American colleges and universities store the sharpest, greatest and smartest minds in the world. But most professors and thinkers in universities keep a low profile in debates that shape the future of this country. Few professors are able to come out of the ivory tower to communicate with the public about their research.
Academic results today are less accessible to the general public than they were four decades ago. It’s not that researchers don’t want to make them accessible. Rather, today’s academics have become so specialized that it takes a tremendous amount of time to explain in plain English what work the professors do. Many of them consider explaining to the masses a distraction from research.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and current president of the New America Foundation, pointed out that “all the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public.”
Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate and a former professor at the University of Chicago, probably had more fervor than any other professors about bridging the gap between academia and the general republic. He was not only successful in research, but also in spreading his word to average Americans. In the 1960s, he appeared on “The Phil Donahue Show” to discuss capitalism and freedom, bravely answering sharp questions from people who ideologically refused to accept his ideas. He has also published a number of books, including Free to Choose, which have greatly influenced and inspired young people around the world.
But today’s academic institutions have less tolerance for professors like Friedman, and the publish-or-perish tenure process discourages professors from communicating with the public. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof notes that the Ph.D. programs in the United States have fostered a culture that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” The fact that peer-reviewed publication has become the most important standard to receiving tenure is elusively penalizing young professors reaching out to people. It seems the only answer to get closer to the highly specialized academic work is to go to graduate school.
The ultimate goal of doing research is to generate new ideas that revolutionize the conventional wisdom or to invent new technologies that open the floodgate to explosive growth of productivity. Our current knowledge comes from the academic work accumulated by scholars hundreds of years ago. It takes time for the most advanced thoughts and innovations to pass down and educate the public.
Indeed, research needs intensive endeavor, extraordinary talents and enormous time. Professors, especially young professors, have limited time to spend explaining their first-hand discoveries beside time they devote to research. Interpreting the most advanced and complicated wisdom in a language that laymen can understand is no less challenging than research itself. But demand of accessing knowledge from the public will be able to foster more professional journalists who are trained to have deeper understanding of the academic work but with the excellent writing skills needed to communicate with average people.
With more professional journalists in different academic fields, professors will have their representatives spreading out their ideas and having a stronger connection with the public. This might place some hope to stop the trend that the U.S.’s greatest minds are marginalizing themselves from the mainstream and reduce the sentiment of anti-intellectualism in American life.
