Pontificating by university professors (Glorifying arcane unintelligibility) ALTES Facts & Quotes Inbox February 18, 2014 / New York City Excerpts from Professors, We Need You! by Nicholas Kristof, columnist, The New York Times, Feb. 18, 2014 • University professors - smartest thinkers. 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. • Disciplines more specialized and quantitative. “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. • Fewer public intellectuals. 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. • Culture of exclusivity. 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.” • Meaningless gibberish. As experiments, scholars have periodically submitted meaningless gibberish to scholarly journals — only to have the nonsense respectfully published. • Useless in predicting unrest. Universities have retreated from area studies, so we have specialists in international theory who know little that is practical about the world. After the Arab Spring, a study by the Stimson Center looked back at whether various sectors had foreseen the possibility of upheavals. It found that scholars were among the most oblivious — partly because they relied upon quantitative models or theoretical constructs that had been useless in predicting unrest. • Reduced influence. Many academic disciplines also reduce their influence by neglecting political diversity. Sociology, for example, should be central to so many national issues, but it is so dominated by the left that it is instinctively dismissed by the right. In contrast, economics is a rare academic field with a significant Republican presence, and that helps tether economic debates to real-world debates. That may be one reason, along with empiricism and rigor, why economists (including my colleague in columny, Paul Krugman) shape debates on issues from health care to education. • Slow to cast pearls. Professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online courses to blogs to social media. Yet academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook. Likewise, it was TED Talks by nonscholars that made lectures fun to watch (but I owe a shout-out to the Teaching Company’s lectures, which have enlivened our family’s car rides). • Be unlike medieval monks. I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found on university campuses. So, professors, don’t cloister yourselves like medieval monks — we need you!
Posted on: Tue, 18 Feb 2014 12:02:22 +0000
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