About Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca

Lingua Franca was an American magazine about intellectual and literary life inside universities, published from 1990 to 2001. Founded by Jeffrey Kittay, a professor of French literature at Yale University and an experienced editor, it reported on scholarly debates, disciplinary fashions, university politics and the personal feuds of academics with the tools of general-interest journalism rather than the conventions of a scholarly journal. It was based in New York, moving between modest offices in the metropolitan area before ending its run in respectable quarters near Bryant Park in Manhattan. Small in circulation — it never topped about 15,000 — it was nonetheless one of the most talked-about magazines of the 1990s, won a National Magazine Award, revealed the Sokal hoax to the world, and trained a generation of writers who went on to reshape serious American journalism.

Founding in 1990

Jeffrey Kittay founded Lingua Franca in 1990 because, as he explained to The New York Times, he was an academic who was hungry for news about his own profession: what made scholars passionate about abstract ideas, where the arguments were, and who was winning them. No existing publication did that job. Scholarly journals addressed specialists in code; university newspapers reported appointments and budgets; general magazines covered professors only when a scandal or a bestseller forced the issue. Kittay saw a niche for vivid reporting about the academic world, especially its controversies, written for readers who were intelligent but not insiders to any single field.

The timing was apt. American humanities departments in 1990 were in the middle of the so-called culture wars, with battles over the literary canon, multicultural curricula, deconstruction and political correctness drawing attention far beyond campuses. A magazine that treated those fights as news — with scenes, characters and stakes — found a ready audience of academics, graduate students and what its last editor called quasi-academics in university presses, libraries and think tanks, plus curious general readers.

What the Magazine Covered

Lingua Franca covered scholarly debates and disciplinary developments across the humanities and social sciences. Its reporters reconstructed the arguments of new books, dissertations and conference papers, explained why a theory had become fashionable or fallen from favor, and profiled the scholars behind the ideas. It also reported on university politics: hiring and tenure fights, embattled college presidents, and institutions caught between competing visions of education, as in its reporting on Hillsdale College as a battleground between social conservatives and libertarians.

A much-loved department tracked academic jobs and promotions — the appointments, moves and honors of professors — serving readers the way wedding announcements serve a newspaper audience: as a record of a community's changing membership, read with curiosity, envy and recognition. The magazine treated the university as a world with its own celebrities, scandals, fashions and power struggles, and assumed that world was interesting enough to sustain a magazine. For most of the 1990s, that assumption proved right.

Style: The People Magazine of Academia

The magazine was sometimes described, half in jest, as a People magazine for professors. The comparison captured its method rather than any lack of seriousness. Lingua Franca insisted that ideas became clearer, not duller, when attached to the people who held them: their ambitions, rivalries, mentors and grievances. Reporting was narrative and character-driven, written in an accessible, often witty voice, on the premise that the passions behind scholarly disputes were real — careers, reputations and whole conceptions of a discipline could turn on them — and that a general reader could follow an argument if a writer took the trouble to reconstruct it honestly.

That approach made the magazine an exemplar of what later commentators called intellectual journalism: reporting that took ideas as its beat. Its implied reader, in its editor's description, was a graduate student versed in current theory but relieved to find it discussed without portentous obscurity. The magazine was printed unpretentiously, on thin paper, from a small operation — first run from a walk-up office in a New York suburb, then from a cubicle in SoHo, then uptown — which gave it the character of a little magazine even as its influence spread through the national press.

Editors and Contributors

Kittay served as editor-in-chief throughout the magazine's life. Peter Edidin edited it in its first year. From 1991 to 1994 it was co-edited by Judith Shulevitz and Margaret Talbot, and it was edited thereafter by Alexander Star, its longest-serving and final editor, together with Emily Eakin. A. O. Scott, later the chief film critic of The New York Times, was a senior editor, as was Daniel Zalewski, who became a features editor at The New Yorker. The historian Rick Perlstein began his journalism career as an intern at the magazine and rose to associate editor.

The contributor and alumni lists explain much of the magazine's afterlife. Writers and editors who passed through Lingua Franca went on to staff and shape The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, Slate and other major publications; names associated with the magazine include Larissa MacFarquhar, Emily Nussbaum, Laura Secor and Caleb Crain among its editors, and Peter Beinart, Lev Grossman, Fred Kaplan and Jennifer Schuessler among its contributors. Cultural critic Ron Rosenbaum later argued that the kind of writing about ideas pioneered there had, through its alumni, changed the face of serious journalism for the better.

The Culture Wars Beat

The magazine's home territory was the academic culture wars of the 1990s: fights over poststructuralist theory, the Western canon, multiculturalism, affirmative action in admissions and hiring, and the proper relation between scholarship and politics. Lingua Franca did not merely chronicle these disputes from outside; it reconstructed the scholarship itself, sometimes at a level of detail rare even in review essays. Perlstein's celebrated essay on generational divides among historians of the 1960s, for example, worked through recent dissertations and conference arguments to show how former student activists, now established professors, were writing the history of their own movement — and disagreeing about it.

Because it covered both sides' arguments in their strongest form and reported the institutional settings in which they collided, the magazine was read across the political divisions it described. That even-handed curiosity was a deliberate editorial stance: the academic world was treated as a subject to be understood, not a team to be joined. It made Lingua Franca useful to administrators, journalists and scholars alike as a map of a rapidly changing intellectual landscape.

The Sokal Affair

The magazine's most famous moment came in May 1996. Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, had submitted a deliberately nonsensical article, dressed in the language of postmodern cultural studies and arguing that quantum gravity was a social construct, to the journal Social Text. The journal, which did not then use outside peer review, published it in its Science Wars issue. Sokal then revealed the hoax in Lingua Franca, explaining his experiment and his motives in its pages. The revelation was first reported there, and the story reached the front page of The New York Times on May 18, 1996.

The affair became a defining episode of the science wars, debated for years in books and journals. Lingua Franca's editors followed their scoop with sustained coverage, publishing responses from scientists, philosophers and the Social Text editors, and later issued a book of selected papers on the subject, The Sokal Hoax. For the magazine, the episode proved its founding premise: an argument inside academia, properly reported, could command the attention of the entire national press.

Recognition

In 1993 Lingua Franca received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in its circulation category, the magazine industry's highest honor, and it was nominated again in 1994, 1996, 1998 and 1999. On its tenth anniversary in November 2000, the Village Voice observed that its influence on 1990s magazine culture had been so strong that it was hard to remember how unusual it had been when it began. The New York Observer similarly described it as a much-talked-about phenomenon inside and outside academia within a short time of its founding.

That recognition coexisted with a fragile business. Circulation leveled off at around 15,000 — large for a journal of ideas, small for an advertising-supported magazine. The audience was loyal and influential but narrow, and the magazine depended on the support of a parent company and benefactors rather than on a robust commercial base of its own. Its honors documented its editorial success; they could not by themselves secure its finances.

Closure in 2001

Lingua Franca halted publication abruptly in the autumn of 2001, during an economic downturn. Subscriptions and advertising had been steady, but the magazine's primary financial backer withdrew support, and its parent company, Academic Partners — which had also acquired Denis Dutton's Arts and Letters Daily website the previous year — was entangled in litigation involving a former employee. The October 2001 closure was mourned in the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, whose critics noted how regularly its pages had contained work other magazines wished they had published.

The final issue was dated 2001, closing an eleven-year run. In 2002 Alexander Star collected the magazine's best work in an anthology, Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca, which preserved essays and reportage that might otherwise have vanished with the magazine's small print runs. In 2006 the teenage programmer and activist Aaron Swartz created a program that put a mirror archive of the magazine's articles on the web, giving the defunct magazine a second, digital readership.

Place and Identity

The batch listing places Lingua Franca in New York, New York, and the record supports that: after its earliest days in a suburban walk-up, the magazine operated from Manhattan — SoHo, then uptown, finally near Bryant Park. Its subject, however, was national: American academic life from Yale, where its founder taught, to campuses across the country. It should be distinguished in listings from academic journals with similar titles; Lingua Franca was a general-interest magazine about scholars, not a scholarly journal itself, and it published no peer-reviewed research.

Legacy

Lingua Franca's legacy is disproportionate to its circulation and its eleven years. It demonstrated a durable market for reporting about ideas, treated universities as newsworthy institutions rather than ivory towers, and modeled a style — narrative, argumentative, funny about serious things — that spread through American magazines largely by way of its own alumni. The academic blogs, newsletters and higher-education coverage that followed inherited its beat even when they did not know its name.

Its story is also a cautionary one about little magazines: editorial influence and industry awards do not guarantee survival when a publication rests on a single funder. When that support was withdrawn in 2001, a magazine at the height of its reputation closed within weeks. What remains — the anthology, the web archive, and the careers it launched — is the record of a magazine that made the inner life of universities legible, and entertaining, to everyone else.