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

Tue Feb 18 03:16:50 PST 2014

The most striking thing about the ranking at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2014/01/the_2014_rhsu_edu-scholar_public_influence_rankings.html is the virtual absence of any mention of academics in the US Congressional Record.

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 6:33 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Professors, We Need You!

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 
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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
>
>
>