Moving through my thesis revisions with this article (and Janet Mock and Laverne Coxs talk last night) foregrounded in my mind. Part of what being a public scholar means, though, is a facility of writing for more than one audience. For scholars of color like myself, it means we do double duty. We write what we need for tenure. We write in obscure terms so that we can prove that knowledge about black people and people of color is “rigorous” and meets accepted academic standards. And then many of us turn to public speaking, radio, podcasts, blogs and Twitter to translate that knowledge in ways that are useful to our communities. None of that work will get us tenure, and it might come with accusations that we are being distracted from doing the more valuable work of academe. But we do it anyway. ... In this moment, when the academy is starving and killing humanities programs, in service of a top-heavy focus on the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields, I concur that we are in serious danger of producing citizens who cannot think critically and ethically about the nature of human experience. The focus on the STEM fields at every level from the government to the university is very much about the U.S.’s attempt to regain imperial dominance through science, technology and business. This imperial push has led to an incessant conversation about “thought leadership,” which, with the increasing privatization and public defunding of the university, has become a vacuous neoliberal stand-in for what public scholarship used to mean. For thought leaders are those whose thoughts can make money and put the U.S. back on top. Gone is the value of new thinking that simply makes us better at being human and existing on the planet more charitably with others. These are scary times, indeed.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:17:37 +0000
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