Q & A on Scholars and the Public Eye

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Condensed from interviews with Noah Feldman, Jennifer Hochschild, and Dani Rodrik.

 —with Noah Feldman

Q. How was writing for a popular audience viewed within the academic world earlier in your career and has that attitude changed?

A. When I started teaching in 2001, some of my senior colleagues thought that the fact that you wrote something that a non-academic would want to read was active evidence that what you’re writing couldn’t be of value to scholars. Happily, things have really changed enormously now. Now many scholars understand the real question isn’t “what is the genre a person is writing in?” It is “what’s the content of the argument a person is making?” And a subtle, sophisticated, and scholarly argument doesn’t always have to be wrapped up in inaccessible jargon.

Q. Is writing in a more journalistic—that is to say, accessible—style an easy enough transition or does it require that academics learn new skills?

A. This type of writing absolutely requires a different skill set. But it’s a skill set that every academic is capable of learning with a certain amount of effort because you’re the one who understands your work better than anybody else by definition. When you write something that is scholarly, it’s almost always possible, after doing so, to write an accessible version of the argument, which won’t be identical but will be, let’s say, a translation of your work to a broader audience. To do that though, you have to accept that you will generalize and oversimplify sometimes, and you have to understand that’s part of the game and part of the challenge. You can add a note saying, “I am oversimplifying here but…” But if you think “I can never oversimplify in my arguments”—you are almost guaranteeing you won’t be able to write it up in an accessible fashion.

Q. Do you see more academics engaging with the public via media and raising the level of public debate?

A. I definitely see more academics engaged in the media and with the public—and I would add the blogosphere there. I think more and more scholars are doing this and understanding that it’s a legitimate and even a valuable way of getting your ideas out there. Whether that’s changing the nature of public discourse is a hard question to answer. I definitely think there’s still plenty of public discourse out there that isn’t very sophisticated and that will probably always be the case. But I think that what exists now that didn’t exist before is that on almost any topic, if you wanted to know what scholars think about that topic, by looking at blogs and at the media you could probably find the answer.

Image of Noah FeldmanNoah Feldman is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. As an adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, he contributed to the creation of the country's new constitution. He is the author of six books, most recently, Cool War: The Future of Global Competition. He is also a columnist for the international news agency Bloomberg View.

—with Jennifer Hochschild

Q. How was writing for a popular audience viewed within the academic world earlier in your career and has that attitude changed?

A. There’s been a huge change. When I started out, and for many years thereafter, writing for a popular audience was generally denigrated. No, I think denigrated is too strong—but it was viewed as suspicious. People would have raised eyebrows or looked askance. You were dumbing down. You were not a serious scholar. You were engaging with people who couldn’t really evaluate the quality of your work.

Now I don’t think most political scientists would say that it’s a waste of time. That sentiment has pretty much disappeared.

Q. Is writing in a more journalistic—that is to say, accessible—style an easy enough transition or does it require that academics learn new skills?

A. It is very difficult. For a long time, it was hard for political scientists to get into the public arena. Even if you got past the view that it wasn’t what you were supposed to be doing, the threshold for publication was high. The New Yorker and the Atlantic don’t publish a lot of over-the-transom stuff—and there just weren’t very many outlets.

I published a few book reviews in the New York Times or Washington Post  book review magazines. But when I wrote one for the New Republic, they wrote back and said they didn’t want to publish it because it sounded too much like a political scientist wrote it—and I’m sure they were right, I didn’t know how to do this.

But with advances in technology it became easier to reach the public, particularly through blogging, and many scholars discovered if they tried hard enough, they could become better at writing for people outside their discipline. And a whole profession of helpers grew—editorial, communications—people good at writing. So even if they weren’t trained political scientists, they could take your material and turn it into something others might actually want to read.

Q. Do you see more academics engaging with the public via media and raising the level of public debate?

A. The most obvious case of impact on the public is Nate Silver who uses political science and really does a much better job than all of us. Malcolm Gladwell does sort of the same kind of things we’re talking about. He basically takes academic research and turns it into very smart presentations. I think of the Upshot at the New York Times... all of this is raising the level of public debate. And then the blogs by academics are increasingly important – Crooked Timber, Monkey Cage, Balkinization, and so on.

Image of Jennifer HochschildJennifer Hochschild is a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center, the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and professor of African and African American studies and American politics at Harvard, and president of the American Political Science Association. Hochschild is the author or co-author of numerous books, including most recently, Do Facts Matter? Information and Misinformation in American Politics. She was founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, and was a former co-editor of the American Political Science Review. She also writes for the Washington Post’s blog, the Monkey Cage.

—with Dani Rodrik

Q: How was writing for a popular audience viewed within the academic world earlier in your career and has that attitude changed?

A: I think early on for most scholars it was an almost denigrated kind of activity—a threat to your status as a scholar—but the situation has changed a lot. With the proliferation of academic blogs, the spread of social media, and the increasing number of academics who are interested in reaching out to a broader audience, I think it’s become much more acceptable.

Q. Is writing in a more journalistic—that is to say, accessible—style an easy enough transition or does it require that academics learn new skills?

A. Most economists don’t become successful by writing well. I think the transition sometimes takes an effort. It takes investing in a style that is more accessible. I certainly think there are many more economists who could be doing this type of writing but it requires that investment.

Q. Do you see more academics engaging with the public via media and raising the level of public debate?

A. I find there is a lot more demand out there from journalists and the media for new ideas and accessible academic writing. I don’t have to market my ideas. I find there are a lot of takers if I put them out there.

Are we raising the level of public debate? I hope so. I see some signs of this like the Upshot site of the New York Times or the Vox site. I see more academic ideas are being brought to bear on important policy questions these days and it’s not just pundits and think tankers. I’d like to think that there has in fact been a change. I don’t think that we’re where we should be but I think there has been a change for the better.

Image of Dani RodrickDani Rodrik is a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center and the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy and, most recently, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science. He is also general editor of the journal Global Policy. His commentary appears in popular venues, including the EconomistBloomberg ViewMarketplace, the New York TimesFinancial Times, and the Washington Post. Rodrik regularly writes op-ed commentaries for Project Syndicate, one of the world’s top news websites. And he’s a popular blogger.

This is one of three articles on the growing number of academics who are writing for a public audience. Weatherhead Center Faculty Associates interviewed on this trend include Harvard professors Noah Feldman, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law; Jennifer Hochschild, the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and professor of African and African American studies; and Dani Rodrik, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy.

Also in the series: Scholars and the Public Eye and Noah Feldman on How to Write for a Popular Audience.