Thursday, February 20, 2014
Political Mayhem Thursday: Professor Irrelevant
SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.
The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.
One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.
“All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,” notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation.
There are plenty of exceptions, of course, including in economics, history and some sciences, in professional schools like law and business, and, above all, in schools of public policy; for that matter, we have a law professor in the White House. But, over all, there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.
A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.
“Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research,” said Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution. “This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”
The latest attempt by academia to wall itself off from the world came when the executive council of the prestigious International Studies Association proposed that its publication editors be barred from having personal blogs. The association might as well scream: We want our scholars to be less influential!
A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure journals — or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep readers at a distance....
Kristof makes some excellent points, particularly about scholarship. I have been re-reading some of my favorite academic pieces lately, by my writing hero William Stuntz. It is clear, sharp, and rooted in reality. Too much of our work (mine included) falls far short of this standard.
Part of the problem, as Kristof recognizes, is that what is most rewarded is too often unintelligible to those outside a small circle of experts. This inability or unwillingness to to communicate clearly is especially puzzling given the primary job that we have-- teaching beginners to our field.
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Famous and influential academics learned how to reach out to the regular guy, the average American. I'm thinking of people like John Kenneth Galbraith, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Cornell West.
I've tried to read a few law review articles here and there to "keep up with the law," and as a Hill Staffer, I perused "Foreign Affairs," but I just don't have the time to do that kind of study any more... and I am quite confident most other non-Academics do not either.
If one wants to turn the Aircraft Carrier of public opinion, reaching out beyond your own circle of colleagues is essential.
Which is why I have always liked your idea of pushing your issues in places outside the liberal mainstream. Those people agree with you already. It's getting the attention of those who question your goals that will make a difference.
I've tried to read a few law review articles here and there to "keep up with the law," and as a Hill Staffer, I perused "Foreign Affairs," but I just don't have the time to do that kind of study any more... and I am quite confident most other non-Academics do not either.
If one wants to turn the Aircraft Carrier of public opinion, reaching out beyond your own circle of colleagues is essential.
Which is why I have always liked your idea of pushing your issues in places outside the liberal mainstream. Those people agree with you already. It's getting the attention of those who question your goals that will make a difference.
I think Kristof hits the nail on the head with this one. Favorite comment “my onetime love, political science, is a particular offender and seems to be trying, in terms of practical impact, to commit suicide”…perhaps that ivory tower academia is so fond of is a good platform to jump. Or [to save themselves from themselves] follow the health sciences’ trend and go the way it hurts most: no projected practical impact no funding. “No impact no pay” cannot be confused to “publish or perish” which makes no difference whatsoever for it already gave birth to the vicious circle Kristof rightfully calls meaningless gibberish respectfully published by scholarly journals or the more all-encompassing definition… “gobbledygook.”
Imagine that. You turn colleges and universities into businesses run by businessmen with the ostensible goal of turning a profit and all of a sudden the best way to get job security is to make sure your work reaches your target market rather than serves the public.
# posted by 
: 4:21 PM
: 4:21 PM
Anon 4:21 I’m trying to understand your point and I’m sorry if I’m a little dense, but "make sure your work reaches your target market rather than serves the public" from the discussion at hand implies that academia work is now serving the public. Let me clarify, we are not talking about core curriculum, which every college professor has a duty to fulfill, right? The discussion at hand is about the said college professor’s contribution to the forefront of their field. I’ll give a very familiar example, my professor boss teaches the courses that fulfill his obligation for holding a tenured chair and he conducts research for which he will not be funded if a practical impact was not projected for his area of interest. Incidentally and rightfully (because the field is that of health sciences) this is not a mutually exclusive deal, he has to do both. He is a teacher first, but he also has to break new ground; he cannot skirt his obligation as a teacher because he researches a cure for cancer, he takes his students along for the ride. Also professor Osler’s example…he didn’t just teach a few generations of lawyers, he took his academic work out of the classroom and applied it in a meaningful way, a way that had impact beyond his circle of peers, an impact resounding all the way to that guy in prison who thought of writing him a carefully calligraphed letter and mailing to his office at the Law School. Now if he could only get right a very crucial turning point…a pair of shoes that will last 20 years, Minnesota winters and be appropriate if he happens to give a talk in Miami.
As a specialist in Medieval arcana, I know that there are only about four cats in the whole world that read my stuff, but I still write it. Why? Because true scholarship and investigation should never be bound by markets of any kind. Pure scholarship may or may not be profitable, but all profitable ideas start out as research. Scholars need the freedom to let their research lead them wherever it might go. Whether the "public" ever reads it or not is irrelevant. I have colleagues who publish meaningless gibberish which is disguised as great rhetoric or deep thoughts. More often than not, they get called out on this nonsense by their peers. We tend to police our own--most professions do. Yet, just because you don't understand what we do or write or investigate, don't question what we do until you have walked in our shoes of thesis, dissertations, and peer reviewed publications. Don't get testy if you can't understand our work. And none of us are in this field for the big bucks because that isn't happening anytime soon. None of what I write serves the general public.
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