====== Thinkers Who Prefer to Be Free ======
; For Many Uneasy in Universities, Independence Is Worth the Cost

By JANNY SCOTT

Published: May 8, 1999

When Judith Rich Harris published an article in a scholarly journal a few years back and put the words ''Middletown, New Jersey'' in the space usually reserved for an author's academic affiliation, she found herself deluged with what she now calls her ''who-the-hell-are-you mail.''

Not only had she listed no university. She had not thanked any august-sounding grant-making agencies, either. She had simply credited half a dozen individuals, including one Charles S. Harris, who any half-alert reader might have guessed (correctly) is her husband.

''I got this E-mail from a professor at Cornell University,'' Ms. Harris recalled recently. He wanted to know: Are you an academic? A clinician? Or perhaps ''an unemployed steelworker who has an interesting hobby of writing seminal scientific articles?''

None of the above.

Ms. Harris, who rocketed out of obscurity last year when she published ''The Nurture Assumption'' (Free Press, 1998), her joltingly unorthodox book crediting peers with greater influence than parents in a child's development, is a member of a little-known endangered subspecies of American intellectual known as the independent scholar.

In a country in which the academy has been accused of vaccuuming up all of intellectual life and processing it into something less deserving of the name, some scholars have traded the satisfactions and frustrations of colleges and universities for the mixed blessings of independence.

They are outsiders -- without titles, without tenure, without steady income. They have no letterhead, no lavish library privileges. As James Trilling, an independent scholar of Byzantine art studies and the history of ornament, said when asked about the drawbacks: ''No colleagues. No students. No paycheck.''

Yet they are free to think and write whatever, whenever and however they choose. They operate unencumbered by academic politics, protocol and publish-or-perish pressures. They straddle disciplines, elude specialization, follow their noses. For better or worse, their work is free to be unconventional and new.

''I had no vested interest in the status quo,'' Ms. Harris said of her book on child development. ''Secondly, I had nobody to please. I didn't have to worry about offending the head of my department, about getting put in an office without a window, about being made to teach statistics.''

''I see myself as a sort of gadfly,'' she said. ''I think I'm in a much better position to criticize the field because I'm not a member of it.''

The independents' reception by academics is not always warm.

The current issue of The New York Review of Books includes a letter signed by 29 academics complaining that the publication used Thomas Powers, best known as an author of books on politics and current affairs, to review several books about Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull and other 19th-century Plains Indians.

The New York Review's editors fire back that Mr. Powers had been studying those subjects for years. ''It is hard to take seriously academics who condemn an independent scholar without making a single substantive criticism of his work,'' the editors retort.

One of the better-known independent scholars is Anne Hollander, an art historian whose subject is dress. She graduated from Barnard College in 1952, well before the advent of cultural studies. It was an era when the image of the clad figure was, she said recently, ''not an appropriate art historical subject.''

Instead of going to graduate school, she married an academic. She lived for years as an academic ''fellow traveler'' in places like New Haven and Cambridge, Mass., always thinking about and studying the representation of clothing in paintings and literature and cornering people at parties to talk about it.

Finally a friend persuaded her to write an article on the subject for a new journal. That led to a contract for her first book, ''Seeing Through Clothes'' (Viking, 1978), then a Guggenheim fellowship, a second book and her third and latest book, ''Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress'' (Kodansha, 1995).

Dress is now a well-established subject for serious study. Ms. Hollander is about to publish her fourth book on the subject and is working on a fifth. She is in constant demand from journalists, who call asking questions that begin, ''What does it mean that we are now wearing . . . ?''

Asked what she had forgone by not becoming an academic, she said, ''What I did not have, and still feel nervous about, is an alma mater, an encompassing institution, the whole institution of the academy that supports all these guys and endorses their sorrows and their efforts and produces a network within which they can feel they have a perpetual identity that is theirs.

''I don't have a deep and abiding sense of myself as part of this dynamic organism. It means that every time I do anything I have to start from scratch. I have only my public and I have no idea who they are.''

There was a time, not all that long ago, when autonomy was not odd. As Mr. Trilling points out, many of the great texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries were produced by people working outside the academy at the time, like John Ruskin, Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill.

But as academia grew, autonomy waned. And many scholars who are unaffiliated today did not initially volunteer for the part. Some were in dual-career marriages, unable to move for a job; some came out of graduate school in the mid-1970's, just as the academic job market was crashing.

Yet many of them have one thing in common: they describe themselves as too ornery for academic life. They say their interests are too eclectic. They resist the degree of specialization they say is required of present-day professors. Some say they have no instinct for institutions.

Wendy Lesser, a critic, essayist and founding editor of the literary journal The Threepenny Review, drifted away from universities after getting a Ph.D. in English. While academia gave her her admiration for ''impractical thought,'' she says, she would have made a poor academic.

In her new book, ''The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters'' (Pantheon, 1999), she says she gradually discovered she was not much of a teacher, was ''hapless'' at dealing with departmental politics, made enemies left and right and wanted to kill most of her colleagues.

''Finally, if I had to give a single reason, I would say I wasn't suited to the academy because I wanted to exercise a kind of judgment that was not normal there,'' she writes. There seemed to be no room for the kind of ''relatively untutored omnivorousness'' she wanted and needed to practice.

''I didn't want to have arbitrary lines drawn between things: between old masterpieces and contemporary works, between art and the rest of the world, between criticism and conversation,'' she adds. ''I wanted the whole terrain. And in my own tiny way, I got it.''

Independence is not easy.

Ms. Lesser, who lives in Berkeley with her husband and son, rarely knows where her next year's income will come from. ''The Amateur'' is the first of her five books to generate more than $10,000. She has gotten fellowships ranging from $20,000 to $50,000 and does consulting and freelance writing.

Mr. Trilling, who got his Ph.D. in art history from Harvard and is the son of Lionel and Diana Trilling, gave up his job as a curator at the Textile Museum in Washington to live in Providence, R.I., with his wife, a tenured professor at Brown, who currently supports him and their two daughters.

He calls himself ''the liberated parasite.''

Others have day jobs. Neil Baldwin, who has published biographies of William Carlos Williams, Thomas Edison and Man Ray, spends his weeks as executive director of the National Book Foundation in New York City and his weekends working on his next book in his study at home in Montclair, N.J.

He can be found reading, say, Isaiah Berlin on an exercise bicycle at the Essex Health and Country Club in West Orange, N.J. In Worcester, Mass., Mr. Trilling, who has written books, monographs and articles on topics like the mosaic pavement of the Byzantine imperial palace in Constantinople, can be spotted in the balcony above the pool at the Y.M.C.A., scribbling notes while his daughter practices synchronized swimming.

Isolation can be a problem for many independent scholars. Mr. Trilling can go for months without speaking to a colleague. Except when he attends conferences or lectures, he is cut off from the shop talk and everyday sharing of ideas that are a feature of university life.

But the hardest part, he said, is having no students. He has far more ideas than he will ever have time to develop into articles or books, but he has no students to pass them on to. At the end of his career, he will be unable to survey the landscape and take stock of where his former students have gone.

''Students are a measure of your career,'' he said recently in his house in Providence, settled in the basement office he shares with a large pet snake. ''That's never going to be so for me. Teachers live on through their students, as well as through their published work.''

Ms. Harris, who says she was ''kicked out of Harvard'' as a graduate student in psychology in 1961, having been told she seemed unlikely to do important work, wrote psychology textbooks for many years, then one day hit upon the theory that became the central idea of her paper and book.

Because she suffers from a combination of autoimmune diseases, she rarely leaves her house. She has gone entire months without seeing anyone but her husband and a friend who cleans the house. She is an energetic user of E-mail, maintaining a voluminous correspondence with academics she has never met.

To keep up with developments in her field, she subscribes to journals and fires off printed postcards asking researchers for reprints of their papers. She has relied so heavily on interlibrary loans, she ended up thanking the librarians in Middletown and Red Bank, N.J., in the preface to her book.

Other independent scholars use their alumni borrowing privileges -- or their spouses' -- to get access to university libraries. Some follow a piece of advice once offered in a newsletter published by a group called the National Coalition of Independent Scholars: ''Get a nonposition.''

Joan Cassell, an anthropologist in St. Louis, acquired the title of ''research associate'' from Washington University, solving both the library problem and what she calls ''the name tag problem'' of people's eyes glazing over as they read her name tag at meetings and look past her for someone more important.

So, are they contented?

''Who's contented?'' Ms. Lesser recalls having answered when asked about her state of mind while on a book tour recently. ''You're dead if you're contented. Nothing is perfect.''