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Academia
Academia in Crisis
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.
Academia in Crisis
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.
Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY ... added November 2023
This article goes back to 2014. It is even more relevant almost a decade later, yet there are really few signs that academia has done much to address its many issues.
I 'gave up' on academia when I was in my early 40s after an incident that took place around 1981. I was involved in the early days of shrimp aquaculture. A group of us who had been the core management team of an international shrimp fishing company started doing consulting assignments in connected with the commercialization of shrimp aquaculture. Our work was international and in my own case I did work in many different parts of the world including Thailand, Madagascar, Mozambique and Ecuador I also authored a comprehensive research report on global shrimp aquaculture that was marketed by an economics consulting firm for $1,500 a copy! I submitted my CV and relevant credentials to incorporate my work in a more academic setting and was rebuffed in the most ugly way. Bottom line, my experience ... and foundational knowledge was an order of magnitute greater than most of those involved in this academic setting and in others.
There are some people who work in the academic setting who are incredible ... but they are not by any means the majority. In fact as I see it there has been a massive increase in the volume of higher education and at the same time a massive decrease in its quality, both in terms of the teaching and the learning of the students.
In some ways I was very lucky. My father was an educator who spent the first half of his career teaching at a 'good' school. During the second half of his career the became the headmaster of a Secondary Modern School ... this is in England, where children who 'failed' the 11+ exam went to a school like my dad's while children who 'passed' the exam went to a Grammar School. The stream that failed ended their formal school education around 16 while most of those that passed continued to about age 18. At that time ... the 1950s and 1960s ... only about 5% of students went on to University. My father was very clear that all children deserved a 'good' education but merely replicating the 'book based' academic model that suited 'bright kids' could not work for most kids and he implemented ... within the normal curriculum structure ... as much hands-on practical training as we possible. The example I remember most is using 'gardening' as the core for teaching 'biology' that was way more effective than merely reading a book and looking at the printed work and a few pictures!
Fast forward ... it has become pretty clear that modern education has failed modern youth in a rather sad manner ... with little going on to recify the situation.
Peter Burgess
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 as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. 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. 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, a Harvard historian who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to everything said here, noted the result: “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, 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 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 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. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
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|Today's Paper|Subscribe