Pull down a few statues

Years ago, I was absolutely delighted with a statue that my grandma's town had installed in the town's center.  A statue of Vanchi.  The freedom fighter from the village who shot dead the British administrator for that region.  As I noted in this post a while ago, "The old teenage emotions on colonialism and anti-Britain have never gone away inside me."

Of course, the Raj ended more than seven decades ago.  But, the scars are always there.  Our lives today are not independent of the historical events. In fact, in many instances, our lives today are very much a result of historical events.  The contemporary lives of Native Americans and African-Americans today, or the lives of the Dalit, are continuations of an unbearable past, how much ever some might want to pretend, or even believe, that looking back does not do any good.

Even universities are not exempt from this.  The older the university, more the skeletons that it most likely has in its closet. Some, like Georgetown, have systematically gone about atoning for the past and are trying to make things right--symbolically, because the literal is impossible.

In the colonial countries, things are barely beginning.  I came across an essay from 2016, by Amia Srinivasan.  The last name is a dead giveaway--from my part of the old country.  But, Amia Srinivasan is not from the old country--she has origins back there.  She is a philosopher playing at the topmost tiers:

I am an associate professor of philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford. From January 2020 I will be the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Previously I was a lecturer in philosophy at University College London.

She earned her BA at Yale.  Yep, that Yale!  In 2007.  Supposing that she were a traditional student means that now as a 34-year old, Srinivasan will be a chair-professor at Oxford. Holy shit!

Now, Oxford is in the old colonial capital.  Which means that there is plenty that they need to apologize for and make amends.  One of them is a highly visible reminder--a statue of Cecil Rhodes, who is not new to this blog.  Amia Srinivasan's essay from three years ago was about Oxford's controversial decision to retain the statue despite the student protests.

A big time philosopher who also writes for publications that even us non-philosophers can read and understand.  We need more like her.  She says:

Scholarly, specialist work is important, and we should defend it fiercely, not just in philosophy, but in all disciplines. And a lot of what goes under the name of “public” philosophy is simplistic and condescending. What we need isn't so much more philosophy that tries to speak to a non-philosophical audience, as more philosophy that comes from a place of engagement with the non-philosophical world.

Yes, I too hate that condescending tone that academics take when they climb down from their ivory towers in order to tell the masses what they think. Good for her. And good for us too.

Sign here

It has been almost 18 years since we got into a military conflict in Afghanistan.  Eighteen years!  College freshman students have no personal experience and understanding of our country at peace.  To them, we have always been at war :(

A pacifist that I am, I have always hated wars.  Well, except for a brief time in my teenage years when I thought that violence and revolutionary wars could overturn the choking status quo.  And then I got older.

At least going to Afghanistan was logical enough, with the country then being home to the dangerous combination of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  But, the invasion of Iraq?  I was completely against it.  I was opposed to it.  Yet, as I noted in this post a while ago, I did not sign on to a campus petition.

As I explained in another post, it is not that I don't sign petitions.  I do.  But, I run far, far away from "we, the academics" petitions.  The ones that I add my name to are typically "not merely from academics and are, instead, open to anybody from any walk of life. It does not matter if I am an academic or a ditch-digger or a filthy rich capitalist; those petitions are from "we, the people."

I don't want to pretend that I know it all.  I am fully aware that what I know is minuscule.  On public policy matters, by signing on to "we, the people" petitions, I am only participating in a democratic process, and not because I am an "expert."  And that seems to be the overall point in this essay too, where the author notes that "Our job is to persuade by argument, not by wielding influence."

However, I disagree with the author's absoluteness:

I believe that petitions, regardless of their content, compromise core values of intellectual inquiry.

Come on!  Be a philosopher and add the necessary qualifiers, woman!  "regardless of their content"?  Really?

The author's essay is otherwise carefully phrased, and she even notes this: "I am not saying that philosophers should refrain from engaging in political activity; my target is instead the politicization of philosophy itself."  And yet she disses all petitions "regardless of their content."

Take action, philosophers, but as "we, the people"!

Blogging, public intellectuals, and faculty

Of course I am talking about myself; this is my blog!

A few years ago a student exclaimed in class that he was reading my blog and realized that he need not ever come to my classes; instead he could get everything that I might have to say in the class right from the blog itself.

Whenever students discover this, I tell them that my blog serves multiple purposes for me, of which one is that this blog serves as my own notes that I can refer to if/when needed.  And, of course, it also serves the curiosities of anybody who is interested in the content here.

Over the years, I have wondered why faculty do not operate in such modes, within and outside the classroom.  And why faculty do not go to classes and treat students as members of the public with whom they have to intellectually interact. 

Tyler Cowen, who is one heck of a prolific, accomplished, polymath of a professor across the continent, and whom I have cited many times here, says:

What’s a university and what is not? Those distinctions are crumbling. If we’re not a university, maybe no one else will be either. There’s a lot of content on the web. A lot of it’s free. That will be increasingly important. I think it’s already the case on a given day. More people read economics blogs than are taking "Principles of Economics" classes in the United States, so why aren’t the blogs already a kind of university? They’ve sort of won that competitive battle in some way.
The people who read the blogs want to read them. A lot of people in "Principles" class, they’re not paying attention, they don’t want to learn, they feel they have to, so blogs are in some ways doing a better job of educating.

While Cowen uses the example of economics, the same can be said about any subject.  People want to know about any number of topics but somehow we have convinced ourselves that the old buildings with ivies crawling on them is the only way to meet that desire to know.  In fact, it increasingly works the other way around--those who come to the universities are some of those who are least interested in learning and are in college only to pick up a diploma.

Cowen has moved beyond blogging itself--to a "university" that offers a whole bunch of videos.  The interviewer signs off with this:

Maybe the biggest impact of upstarts like Marginal Revolution University will be that traditional colleges will feel more like, well, like blogging. Maybe the line between the formality of college education and the informal materials found online throughout one’s life will blur, and maybe those distinctions will just matter less and less. Authority may sound less like a lecture from a podium and more like a Facebook post.

But, are the faculty, who are busily writing books that nobody ever reads, thinking about such important questions as "What’s a university and what is not?"

Source

You read until here?  Check this out.

The life of an amateur

I wanted to be an academic who was actively engaging with the public--the old-fashioned public intellectual, even if I could not ever be at the high quality. After all these years, whenever I look at my CV, well, frankly, I am impressed with myself.

I really did not think it would work out this well.  Especially because I am always worried that people might find out that I am an impostor.  I have always felt like I am an amateur who was dangerously close to the edge.  It is, therefore, comforting to know that such a thought of being an amateur is a good thing:

Being an amateur is nothing to be ashamed of. Edward Said embraced the term. For him it was the mode of the intellectual. Amateurism, he said, is "the desire to be moved not by profit or reward, but by love for an unquenchable interest in the larger picture." It is a desire, he continued, that lies "in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession."
As an amateur you are naturally anti-instrumental. You’re largely indifferent to extrinsic rewards or status. When doing research, you’re not interested in gaining an elevated position among your immediate academic peers. You’re just interested in keeping your job, making sure not to get fired.

I like that description: "you are naturally anti-instrumental,"  I do what I do not because I am chasing "extrinsic rewards or status."  I care for the ideas that I explore, for the students I serve, and as long as I continue to have the job that I have, all is well.  As simple as that.

As amateurs we need to be open. And we need to experiment with different outlets, and work on how we get our ideas across.

Exactly.  In doing so:

Are we writing about topics worth caring about? Topics that move us? Topics that move other people? All too often we seem to write about topics that move no one and have no resonance to anyone, anywhere.

In my early years of engaging with the public, it was always a struggle trying to figure out how to convince the reader that what I write is important.  Where was the hook for the local reader if I wanted to write about India or Tanzania?  Why is that relevant to them?  The only thing I knew was this: I did not want to come across to a reader that I write because I am an expert and that they ought to read my stuff because I am an expert.  That, to me, was an unequal partnership that would never work.  I detest the tone of "listen to me, because I am an expert who works at a big time place."

I am willing to bet that this meaningful op-ed writing and engaging with the public has also made me a better teacher.  Or at least a less-horrible teacher.  After all, it is the same mentality that I take to the classroom: How do I convince the audience--even if they are captive--that the content is relevant to them and their lives?

When writing for academic journals, you’re lucky to be read by more than a handful of people. With teaching, however, it’s different. Not only can we reach many more, but, as Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals, we "have students who pass through and on to other things." And with students passing through the university each year, you might have an impact after all.
As an unapologetic amateur you should like to experiment with form.

It is a pleasure, and perhaps quite an ego trip, when students do make those connections.

At the end of it all, I find more meaning in what I do.  There is no unbearable burden of calculations towards professional advancements.

Many aspiring intellectuals have put their professional careers at risk in favor of something more meaningful. They’ve cared less about their careers — and more about the world. Which, we think, is laudable.

In the meanwhile, there are students to serve.  After the spring break, which even wannabe intellectuals need ;)

If only the world had listened to me!

Many moons ago, when about this time of the year I had started planning for the migration northward to Oregon, I was scanning the local, downtown, community newsletter of sorts--I think it was called the Village News, perhaps modeled after the Village Voice.

In that, and unexpectedly, I received one of the best compliments that I have ever received.  The editor had noted my departure from the university and the town with a comment that the area was losing a public intellectual. I was pleasantly shocked.

It was all the more wonderful because it came from a person whom I had never met. This meant that she had based her comment strictly on my op-eds in the local newspaper, the Bakersfield Californian.

I knew even back in my teenage years that my life would be in the intellectual arena.  Further, I knew that I wanted my intellectual activities to be in the public, and not in some obscure office, not because of a need to be in the spotlight but because of an obsession of sorts to understand social issues and to discuss and debate with others my understanding.

But, of course, I had no idea then of a phrase "public intellectual."  It was one of the many new ideas that came to understand over the course of six graduate school years.

A couple of years ago, a student told me that he wanted to engage in the kind of public discussion of ideas like how I do, and asked me for suggestions on how he could go about it.  That stumped me.  I had no idea what the formula is.  I agree with the author here:

The phrase has come to mean an academic who occasionally addresses a general audience, as if all academics were intellectuals, and some of them were also public ones. In fact, academics and intellectuals are antithetical types. An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, “It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.”

I love that description of "years of undisciplined preparation."  I might never have come up with that phrasing, but that has exactly been my life until now.  Undisciplined preparation. 

The intellectual’s job is to think past the culture: to question the myths, metaphors, and assumptions that limit our collective imagination. The founder of the breed was Socrates. As Kazin also said, an intellectual is someone for whom ideas are “instruments of salvation.” Becoming one requires a little more than setting up a blog.

Indeed.

Engaging the public has been far more productive in terms of creating and sharing knowledge, than my formal scholarship can ever be.

Back in graduate school, I was cautioned against gong this route by one of my graduate school professors.  Jim Moore applauded my passion for this approach, but warned me that academia would care only about the formal academic inquiries via the publish-or-perish peer-review process, though they would certainly get jealous about any notoriety that I gained from my approach.  Jim was, and is, correct.  But, it would not be me, and not my life, if I did anything other than what I wanted to do.  I carried on with my Quixotic tilting at windmills.

Every time I visit India, my father asks why I don't write for the Indian newspapers.  I have found it difficult to explain to him that the op-eds in the newspapers there are not the kind of the public intellectual discussions that I favor.  Often they are filled with jargon, written by experts and not by intellectuals.  The writings often seem to have an undertone of the specialist having decided that the ignorant public needs to be educated with his/her expert opinion.  As if the public policy issue would be solved, and solved easily, if and only if the public listened to that expert.  That does not strike me as the role of the public intellectual. 

There is so much to talk about ... never has there been a better time.  It will also be nice though if people listened to me! ;)

Say this over and over: "I am the public"

A student asks in this Scientific American piece:

Science is conducted for the greater good of the community—so why aren’t we engaging with the largest beneficiaries of our work?

Well, ok, this is not an undergraduate student.  Not even at Harvard.

Katherine Wu is a third year graduate student at Harvard University and Co-Director of the science communication organization Science in the News.

Good for Wu to ask such questions, and to co-direct this initiative.

For me, of course, this is old territory.  So old, and so often that I have talked/written about this, that I am tempted to shrug my shoulders and say, "if only the world listened to me!"

Not only scientists, but non-scientists, along with business folks and cultural elite, all seem to think that they are not a part of the public, and they like to operate in their own rarified world.  I have forever tried to argue that it is extremely important to engage with the public--at least for selfish reasons.  One would think that scientists want to convince the public that science is important and so is funding it.  Business folks would want to convince that they are doing things for the public good.

But, nobody cares a shit--unless and until they feel that the lack of engagement with the public is affecting their own rarified world.

trump happens, and now scientists are worried.  Seriously, why did a trump have to happen for scientists to realize that not only they need to engage with the public, but that they too are a part of the public?

Scientists are, just like everyone else, a subset of the general public—that is, “people.” For each and every one of us, there is at least one field that is unknown, a field in which someone else considers us the general public.

Exactly!

If we had the intellectual humility that we do not know it all, and that we could not possibly know it all, then that alone would have reminded us that we are the "public" according to an expert in a field about which we know nothing.  Right?  You see why this is all old story for me?

As scientists, we should engage in conversations with the general public whenever possible, whether it’s over Thanksgiving dinner or by volunteering at a local high school science fair.
At a minimum, scientist or non-scientist, each of us should commit to simply showing up. Without participation on both sides, communication doesn’t happen, and we can’t challenge each other to relay information effectively. Communication is a conversation, not a series of lectures. Don’t just expect that conversations will happen—take part in making them happen.

I am all for conversations. But, hey, nobody listens to me, and I am merely talking with myself all the time! ;)

Source

If you understand this, it means that I am not an academic?

Over the winter break, when talking with the family in the old country, to hear them remark that it has been thirty years since I left for the US was, well, quite something.  Thirty years!

I continued to think about that--after all, reflecting on my life experiences is what I seem to do most of the time! ;)  Que sais-je?

One of the actions that resulted was an email to a graduate school professor of mine.  In that lengthy email, I thanked him for one thing in particular:

I want to thank you again for one particular aspect of my intellectual and professional life: There is a good chance you do not remember a conversation that I had with you during my grad school days, when I said I wanted to directly contribute to the public, instead of the traditional research.  You encouraged me in that, but also cautioned me that academia does not value public engagement.  You went one step more and said that society needs active engagement from academics.

Over the years, I have witnessed higher education call for public engagement. Over and over again.  Like even in a recent tweet from the incoming president of the American Association of Geographers:

.@AmericanGeo @CanGeographers @theAAG @NCGE1915 Imp for geographers to be good storytellers who resonate, esp in uncertain times @JoshGeog https://t.co/iQPOOS2A6Z

— Derek Alderman (@MLKStreet) January 21, 2017

But, higher education does not walk the talk.  Storytellers who engage with the public are not considered real academics.  Unless one publishes in journals that nobody reads, one is not really an academic.

The situation is worse in science.  Carl Sagan, despite all his formal and rigorous publications and research was not considered to be a top-rated scientist by his peers because he dared to be a phenomenal storyteller.  I don't ever understand why this is the case.

But, of course, with regularity, we find calls for more public engagement.  Like this one, in which the author wants scientists to be more than mere storytellers--he wants them to be more involved in the political process:

The dearth of lawmakers who bring a scientific perspective to national issues of energy, climate change, national security, and technology deeply concern me as a scientist and as an American. As scientists we are trained to embrace uncertainty, use the tools of data, hard evidence, and analysis to solve problems. For scientists, there are no facile answers; rather, there are complex questions that require disciplined, dispassionate and systematic thought —our aim to arrive at solutions that serve truth above expediency. I realize the importance of bringing the scientific perspective to bear on today’s urgent and complex environmental and technological issues because of my background and training.

The world of higher education would not care about these.  And then they continue to wonder why the public does not understand the importance of education and ideas!

If only Faculty were Public Intellectuals

I remarked to the few students who were pretending to listen to me that engaging with the public requires a thick skin.  (It is not because of a thin skin that I do not engage with most faculty; I choose not to even wish the unprofessional professionals!)  It is relatively easy for faculty to say whatever bombastic stuff they want to expound on--when they are in class with a captive audience, or when they are at one of their committee meetings.  (As a friend joked, a committee is where they take minutes for the hours wasted!)  

It is strange, rather ironic, that tenured faculty confine themselves to such safe territories and do not dare to venture out.  Why don't they proclaim their bombastic ideas with the public?  If they truly believe, for instance, that the humanities and the social sciences have never been more important, then why don't they make the case to the world outside their safe spaces?

Rachel Toor--a tenured member of the faculty at a university here in the Pacific Northwest--writes:

We live in interesting times. Scholars in the humanities can’t afford to stop making the case that what we do matters — that art helps us to live. We need to be able to convey that to our students, especially those in STEM fields who may not have gained as much exposure to music, literature, art, or theater.

But, why to "our students"?  They are not the ones who need that message.  After all, what students think and do result from various social policies and structures that the public has established. Further, the courses that students take resulted from the curriculum that faculty designed.  Which means it is the faculty who need to be convinced about the humanities?

The timidity we find in much academic work is a product of a system that — while professing to cherish academic freedom — doesn’t foster academic bravery.

She got that part right!

Another faculty, who is on the tenure-track, writes about "dipping our toes into the role of the public intellectual."

So tell me, reader. How are you dealing with this seemingly inevitable slide toward becoming a public intellectual? What are the benefits and what are the risks of engaging with people about our work online? Share your stories below in the comments or Tweet @MeganCondis. Let’s talk about it.

Oh, please!  I have been doing this for years.  I suppose I should have written essays about my experiences at the places where these faculty have published theirs and boosted my CV!

I have been doing what I have been doing for two decades now, from even before the birthing of "www."  Harsh and negative criticism is something that I view as evidence that I am doing something alright.  As I joked with students, how many can claim to have received hate mail! ;)

I will end this post with excerpts from two recent responses from strangers, which will show that I have enough of a thick skin to engage with the public ;)

First:

I read your article in the R-G about Elihu Yale and I have to say you’ve really gone off your nut this time. Have you had your blood sugar checked lately?

Mild, right?  Keep in mind that was merely the opener!

How about a couple of sentences from another one?

The students' jaws dropped when I read that to them.  I told them about my all-time favorite hate mail that I received; check it out yourself ;)

I, for one, am not holding my breath waiting for the tenured faculty to be brave outside the ivory tower.  As they say in the old country, வீட்டிலே புலி வெளியிலே எலி  (a tiger at home, but a mouse outside.)

I don't care to write about climate change! Because, I am a part of the problem.

Here in the blog, I write about a range of topics.  It is nothing but a symptom of a problem that I have had throughout my life--while many classmates and friends identified whatever fascinated them and worked on that while excluding subjects and ideas that were of lesser interest to them, I continued to spread myself thin.  I have an intense commitment problem, I suppose!  But, how could I choose to ignore so many fascinating ideas and issues when I am acutely aware that I don't know a damn thing?

Yet, when I write op-eds, I write on a much restricted range of topics.  The other day, I was perusing the listing in my CV, and wondered what a word cloud might look like.  Economics and geography feature a lot, and so do higher education and India.  There are plenty of topics that are not to be found in the CV.  For instance, while I have blogged more than a couple of times about the Ukraine-Russia tensions, I have not authored a single op-ed on that, nor am I planning to write one.

The missing topics are for a simple reason: Even this wannabe public intellectual knows his limits.

I am absolutely ok with readers disagreeing with my interpretations and commentaries.  But, I don't ever want to be in a situation where a reader thinks, after reading an op-ed of mine, that I have no idea what I am talking about.  Hence, despite my passionate opinions on wars, or racism, or climate change, well, I haven't authored any op-ed that are strictly about those issues.

So, why this rambling note about the self?

This op-ed on climate change was the trigger that made me thank my awareness of my own bounded knowledge, especially on highly charged and controversial public policy issues. Am reminded of an old joke that opinions are like armpits--everybody has them and they stink!  While I might freely opine here in the blog, an op-ed is not a mere opinion, but an informed and educated interpretation.

Talking and writing about climate change is difficult for another reason--the bottom line is that it is a moral issue that has guidelines for a good life.  To think that I am typing all these in a well-lit comfortable home that is warm even though it is sub-freezing temperature outside means that this blog-post alone is reflective of the huge carbon footprint that I have, which I should try to reduce before I preach it, right?

Estimate your household emissions here

Thus, as Al Gore found out, it is difficult to be a passionate advocate for a whole bunch of lifestyle changing recommendations when his life was anything but simple--with his mansions and jetting around the world and everything else.  Remember the "hippy-crites" route that the Daily Mail went a few years ago?  Heck, it gets awkward and difficult to defend one's beef eating, when that is responsible for more damage to the environment than most things that we would imagine.

I agree with Elizabeth Kolbert, who writes at the end of her essay in which she reviews Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything:

when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.”

Which is all the more why this public intellectual does not write op-eds on climate change, though in this blog I write often about the urgency, and my new favorite German word: energiewende.

It is awfully difficult to practice what you teach.  Hey, wait a sec, I wrote a commentary on that many years ago ;)

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!

I prefer to be a fox. My goal is to be a fox!

Tomorrow will the first day of classes in a new academic year, which is all the more the reason why I have been thinking about the kind of a teacher and a scholar I am. 

One such chain of thought led me to recalling reading, while in graduate school, Isiah Berlin's wonderful essay on The Hedgehog and the Fox and how much I deeply resonated with his "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing".

This article takes up that same idea, and notes:

In an age of specialists, does it matter that generalists no longer thrive? The world is hardly short of knowledge. Countless books are written, canvases painted and songs recorded. A torrent of research is pouring out. A new orthodoxy, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, sees obsessive focus as the key that unlocks genius.

Just knowing about a lot of things has never been easier. Never before have dabblers been so free to paddle along the shore and dip into the first rock pool that catches the eye. If you have an urge to take off your shoes and test the water, countless specialists are ready to hold your hand.

And yet you will never get very deep. Depth is for monomaths—which is why experts so often seem to miss what really matters. Specialisation has made the study of English so sterile that students lose much of the joy in reading great literature for its own sake. A generation of mathematically inclined economists neglected many of  Keynes’s insights about the Depression because he put them into words. For decades economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life. Part of my regret at the scarcity of polymaths is sentimental. Polymaths were the product of a particular time, when great learning was a mark of distinction and few people had money and leisure. Their moment has passed, like great houses or the horse-drawn carriage. The world may well be a better place for the specialisation that has come along instead. The pity is that progress has to come at a price. Civilisation has put up fences that people can no longer leap across; a certain type of mind is worth less. The choices modern life imposes are duller, more cramped.

A monomath I am not, and was never keen on becoming one for the very reason articulated in that essay--I felt cramped, imprisoned, and cutoff from everything else whenever I was on that track.  I didn't want that.  It simply wasn't me.  I knew well that I have naturally been inclined to know a little bit of as much as I can.  I am excited I am not a hedgehog and, more importantly, I do not pretend to be one.
 
I know all too well that I am no polymath either--am way, way short of those intellectual abilities.  Am glad though that I am where I am, knowing I yam what I yam ;)

If only college faculty were public intellectuals in the classroom!

Thinking about what I do, in the classroom and outside, I was reminded of this by Tim Clydesdale:

Back when students held us in awe, sat willingly for lectures, and assigned us the work of deciding what knowledge was worth knowing, we organized our classes around our disciplines. We chose what knowledge needed to be conveyed to students in what order. Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what's worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

Likewise, the work of public intellectualism must go on outside the classroom as well. Others have made that case eloquently in these pages, so I shall simply underscore their appeals with a few suggestions.

First, I applaud the efforts of leaders of scholarly associations to promote and reward the work of public scholarship, despite membership pressure to preserve the status quo, and I encourage those associations to continue that work. Second, I respect the efforts of many agencies that support academe to promote general dissemination of research results and encourage other sources of financial support to do the same. To be sure, there is a place for highly specialized research programs; I simply ask program officers to ensure that each call for proposals includes a question about how results will reach a general audience and that responses to that question be considered in the proposal's evaluation.

Third, some of us need an attitude adjustment. It is not just residential-college students who live in a bubble — many faculty members do as well. We take for granted our privileged status, become consumed by petty controversies, talk only to ourselves, and ignore the wider public that makes our work possible. It is tempting, I know, to want to curse the culture and withdraw into like-minded enclaves. But neither catharsis nor retreat will satisfy those who demand accountability, raise financial support for public higher education, or generate more students who cherish college as an opportunity to learn and think.

Even though our interests often diverge from those of the general public, we remain beholden to it. With a few adjustments at our end, we can begin to rebuild trust among a critical mass of fellow citizens ...

I could not have said this any better.

Where have all the (public) intellectuals gone?

From this essay by Jessa Crispin (ht):

Twenty years after the Velvet Revolution, Havel gave a public speech in which he assessed the current state of the free Czech Republic. “On the one hand everything is getting better — a new generation of mobile phones is being released every week,” he said. “But in order to make use of them, you need to follow new instructions. So you end up reading instruction manuals instead of books and in your free time you watch TV where handsome tanned guys scream from advertisements about how happy they are to have new swimming trunks... The new consumer society is accomplished by a growing number of people who do not create anything of value.”

The artistic and literary scene that flourished paradoxically under censorship and repression has died off. The public intellectual is, for the most part, no longer invited to the most important parties. Anna Porter writes, “Now that everyone can publish what they want, what is the role of the intellectuals?” and she can’t find an answer. It’s no longer the police state that’s attacking the intelligentsia — it’s disinterest and boredom. It’s distraction. It’s a trade off. And it’s one that we should be able to acknowledge and be allowed to mourn. When the historian Timothy Garton Ash visited Poland in the 1980s, he admitted to an envy for the environment there. “Here is a place where people care, passionately, about ideas.” The people of Central Europe traded in ideas for groceries and for not being beaten to death by the police. No one could possibly blame them, but at the same time, Havel and the other leaders had no sense of the true cost of democracy.

If only Havel were correct in opining that instruction manuals are the only books that people read--I suspect they don't even read that much, which is why we use the abbreviation RTFM :)

Seriously though, it is depressing that the profit motive invariably leads us away from intellectual pursuits.  I do not mean to imply that these are necessarily mutually-exclusive.  Any television interview with many of the ultra-rich shows that they have deep intellectual pockets as well, and most of them do seem to value intellectual activities.  But the vast middle class ...?

The author observes in concluding the essay that the overwhelming economic culture:

is stripping us of our environment, our creativity, and our personal happiness. We are, for the most part, bogged down in the daily struggle for survival, too worried about losing our fragile position within a corporation to envision an entirely different way of being. It’s going to take another Havel, someone who can see the world for what it is and find a better story to tell.

I am afraid we left that station a long time ago, and there is no going back :(

Quote of the day

Whether here within the university, at think tanks, in the government, in the press, or even working with us in the labor movement, working people need the help of engaged policy intellectuals if we are together going to build an economy that works for all.
Think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, “more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.” ...
Working people are angry—and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.

From Richard Trumka's (President of AFL-CIO) speech on “Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen” delivered at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
ht

A Public Intellectual Feels the Heat

That is the title of this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I can relate to "feeling the heat" in so many ways ... The author, Michael Messner is on the faculty at USC (yay, Go Trojans!!!) writes about the responses he received after the LA Times published his op-ed essay where he advocated raising taxes in order to save Social Security.  But, despite all the nasty responses, Messner writes:

My piece was read by a huge number of people, who possibly then discussed it with others. There is a vast public out there; I'm determined to thicken my skin and remain a part of it.

I concur.
In fact, to engage the public on such issues is a prime responsibility that I take seriously.  (Not on my campus though, because I have been explicitly told--in writing--that I do not have a right to express my views.)

A couple of days ago this op-ed of mine was published--yes, also about taxes.  Some of the responses online are ... well, you make the call :)

Oranges writes:

HEADLINE NEWS: Taxes make government services available to all!

What a wonderful concept. It's almost like the Garden of Eden but not exactly. Close though!

Aahh, to know that government will take care of me and that I'm not responsible for anything . Nope. I inherited all that is evil dating all the way back to the day Eve ate that apple.

mjacks06:

'Sriram Khé of Eugene is an associate professor of geography at Western Oregon University.'

Geography? They couldn't get an economics professor to write an article on taxes? Odd..

Understanding the Great Recession

A special session at the annual meeting of the AAG was devoted to Paul Krugman's Nobel, and what that meant for economic geography. There one of the panelists recalled his encounter with Krugman years ago. The panelist finished his talk at a seminar when he was a visiting professor somewhere in Europe (I forget the name exact location.) It turned out that Krugman was also there at the same time. When it opened up for Q/A, apparently Krugman mocked that the research that the panelist presented was nothing but simple anecdotes for the edification of undergraduates.
That reminded me of the time when I was in graduate school--I came across an essay where the economist Robert Solow had written a damning critique of my adviser's essay. True to my nature, I brought this up with my adviser, who said something like, "oh, where he knocked me on my head?"

I suppose it is rare for a super-genious to be gracious to others. Many others, like Larry Summers, are also notorious for such behaviors. But then, hey, it takes all types of people to make up this planet :-)

In the NYRB, Solow has a critique of Richard Posner's latest book, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression. An interesting review for many reasons. In wrapping up the essay, Solow writes:

The problem is rather that Panglossian ideas about "free markets" encouraged, on one hand, lax regulation, or no regulation, of a potentially unstable financial apparatus and, on the other, the elaboration of compensation mechanisms that positively encouraged risk-taking and short-term opportunism. When the environment was right, as it eventually would be, the disaster hit.

Like I am going to disagree with Solow and get knocked on my head! :-) Seriously, there is nothing to disagree here. In reaching this ending, Solow has lots of wonderful explanations for the crisis, and dissects Posner for sloppiness. It was interesting to note how Solow threaded in Posner's book on Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.

In his book on public intellectuals, Posner blames the decline of the species on the universities and their encouragement of specialization. I may be acting out that conflict. Remember that even hairsplitting is not so bad if what is inside the hair turns out to be important.

Ouch! That is the Solow knock on Posner's bald head! Oh, the sentence just before that quote? "his grasp of economic ideas is precarious" . Hilllaaarious .... :-)

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.