[AstroNet] Academics: forget about public engagement, stay in your ivory towers

[Sam Rametse]

Morning everyone,



Here is an interesting article on some academics’ s view of public
engagement. See if you are in agreement



http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/dec/10/academics-forget-about-public-engagement-stay-in-your-ivory-towers?CMP=share_btn_tw



Academics are constantly encouraged to engage with the public more often,
but this advice ignores the way that specialised knowledge already affects
civic life. Specialisation has social importance, but often only after
decades of work.



It is time for us to reassess what we mean by public scholarship. We must
recognise the value of the esoteric knowledge, technical vocabulary and
expert histories that academics produce.



Those who call for academics to publicise their work often place importance
on making complex research more accessible to general audiences. Some
scholars insist that groundbreaking humanities research is ignored because
academics don’t publicise it properly. Others assume that academics don’t
want to leave their ivory towers because they are more comfortable there or
might be afraid to speak in public.

This attitude towards public engagement presents it as an intrinsic virtue,
while perpetuating the idea that professors are brainy introverts unable or
afraid to talk to people outside their sphere of expertise. In fact, the
opposite is true. The work of an academic is to talk about ideas – in
lectures, class discussions, academic conferences and student meetings. For
many, it’s one of the job’s greatest pleasures.

But we need to recognise that popularising research isn’t the only way to
make a social impact. One example of this is the history of sexuality
studies in relation to the gay rights campaign in the US.

Queer theory emerged in the 1980s with the goal of overturning the 1986 US
supreme court decision in Bowers v Hardwick, which upheld the
criminalisation of sodomy. Chief Justice Warren Burger claimed that the
ruling had “millennia of moral teaching” supporting it.



When the supreme court reversed this decision in 2003, the majority cited
decades of scholarship demonstrating the inaccuracy of Burger’s claim. The
meticulous research of queer theorists and historians only became central
to the judicial process years after the research was completed.



It would have been difficult to know in 1986 what effect publicity would
have on academic debates about the “homo-hetero binary” or the gay
subcultures of early-20th-century New York. But this disciplinary framework
enabled a massive national transformation decades later.



Whether our research eventually appears in judicial opinions or not,
academics are forced to confront questions of relevance. North Carolina
State University, where I work, was founded in 1887 as a “land-grant
institution” dedicated to expanding higher education in “agriculture and
the mechanic arts”. Its concern with relevant knowledge is made explicit in
its motto: Think and Do.



I often contemplate how my research could aid a university like my own.
Right now, I am investigating 18th-century British authors who wrote poetry
and plays in colonial cities and outposts stationed around India, Sumatra
and Singapore. Many of these authors haven’t been read since they appeared
in print during the 1790s.



I see the value in recovering colonial writers who are not readily
remembered. But I realise that the public could think the authors I study
are unread for a reason. To them, knowing how white men published poems in
1790s Bombay seems irrelevant.



I could explain that my research builds on themes that are important to our
modern society, such as the possibilities or failures of cross-cultural
dialogue, the relationship between corporations and social communities and
the sharp tongue of satire in political discourse.



But as a scholar, I can’t predict which, if any, of these themes will be
influential in the coming decades. Engaging the public is important, but we
should not assume that what will be integral to future society is the same
as what can be made popular or immediately understandable now.



Humanists like myself are regularly forced to consider what the public
wants. We are told to imagine their desires and to conjure ways to fulfil
them. This is an important strategy that every academic should pursue.



But we must be allowed to resist this impulse, too. We can’t anticipate
what intellectual discoveries will become essential answers to the public’s
future questions. We don’t always know what form public scholarship should
take.



So academics, stay in your offices. Write books that few people will read.
The results might be more significant than any of us first recognise.



Best Regards
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