[Xmca-l] Re: Professors, We Need You!

[Cliff O'Donnell]

Thank you, Peter, for bringing Kristof's piece to our attention. In  
psychology an important part of the problem is the distinction between  
basic and applied science. Those who make this distinction and value  
basic science believe that basic science leads to Truth and dismiss  
applied science. Participation in public debates then is seen as a  
distraction at best. Basic science in psychology typically means  
studying people in laboratories designed to seek basic principles by  
isolating participants from the context of their everyday lives.

The bad news is that separating people from context can lead to  
limited and, often, inaccurate knowledge. The good news is that there  
are areas of psychology where many researchers reject the distinction  
between basic and applied science. They study people in context and  
often participate in public debates about their work and its  
implications for public policy (see www.scra27.org and www.spssi.org).  
One model for this work combines basic and applied science ‘‘where no  
action step is contemplated without questioning about its theoretical  
significance and no speculation about underlying processes occurs  
without asking about its action implications’’ (Price & Behrens, 2003,  
p. 222).

Reference
Price, R. H., & Behrens, T. (2003). Working Pasteur’s quadrant:  
Harnessing science and action for community change. American Journal  
of Community Psychology, 31, 219–223. doi:10.1023/A:1023950402338.

Cliff O'Donnell

On Feb 16, 2014, at 5:09 AM, Peter Smagorinsky wrote:

> Professors, We Need You!
>
> FEB. 15, 2014 Nicholas Kristof <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/nicholasdkristof/index.html 
> >
>
> 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.
>
> One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind  
> that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkjbJOSwq3A 
> > as "a snob" for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led  
> congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science  
> research<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/02/us/humanities-studies-under-strain-around-the-globe.html 
> >. Yet it's not just that America has marginalized some of its  
> sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.
>
> "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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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."
>
> The latest attempt by academia to wall itself off from the world  
> came when the executive council of the prestigious International  
> Studies Association proposed that its publication editors be barred  
> from having personal blogs<http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/29/international-studies-association-proposes-bar-editors-blogging 
> >. The association might as well scream: We want our scholars to be  
> less influential!
>
> A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their  
> insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public  
> consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure  
> journals - or published by university presses whose reputations for  
> soporifics keep readers at a distance.
>
> Jill Lepore<http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore>, a Harvard historian  
> who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to everything said  
> here, noted the result<http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Economy-of-Letters/141291/ 
> >: "a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a  
> vast moat of dreadful prose."
>
> As experiments, scholars have periodically submitted meaningless  
> gibberish to scholarly journals - only to have the nonsense  
> respectfully published.
>
> My onetime love, political science, is a particular offender and  
> seems to be trying, in terms of practical impact, to commit suicide.
>
> "Political science Ph.D.'s often aren't prepared to do real-world  
> analysis," says Ian Bremmer<http://eurasiagroup.net/about-eurasia-group/who-is/ian-bremmer 
> >, a Stanford political science Ph.D. who runs the Eurasia Group, a  
> consulting firm. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, one-fifth of  
> articles in The American Political Science Review<http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/APSRNov06_Sigelman_Co-evolutionEssay.pdf 
> > focused on policy prescriptions; at last count, the share was down  
> to 0.3 percent.
>
> 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<http://www.stimson.org/images/uploads/research-pdfs/Full_Pub_-_Seismic_Shift.pdf 
> > 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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).
>
> 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!
>
> I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground<http://www.nytimes.com/ontheground 
> >. Please also join me on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/kristof>  
> and Google+<https://plus.google.com/102839963139173448834/posts? 
> hl=en>, watch my YouTube videos<http://www.youtube.com/ 
> nicholaskristof> and follow me on Twitter<http://twitter.com/nickkristof 
> >.
>
> A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 16, 2014, on  
> page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline: Smart Minds,  
> Slim Impact. Order Reprints<https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?contentID=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2014%2F02%2F16%2Fopinion%2Fsunday%2Fkristof-professors-we-need-you.html&publisherName=The+New+York+Times&publication=nytimes.com&token=&orderBeanReset=true&postType=&wordCount=795&title=Professors%2C+We+Need+You%21&publicationDate=Feb.+15%2C+2014&author=By%20Nicholas%20Kristof 
> >|Today's Paper<http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html>| 
> Subscribe<http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.html? 
> >
>

Clifford R. O'Donnell, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Past-President, Society for Community Research and Action (APA  
Division 27)

University of Hawai‘i
Department of Psychology
2530 Dole Street
Honolulu, HI 96822