Anonymity, Dialogue, and the Academy

The history of English literature is replete with authors who hid their names from their audience. Should the twenty-first-century academy also follow in this tradition? Jonathan Swift, for example, published all of his satirical writings without revealing his identity to his audience. In the case of his late masterwork, Gulliver’s Travels, a work—as he wrote in a famous letter to Alexander Pope on September 29, 1725—designed “to vex the world rather than divert it,” Swift went so far as to have an intermediary deliver a sample part of the manuscript to his publisher. Not only was the sample probably transcribed by someone other than Swift, but it was accompanied by a letter from “Richard Sympson,” the purported cousin of Lemuel Gulliver, offering the whole manuscript to the publisher for £200 (Mullan 2007, 9). Should contemporary academics follow Swift’s lead and publish all of their critical writings anonymously? Should they even put their name on critical assessments of their colleagues? What role, if any, should anonymity play in the contemporary academy?

While Swift may be a more elaborate case of an author wishing to deceive the public—and his publisher—as to his true identity, he was far from the only famous English writer to mask his or her identity. Spencer, Donne, Marvell, Defoe, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Byron, Thackeray, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, George Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing are some of the writers who published works that did not reveal their true identity to their audience. And Gulliver’s Travels, Sense and Sensibility, The Rape of the Lock, Joseph Andrews, Robinson Crusoe, and Frankenstein were all first read without their audience knowing the true identity of their authors.¹

Given that these authors and their works are some of the cornerstones of the English literary canon, one might wonder why these authors did not put their names to some of their greatest works of writing. The simplest—and probably best—answer is fear: fear of things like persecution or imprisonment.² This link between fear and anonymity is now carried on in the academy. Though fear of persecution or imprisonment might not persuade academics today to hide their identity from their audience, fear of retaliation surely does. Some academics fear that negative—or even positive—comments about their colleagues will lead to retaliation from them.³

This, in turn, leads many contemporary academics to voice their comments from behind the veil of anonymity. Or, worse yet, convinces them to alter their comments because they are not anonymous. The practice of anonymous critical assessment is relatively common and widely accepted in the academy. So too is the understanding that some non-anonymous comments by academics may not be reflective of their true opinions.

Here is an example of how the logic of academic fear works with respect to non-anonymous comments: Professor Jones is asked to write a reader’s report on the worthiness for publication of Professor Hill’s manuscript. Jones reads Hill’s manuscript and believes that it is a “weak” contribution to the field, and believes that it should not be published. However, the potential publisher of Hill’s manuscript tells Jones that his name and his comments will be passed along to Hill. Jones fears that if he writes a negative report of Hill’s work, that Hill will in turn retaliate against Jones by writing a negative report of Jones’ work should the opportunity arise. Therefore, Jones decides to write a “less negative” or “more positive” report of Hill’s manuscript even though he believes that it is a “weak manuscript.”

A variation of this example involves the use of anonymous comments, rather than non-anonymous ones: To avoid a “dishonest” report by Jones, the publisher assures him that his comments will be kept anonymous. Therefore, Jones knowing that Hill will not discover his identity decides that he will provide a more honest assessment of the manuscript.

There are of course many variations of these scenarios including a totally anonymous interchange: an anonymous manuscript stripped of all indicators of the identity of its author is read...