Is it possible to pull academia's head out of the clouds?

In a hallway, in the building where my office is, are two shiny display shelves with books authored by faculty.  This takes intellectual onanism and narcissism to new heights (lows?).  After all, it is not even at a place that has high visitor traffic to impress them with "research"--heck, it doesn't even have high student traffic--which means that the displays are essentially for us faculty to feel important in this cosmos.

A monument to faculty, by faculty. and for faculty!

I suppose those display shelves by themselves are an awesome statement on what higher education has come to mean for faculty--it is all about themselves.  Who cares about students and their learning, and society and the public good!

Why such books in the first place?  Because, that is how faculty prove their mental capabilities to their peers.

The first four chapters prove the scholar’s done the work, and the next two chapters – the ones “people might actually read” – present the argument. Elsewhere and in between are the reworking of the author’s dissertation and implicit tenure pitch.
That’s how Timothy Burke, professor and chair of history at Swarthmore College, described the scholarly monograph here Thursday during a forum on its future sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. Half-jokingly, Burke said of how authors view their books: “I prize this because only five people in the world understand it … We all know it.”

Haha. Funny. What a joke, right?  Those books on display in the hallway are like most books by academics--even if the publishers gave people money to read them, there won't be any takers.

When insiders joke about something important, I wonder why they cannot instead, you know, do something about it.

Anyway, back to the books. If these are not books that you find at the local bookstore, and if even the peers won't really read them, who buys these books?  Two major customers: students, who will buy the required texts (and not even open those books!) and university libraries that stock them on stacks that practically nobody ever goes to anymore.

So what to do about it? Burke and other speakers pointed to the digital monograph as a remedy to higher education’s stubborn grip on an increasingly obsolete form.

OMG, alert the press; the glacier is moving!  Higher education has figured out there is something called "digital."  And, even more, about an important advantage:

“In digital work, expert-based work becomes less important, and problems become more important,” Tanaka said. “That changes the authority structure on which our careers and expertise are based.”
Somewhat counterintuitively, however, he added, the historian in this context becomes more important, not less. With the wealth of data now available to the general public, historians don’t just transmit information; they must think critically about how it is best shared with which audiences, and how it intersects with research and teaching.

Seriously?  It took them these many years to understand that "problems become more important" and that the "expert-based work becomes less important" and that faculty need to "think critically about how it is best shared with which audiences, and how it intersects with research and teaching"???

Even more of a show-stopper is this:

The humanities also need to be a bigger part of online scholarly conversations, he said. Still, Shore said he wondered if the proposal -- especially in light of the day's conversations -- "goes far enough." He told the librarians in the room that they were the "intellectuals of this new ecosystem," and encouraged them to share feedback and -- along with faculty members -- "take risks" in exploring the future of the monograph.

OMG, "a bigger part of online scholarly conversations" could mean, ahem, engaging with the masses that exist outside the ivory towers, and many of them could be as smart as, or even smarter than, the faculty. Isn't it much better to remain cloistered instead and build self-satisfying monuments?

Meanwhile, the friend alerts me to this development:

Enter the Carnegie Corporation of New York, one of the few top foundations that's headed up by a bona fide public intellectual, Vartan Gregorian. This week, Carnegie dropped $5 million on five universities to help bridge the worlds of academia and policy in the area of global affairs.
What's cool here is that Carnegie is targeting two of the top problems keeping scholars sidelined.
First, the foundation wants to see universities change their rules on tenure and promotion to take into account policy-relevant work. As well, its grant funds will support younger scholars who want to freeze that ticking tenure clock while they go out into the policy world and make themselves useful.
Second, Carnegie money will support efforts to pull scholars into debates where their expertise is relevant, through both new research and by engaging with policymakers and the media.

How awesome that a foundation is putting up money as incentives for academics to crawl outside the gilded towers!  Will it work?

the insularity of academia is a hard problem to solve one institution at a time—especially when there's no evidence that the system as a whole is interested in change. For decades, now, universities have been pummeled for becoming less relevant, yet things have only gotten worse. And that's not surprising: Universities aren't really accountable to anyone who favors more real-world engagement, so where's the institutional incentive to change anything?
Add "policy relevant" to the criteria used by U.S. News in its college ranking and we'll see some action. But probably not before.
So while Carnegie's effort is laudable, one wonders if this is money well spent.

Fine, you want the bottom-line?  Here it is:

even if Carnegie is doing God's Work here, it's not clear that any foundation has enough money to pull academia's head out of the clouds.

Yep. I can expect to see and hear within the university how awesome the research work done by faculty is, while the rest of the world outside continues to worry that students are simply academically adrift.

Hey, you think the Carnegie Foundation will give me at least a couple of dollars for the public engagement that I have committed myself to?  Yeah, right!