Academics and policy; Joseph Nye notes a lack of relevance

Joseph Nye, a former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, writes in HuffPo one of those occasional posts that bemoan the lack of connection between academics and policy (the original OpEd piece is in the WaPo).

This has been a problem for how long now? Years, decades, centuries? Apparently the isolation of the ivory tower is getting worse. No doubt. I am familiar with this dilemma. I spent a fair amount of time and energy as an undergrad wondering if and how my philosophy degree would be relevant to real change in the real world. When I asked my philosophy professors about this, they seemed surprised by the question, as if it hadn't occurred to them. You would think that philosophy professors - of all people - would spend some time thinking about the meaning of their profession.

Nye cites a few trends/suspects for this widening gulf. Mostly, it's because once you're in the academy, you pay more attention to staying in the academy, and less attention to the outside world. Professional advancement within academia depends on impressing other people who are also within it, not the people outside.

That's probably true, but I lay the blame squarely on one facet of academia: tenure. There is one crucial difference between people in academia and people who are actually developing policy in the real world. That difference is that people in the real world are held accountable for how their ideas affect people, and academics are not. People in the real world have to deal with the consequences of their ideas. People in academia do not have to deal with those consequences. People in the real world can be fired if they screw up. People with tenure cannot be fired. If you can be fired because your ideas are wrong, you pay close attention to making sure your ideas are right, which means changing them when those ideas turn out to be wrong. If you are immune from being fired, you have no incentive to paying attention to how your ideas work in the real world. You can be wrong forever, and not pay any price.

This becomes self-perpetuating, because people who want their ideas to be relevant will work for organizations where their ideas will be relevant; think tanks, legislatures, newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc. Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall both have Ph.d.'s from Ivy League universities. People who are not as concerned about their relevance will tend to gravitate towards academia, where they can argue amongst themselves to their mutual hearts' content.

I should point out that this applies mostly to the humanities and social sciences. Academics in math, engineering, and the hard sciences are held accountable by their experiments. If a physicists' experiments don't work, he or she has to change his or her mind. I should also point out that my critique is aimed at higher education; I have much more respect for teachers in elementary and high school, who have the very difficult job of teaching. I have a lot of respect for teachers. I'm not a big fan of tenure at that level, either, but I don't think it has the same corrosive effect it does in higher education.

I had an argument about this with a friend who is an academic. My position was that academics are not relevant to society. He came back with "But you're assuming that they should be." To him, whether or not academics are relevant to social change or society in any respect is not an important question. This is a guy who minored in Latin and read ancient Roman poets for fun. He's perfectly happy going to conferences and teaching undergrads. Which is great. We need people to do whatever work he is doing, and I'm sure he does it quite well. The fact that he's perfectly happy with his job has a value in and of itself.

One thing that has changed very dramatically that Nye doesn't seem to notice is that there are vastly more opportunities today for people who are very smart and interested in ideas and want to see those ideas change society for the better. Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall are both making a living as bloggers. They both have an impact on politics. There was a time when colleges and universities were bastions of enlightened and progressive thinking, and if you wanted to hang out with smart people, that's where you went. That is no longer the case. So people who want their ideas to be relevant have options that they didn't have even 10 years ago. Which means, of course, that they have even less incentive to go into academia. Previously, they may have gone back and forth between academia and government, as Nye himself did. Now they can just leave academia with their Ph.d.'s and never look back.

I'm not as worried about this as I used to be. If people want to go into academia and argue about absurdly esoteric topics, fine with me. When I think of these people, I am reminded of the description of the earth in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Mostly harmless." Every society has people who are smart but confused and misguided. Successful societies come up with a way to deal with these people that keeps them from ruining life for the rest of us. That's one purpose of tenure: academia has become a holding pen for people who are really smart, but basically wrong. As long as they stay there, they are mostly harmless. The rest of us should basically ignore them. This was what went wrong with the Ward Churchill fiasco: people actually started paying attention to him, and he became relevant and then controversial. If we had all ignored him, he would have stayed mostly harmless and basically irrelevant. I say "mostly harmless" because, of course, as an academic, he is teaching students, some of whom might actually take him seriously. This is an unfortunate side effect, but it is tampered by the fact that most students grow out of what they believe in college. It's like the other Churchill (the more quotable one) said: "If a man is not a Marxist at 20, he has no heart. If he is still a Marxist at 40, he has no brain." I'm actually not really sure if that's from Churchill, but it sounds good. And since I'm not an academic, I'm not going to worry about the historical accuracy of my citation. Because, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "Truth is absolutely and completely a matter of style." Not sure about the accuracy of that quote, either, but I think it sounds just as good as the one from Churchill.

For now, then, I'm not going to worry about whether or not there are enough academics in the Obama administration. That's because I am going to judge the Obama administration on whether or not they get the job done. They are held accountable on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Which is why I have much more respect for them than I do for academics.

Stanley Fish on the Problem of Tenure, Academic Freedom, and Free Speech

Stanley Fish is a blogger at the NY Times who is a distinguished professor of law. I like his stuff occasionally, but can't say I'm a huge fan. But I respect an academic who's very engaged with the public. This week he has a fascinating post about tenure and academic freedom. He explored this theme in his previous week's post, about a guy named Denis Rancourt (remember that name), a professor of physics at the University of Ottawa who has taken the cause of academic pretty to its logical extreme; he has not only been fired, but banned from the campus (read Fish's post for the graphic details).

The issue at hand is what responsibilities professors have to the university that pays them, and what to do when those responsibilities conflict with academic freedom. Rancourt, the guy in Ottawa takes the position that his responsibility is to undermine the university in the name of answering to a higher truth. Having worked in the real world ever since graduating from college, I find this a bizarre idea, but, having gone to a college that was a training ground for academics (Swarthmore), I'm not unfamiliar with the logic.

Most academics realize that they have responsibilities to their instiutions, to their departments, their colleagues, and their students. But a fair number also subscribe to what Fish calls "academic exceptionalism," the idea that, as academics, they are somehow better than the mere mortals who do not have advanced degrees. I am, again, familiar with this concept, largely because I have been on both sides of it. Swarthmore was very much a training ground for academics. Many of my friends went on to careers in academia (and a fair number started down that path, then diverged away from it). I majored in philosophy. Swarthmore had such a good track record of training philosophy professors that a professor there told me that there were more professors of philosophy with undergrad degrees from Swat than from any other college or university. And that was absolute numbers, not a percentage.

I once asked that same professor what the purpose of philosophy is. I figured that if there is one group of professionals who will be able to answer deep questions about the meaning of their occupation, it would be philosophy professors. This professor answered that I had a talent for asking difficult questions in an innocent tone of voice (when a philosophy professor tells you that you are asking him a difficult question, that means he is very impressed). But then he told me that, for him, the purpose of philosophy was to offer a critique of society.

Yet again, I've been on both sides of that perspective. I struggled with this idea of philosophy providing a "critique of society" because I wanted to buy into it. I wanted to believe that I could make the world a better place just by sitting around and thinking.

But there is a deep arrogance in the idea that your profession bestows upon you the right to "critique society." First, it implies that you understand society well enough to critique it. That may or may not be true. But there is, of course, a moral element to "critiquing society." To do so is to grant yourself the right to dictate to other people how they should act. To assume that you have the right to tell other people how to behave because of your job seems to me extraordinarily arrogant.

Of course, in a democracy we are all social critics. But we also respect each other's right to engage in the practice of arguing about politics.

This arrogance is part of what Fish is writing about when he describes "academic exceptionalism." He explores where this leads, and doesn't like where it takes him. Neither do I. One place it leads to is a denial of responsibility. Fish doesn't mention this, but it occurs to me that if you set up a situation where people are not responsible to other people, you will attract people who are irresponsible. I think that explains, in part, the phenomenon of people like this idiot Rancourt. They don't want to be responsible, and they are enabled by an environment in which they are allowed to develop highly intellectually sophisticated justifications for not being held responsible for the impact that their ideas have on other people. There's another term for this. It's called being a jerk.

One other aspect that Fish doesn't get into is that even if individuals in colleges are not held accountable for their ideas, the institutions ultimately will be. I was very disillusioned by my education, for a number of reasons. I have a love/hate relationship with my undergraduate alma mater. It was the perfect place for me when I started there, but I outgrew it quickly, without realizing it. So I wasn't happy by the time I graduated.

I have been the recipient of many requests for donations from Swarthmore since graduating. I have answered almost none of them. This is one way that accountability works its slow, slow way through the system; students are affected by the ideas of their professors. Then those students become alumni. And just about every college and university in this country depends on alumni donations for support. If the disillusionment that I experienced ever reaches critical mass, we will have an accountability moment for colleges and universities of catastrophic proportions. And professors will yell and scream and bitch and moan and protest and issue demands and be angry and confused because they will have no idea what hit them.

I am a strong proponent of academic freedom, but I am a strong opponent of tenure. I do not think academic freedom requires tenure; I think it requires strong leadership from each institution's managers. Of course, it also helps to have strong endowments.

There may have been a time when tenure was necessary. I'm sure there are still many professors who benefit from it. But those with tenure pay a high cost, and that is in respect. There's a reason professors are stereotyped as living in ivory towers; because many are not held accountable for their ideas, as the rest of us are. I make a key distinction between professors in the hard sciences and those in the social sciences and humanities. I have a great deal of respect for physicists, biologists, chemists, etc., because they are held accountable for their ideas by reality; they are answerable to their experiments. Some social scientists are good enough scientists that they are also answerable to their experiments. But many are not. Philosophy professors, of course, are very much in this latter camp. They are intellectually disciplined by the logic of their arguments.

There was a time when colleges and universities were bastions of enlightened and progressive thinking in a world where those qualities were not common. That is no longer the case. Colleges and universities have been extraordinarily successful at educating generations of students to be intellectually curious, to ask questions, to debate great ideas. Professors have, in a sense, created their own competition. Swarthmore generally ranks very high among liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News and World Report rankings; I don't think it has ever dropped lower than three. Williams and Amherst are usually the other top two. But Swarthmore's competition is no longer Williams, or Amherst, or Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. It isn't Michigan, Berkeley, or UVA.

The great reason that academic exceptionalism is increasingly an anachronistic idea is that the centers of englightened and progressive thinking are no longer places like Harvard and Berkeley, but Google, McKinsey, and the NY Times. Great ideas are now debated in places like the ACLU; Skadden, Arps; Brookings; Kleiner, Perkins; and DreamWorks.

At some point the idea of academic exceptionalism is going to collide with the limitations of how much we, as a society, are willing to pay for college education. When that happens, the arrogance of the people who responded to Stanley Fish with eloquent articulations of their own unique responsibilities towards truth is going to be a poor defense against society's demands for accountability.