Last weekend, I stuck a big toe into social media, while I was on my illness-imposed blackout from the Internet. My twitter friends were up in arms about Nicholas Kristof’s column about the lack of public engagement by academics.
“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.
Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to everything said here, noted the result: “a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.”
I’m glad that I was ill and not up for blogging. I probably would have responded too quickly. Instead, I flipped through the responses on the academic blogs and twitter. Some responses were good. Others were defensive and clueless.
Note: if you are a quantitative social scientist, it’s a little embarrassing if you point to outliers as proof that Kristof is wrong. It’s even more embarrassing if the outliers are completely unknown to the general public and the journals that they write for are behind paywalls. It’s even more embarrassing if you use an imperious tone during the blog post.
I’m not even sure if I like the term, “public intellectual.” It’s rather elitist — a great mind will emerge once or twice a year from the Gothic towers of a university and make a pronouncement that all will hail as brilliant. Is this person really more knowledgable than a person who is getting their hands dirty in a policy area or who is embedded in a region or who reads a shitload of books? Why should we pay attention to someone, who isn’t paying attention to us?
I would prefer to see a small corner of the world — the part that isn’t devoted to SEO rankings and Kim Kardashian’s stretch marks — that is able to discuss ideas and research without concern about university affiliations or degrees or press credentials or traffic numbers or CV building. Just regular smart people bullshitting together and coming up with something really good.
Update: Great discussion about this topic by Joshua Rothman at the New Yorker. And it’s great, because he basically says the same thing as I did.
Apt. 11d 