We Need More Support For Public Facing Scholarship
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If you are a political analysis junkie like me, you’re probably familiar with Julia Azari. A political science professor at Marquette University, Azari researches the American presidency and political parties — topics which have a direct bearing on day-to-day political developments in Washington. Azari regularly offers the benefits of her research experience to the public; she writes for the Mischiefs of Faction blog at Vox.com, and is also a frequent contributor to Nate Silver’s 538, perhaps the single highest-profile site for election analysis on the web. She analyzed Trump’s inaugural speech for the New York Timesand discussed intellectual’s support for Trump in Politico. She’s a highly visible, jaw-droppingly productive, widely respected public scholar, who works hard to make the national conversation about politics more informed.
Unfortunately, while its easy for regular readers like me to see the worth of what Azari does, universities still struggle to value public writing. In many departments, across disciplines, tenure and advancement are still primarily tied to peer-reviewed publications. Scholars are encouraged to write only for other scholars — an incentive structure which impoverishes both academia and everyone else. “Impact matters,” Azari told me. “What is the point of generating knowledge in an insular fashion? If a field has insights about a problem, but no one hears them, are they really insights at all?”
Many academics I spoke to do value public facing scholarship. But institutional change can be slow, even in cases where faculty and administration agree that they want to encourage scholars to reach out to the public. Still, there are some promising models, historical and current, for revaluing public facing scholarship.
First, government programs can be hugely effective in encouraging public-facing work. David Perry, a historian and a columnist at Pacific Standard, points out that state and federal support for agricultural extension schoolsfrom the 1800s on was extremely successful in disseminating academic research to farmers. “Every time you bite into a Honeycrisp apple, you’re benefiting from quite literally the fruits of public scholarship, in which these agriculture extensions schools were founded in part to collaborate with and help local farmers” Perry told me. “So theres’s a long history of public scholarship being counted and celebrated. It just hasn’t crossed over out of that because we don’t take a look at the farm very often over at the humanities.”
Currently, Britain has instituted a national funding mechanism called the Research Excellence Framework(REF) which puts a premium on the public impact of scholarship. The REF is used to allocate money to universities, so there’s a powerful incentive for academic institutions to support and encourage engagement with the public through appointments and promotion. The REF has been criticizedfor putting too much emphasis on economic impact, and on ignoring the value of some scholarship. At the least, though, the REF show how public policy can push institutions to recognize and reward public-facing work.
Advocating for public impact consideration for grants might be a long term goal. But there are many other ways to change policies. For example, Candida Rifkind, an associate professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, pointed out that at institutions where the faculty is unionized, tenure and promotion standards are governed by the Collective Agreement. “If your CA doesn’t currently allow for creative publications or public intellectual work to count, then it should be on the bargaining table for your next CA,” she told me.
Professional disciplinary guidelines have also begun to recognize the importance of public facing scholarship. The American Historical Association, for example, has called for more recognition of public facing scholarshipin tenure and promotion decisions. This approach to change has the advantage of allowing standards to be tailored to different disciplines. Mathematicians, agriculture scientists, painters, and political scientists do different kinds of public facing work, and need to develop different standards to evaluate that work.
In addition to developing different disciplinary standards for academics in general, some institutions have also experimented with creating particular positions where the job description specifically calls for public scholarship. Michael Berry, a communications professor at King’s College, told me that his school has a track for professional specialists: people who have professional experience, but no PhD. In those positions, professional intellectual work is an important part of tenure and promotion decisions. Julia Azari suggested that political science departments should consider creating positions in public scholarship, in which analyzing and explaining current events to a broader audience is part of the job description.
There has also been a push to demonstrate the value of public scholarship by creating venues which highlight it. In Britain, for example, the website The Conversationis devoted to publishing public writing by scholars in fields from international relations to geology. Public Books(where I used to edit a romance criticism column) is an online magazine in which scholars discuss books, ideas and popular culture for a wide audience. “By giving the public access to the smartest professors, a magazine such as Public Books makes lifelong learning available to everyone,” Sharon Marcus, the editor-in-chief told me. “We are an open global university where readers can encounter work by scholars of all ages, from around the country and around the world, presented in ways that anyone can understand.” Venues which connect researchers with the public also help create a community of academics with an appreciation for, and interest in, public scholarship. Those are people who can advocate for changes in tenure and promotion standards within their own universities and disciplines.
There are, then, a wide array of ways in which to revalue public scholarship — through government grants, labor contracts, disciplinary guidelines, or by creating new media platforms. The breadth of possibilities is heartening; there are a lot of promising ways to advocate for public scholarship. But the piecemeal approach also indicates that there is some way to go before the university embraces public facing scholarship. There is no one clear advocacy path, which indicates ongoing uncertainty about how best to push for change. Many people in academia support greater recognition for public scholarship. That recognition seems likely to come. But it’s still, unfortunately, not clear how we’ll get from here to there.
