Viva Public Scholarship! :-)

I have blogged (particularly here, here, and here) about public scholarship.

However, over the last couple of weeks I have been forced to wonder whether I ought to, instead, play the dirty old publishing game in academe. You know, author papers in academic journals that nobody would read! And I simply hate that game, which is nothing but a farce--at the expense of taxpayers in universities like mine, and I wrote about this too.

Today, a colleague emails me a link to the Christian Science Monitor, along with a note that "this appears to be written for you" ..... I am just simply excited with her note in the first place, and then with the content of the piece in the Monitor.
So, what is that about?
Here is an excerpt:

Suppose that 30 or 40 prominent research universities issued a joint statement, urging their faculty to publish in popular venues – and promising to consider such articles in promotion and salary decisions. Believe me, you'd see more and more professors writing for the newspaper.

To be sure, some faculty would continue to turn up their noses at it. As the historian Patricia Limerick has quipped, these professors resemble the people nobody wanted to dance with in high school; as a defense mechanism, they pretend that they never wanted to dance in the first place.

But I think plenty of academicians would want to dance, if the academy rewarded it. And it would be good for their disciplines, too. These are tough times for the social sciences and humanities, especially, which need to justify their budgets to already-strapped state legislatures and donors. What better way to prove your worth to the public than to write for it?

That is what I am talking about. Or, writing about. Thanks to Professor Zimmerman.