Academics in Public (belated response to Nicholas Kristof)

Last year, as I recounted in this Chronicle of Higher Education essay, I submitted a book manuscript to a publisher, turned in my tenure file, and started writing for public media. It happened by accident, driven by the unlikely medieval relevance of the surprise papal resignation and enabled by my friendship with Bruce Schneier. CNN and the Atlantic wanted medieval commentary briefly. Bruce helped me with my writing and gave me the needed contacts and the essays (and this blog) all followed.

Over the weekend, as all my online academic friends know, Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed on academia and public engagement. It relies heavily on stereotypes and people from Ivy Leagues and their ilk. It's been widely critiqued, from Corey Robin's long, detailed, analysis of the structural reasons that keep academics out of public discourse, to Laura Tennenbaum's short, pithy, comment that perhaps teaching thousands of students might be a form of public service of equal merit to writing for the Times, to countless other short and long responses.

Because as Kristof well knows, lots of professors are online and engaged with each other, if not "the public," as Kristof defines it. In fact, I sort of feel like he was trolling us, then enjoying retweeting the outrage (without actually learning anything from it).

The issue is that there is a real problem here. Academics do know a lot and are not encouraged or able to engage the public. But mostly I'd recommend reading the Robin piece, as it's great and says so many of the points I would want to make. Adjunctification, the changing nature of the university, the pressures to publish, the people who WISH they had pressure to publish, and so forth - all of these are driving academics out of the public sphere far more than Kristof's straw men and women.

Here are, however, a few key additions to the broader conversations that I think I can make.

One: When I started writing more regularly for CNN and The Atlantic, the first questions I would get (phrased delicately) are: Does it count? Does it pay? My answers - It sometimes pays, but not mostly. It definitely wouldn't count if I was trying to count it for tenure or promotion.

 Last fall I had a long conversation with a Dean who noted that she would be delighted to count public engagement as a factor in tenure/promotion decisions. At her university, however, faculty make these decisions, so faculty have to take the lead in crafting standards (perhaps through organizations such as the American Historical Association, Modern Language Association, and their ilk).

I have no idea how to make that work, especially at an R1 school. The structures there are entirely based around peer reviewed formal publications and grants. Does a "well-read" (whatever that means) blog equal a conference presentation? Do 6 op-eds for national media equal a lower tier journal article? What about local op-eds for local papers, something we should all be doing (as it's easier to get published). Does it just nebulously count as a marker for "impact?"  How would you count public engagement in your field and institution? I'd love to hear your ideas, no matter how vague or specific to your institution.

Two: In my Chronicle piece, I wrote this:

Meanwhile, the general public perceives faculty members as isolated from reality, holding cushy jobs, and uninterested in open communication. The public has little access to the broad diversity of knowledge, experience, and background inside higher education, because those academics who do achieve broader platforms generally come from only the most elite universities. Although many of those public intellectuals are brilliant writers and speakers, they represent only a tiny percentage of the expertise available in the academic world. That expertise lies not just in our subject fields but also in the habits of mind we bring to bear on countless other kinds of issues.

Here, as the mighty Bruce Holsinger noted, I was suggesting that academics at non-prestigious institutions (like mine) are an untapped resource. I want, in Holsinger's words, "to democratize" the notion of the public intellectual. But there are few pathways available for people like me to reach larger audiences - I just happened to have a friend who is a world-renowned security expert, a writer, and a man willing to forward my essays to major editors. That's random, and letting randomness determine whose voices gets heard leads ... well, it leads to mostly white folks, mostly men, mostly from the Ivy Leagues, being the only voices in the room. Kristof's column exemplifies this: He talks to LePore at Harvard, Slaughter at Princeton, McCants at the Brookings Institute, and Bremmer at Stanford.

Three: Some academics are in fact snobs. I have received many reflexive "compliments" about my public work that are dripping with snobbery, assumptions that I am not "serious," and other condescensions. And look how I introduce myself as a public writer. I note that I already have tenure, that I have a "real book" with a "real university press," on the way, and then I talk about my writing. It's a defensive posture. In fact, my public writing has been great for my career. I've been invited to give both scholarly and non-scholarly talks at R1 universities as a result of my writing. I have nothing to complain about.

This is a fundamental problem with the prestige economy. I think it is is changing though as the younger generation is generally highly aware of the random forces at work that fling us through the job market (and the lie of meritocracy) and the more senior generation engages online. I'm very optimistic about this particular problem fading over time.

If you've read this far, thank you. Now weigh in on point one. incentives matter. Money matters. Tenure and promotion matters. How do we make public engagement count?

Batgirl

For the 100th day of school at my daughter's pre-school, students were supposed to come as their favorite superhero or princess. My daughter is the batgirl on the left. My daughter's teacher is the superwoman on the right.

My whole theory on parenting against the grain is to try and create space for my children, for all children, to make choices rather than being pressured to conform to defaults. This feels like winning.

 

The key here is that we didn't say, "be a superhero," but say, "You can be anything you want to be ... including a superhero." She can read and saw the word princess, but said, "I want to be batgirl!" And so it was.

Debating Abuse - Your Role

My book is done in terms of the writing, but there are still many tasks to do until I ship it to the publisher (and then later there will be edits and proofs and so forth). Now I am dealing with the mountain obligations I let slide as I did my writing, but I hope to ease back into regular blogging in the next few weeks.

I'm here this morning because people are still debating the Woody Allen - Dylan Farrow sex abuse allegations. I see it on blogs, in formal publications, and of course permeating social media.

Here's the message, borrowing from a comment made by Scarleteen. We don't get to know what really happened between Allen and Farrow. But we all know someone, likely many someones, who was sexually abused. When we debate whether or not to believe Farrow, we tell those people that if they come forward, we will debate the truth of their statements as well.

And they will not come forward.

So I can't tell you whether or not to believe Farrow's story. I will not tell you whether or not I believe her.

But if you don't, rather than broadcasting your skepticism throughout your social world, perhaps you might embrace silence, so that if someone who trusts you is ready to talk, they will believe you are ready to listen.