"-and what's more, you're unattractive."

Does being rude advance intellectual effort?

...It is not difficult to turn up examples of academics being deliberately rude to each other, whether in print or in person, openly or anonymously. Another striking instance is recalled by Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford. Many years ago she was invited by a similarly young and junior feminist academic to give a lecture on a feminist topic at a university in what was then West Berlin. 

“I was surprised but initially gratified when the senior members of the department – elderly male professors – turned up,” she recalls. “But after the introduction, when I rose to speak, they all simultaneously opened their newspapers and ostentatiously read them throughout the proceedings.“I don’t know if this piece of rudeness was directed more towards my German colleague (for having the temerity to invite a guest speaker rather than leaving such things to them), towards me or towards the very idea of feminist scholarship. Probably all of the above. Whatever it was, they wasted over an hour of their own time on the gesture, and, in the process, probably gave the students the impression that I was more important and more radical than anyone had previously supposed.” 

The moral of the story, in Cameron’s view, is that “rudeness in the academy backfires more often than not. The most effective put-downs are the courteous, mild-mannered ones.” 

Can the same be said about really vicious reviews? A celebrated example is the attempted demolition of On Consciousness, a book by Ted Honderich, Grote professor emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London. The review by Colin McGinn, who recently resigned from a professorship at the University of Miami, was published in The Philosophical Review in 2007 and begins: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent…Honderich’s understanding of positions he criticises is often weak to nonexistent, though not lacking in chutzpah.” 

The review is accompanied by a startling footnote that reads: “The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The editors asked me to ‘soften the tone’ of the original; I have done so, though against my better judgment.”...