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

Mon Feb 17 15:58:07 PST 2014

I don't really think that academic work needs publicity to be of public relevance. We teach thousands of students.  That's a public activity. Maybe the most important one. Many of those teaching do that as adjuncts without proper recognition and job security. Many others do work that has public relevance however it is not publicized by the new celebrity circuit that has been so damaging to intellectual life. And to be honest I see the NYT piece closer to that celebrity circuit than to those communities of practice and inquiry that give true value and meaning to to the intellectual work of any university, global or local. Certainly we need public intellectuals. But who is not one? Academia is inherently public. What we don't need is to feed the celebrity system with academics turned into "stars". Why? Because stars are beyond the dialogical nature of a good and nurturing academic life. 
David

Enviado desde mi iPhone

El 17-02-2014, a las 21:32, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> escribió:

> Thanks to you both.
> Locally the discussion is around "public scholarship." Lots to rhetoric
> aimed
> at audiences on the inside, little action vis a vis the outside.
> mike
> 
> 
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 1:41 PM, Cliff O'Donnell <cliffo@hawaii.edu> wrote:
> 
>> 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=
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>> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 