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The cult of irrelevance
A year or so ago, I read a news story where a well-known IR scholar explained the silence of many academics about the Iraq war by saying that "I don't think all the academics in the world could have had much impact on American public opinion...I don't think academics matter."
Even if true in this particular case, this is a self-fulfilling world-view. If you basically believe that what scholars write and say doesn't really matter for major national policy decisions, you're unlikely to write or say anything that might actually shape those decisions. And for many academics, that's ok with them.
As Laura Rozen noted earlier this week, my colleague Joseph Nye offered a candid and critical assessment of the growing gap between academia and the policy world in a Washington Post column on Monday. Joe's own career demonstrates that it is still possible combine serious scholarship, government service, academic leadership, and public commentary, but his warnings that this combination is becoming rarer is almost certainly correct. Michael Desch makes some related points in a recent article in Notre Dame Magazine, noting that the policy world is increasingly indifferent (or hostile) to academic advice. Together, the portrait they paint is more than a little disturbing.
My own views on this subject can be found in a longer essay in the Annual Review of Political Science. Here I'll just note two points. First, the prevailing "cult of irrelevance" in much of academia is both regrettable and irresponsible. Our society permits many academics to live pretty comfortable lives, particularly once they have tenure. And let's not forget that tenure isn't granted to allow a life-time of self-indulgent scholarship, but to allow scholars to take risks in their research and to confront controversial subjects without fear of coercion. In exchange for job security, a decent living and a high level of intellectual autonomy, our fellow citizens have a right to expect us to take our teaching responsibilities seriously and to use our knowledge to address serious issues. For political scientists, that ought to mean using our knowledge to address important matters of concern in the real world, and to contribute to the broader public discourse on these topics. That doesn't mean we should spend our days writing op-eds (or blogs!), but neither does it mean that we should studiously avoid any engagement with controversial real-world topics.
Yet a surprising number of my fellow scholars seem to hold the opposite view. Either they try to cut deals to keep their teaching to a minimum or they devote vast amounts of time to researching topics that are of interest only to a handful of their fellow scholars. Even worse, anyone who does engage the real world gets derided for doing "policy analysis" and younger scholars who show an interest in this sort of activity are less likely to be taken seriously and less like to rise within the profession. What sort of incentive structure is that?
Second, this "cult of irrelevance" is not a law of nature. As I wrote in the Annual Review essay:
Scholars naturally respond to incentives, and the incentive structure today discourages . . .a concern with policy relevance. But the norms that establish these professional incentives are not divinely ordained; they are collectively determined by the members of the discipline itself. The scholarly community gets to decide what it values, and there is no reason why policy relevance cannot be elevated in our collective estimation, along with the traditional criteria of creativity, rigor, and empirical validity."
What would this mean in practice? First, as Nye points out, academic departments could give greater weight to real-world relevance and impact in hiring and promotion decisions. When evaluating job candidates, or when considering someone for tenure, reviewers and evaluation committees could be asked to explicitly consider what contribution a scholar's work has made to the solving of a genuine real-world problems. Second, departments could also allow junior faculty to "stop the tenure clock" during a public service leave (as we do here at the Kennedy School), a policy might improve their subsequent research and make them better teachers to boot. Third, editors of academic journals could give greater weight to policy-relevance in evaluating submissions, and professional organizations should create outlets (akin to the Journal of Economic Perspectives), designed to make cutting-edge research accessible to policymakers (or at least their staffs).
After all, should scholars in the Ivory Tower really be proud that so few people care about what we have to say?
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After all, should scholars in
Professor, the problem is not "there is not many people to care about what you have to say" but it is "you don't know how to market your products". Remember the Ancient Greek Scholars who were spending most of their time with real people in the Market Places. Compared to those where are you?
As being IR scholar your products are Language Products, like computer programs/tools. They are conceptual structures, Language Tools.
Here is my classic example to show the importance of conceptual tools.
There was a French Mathematician called Everiste Galois in he died from wounds suffered in a duel under shadowy circumstancesa in 1832. He is the inventor of Group Theory, He wrote his theory just before the night to attend the duel. This theory is not used until early 20th Century, but then Nuclear Physicists defperately needed a mathematical tool to compose QM. One of the members of the QM team was good on mathematics and dig out the Group Theory and offered it to his friends. That is how we had the QM.
When you develop conceptual tools in IR, you can also introduce them to Language by supplying examples like you do in your TEs. Once you introduce your concepts to Language, you can congratulate yourself as you have achieved the most important part of your duty. Don't worry about the rest, the rest will be taken care of by Language. Just imagine Language as a giant organism to visualize what I mean.
Lets come back to other marketing tools of your products which is more fun;-> Imagine you are a Computer Company Owner selling operating systems to end users like me to access to Internet to interact with people on your Blog.
I buy the software OK paying couple of hundred dollars but then comes some other programs called Computer Viruses which keep interrupting my entertaiment with the Blog. What can I do? Thanks my original software supplier that they also happen to be supplier of the so-called anti-virus protection programs. And this time I have to pay 100 odd dollars per year to get my damned computer keep functional.
I hope this gives you some bright ideas how to market your products, how to create a need to buy them Mate;->>
I think you Professors need a Marketing department next to your department;->
Grand Sen~or.
one component missing....
One line struck me in Professor Desch's article:
I think we should ask first, "is it the role of academia to work seamlessly to formulate U.S. national security policy?" I think I land on the side of "no". I rather believe that it is because some elements are left out of this equation: the media and the people.
To back up for a moment, I will say that I left my training in "the Ivory Tower" because I had a special needs child. But, I never bothered much to return because I had arrived there with the idea that bright people were meant to use their gifts to help others. The human element was always so lacking, I could never really see that Political Science was really striving to help people. So, I did not do all I could to return. In that sense, I do think that there is some merit to questions raised in the article by Nye and Professor Walt's 2005 APSR article. But, I still think an element is missing.
Our system is one of checks and balances. If I were to say what the biggest issue in education today is, I would say the marriage of the education system to the political system such that there is no checks and balances. Teachers have never had more power, and we are still falling behind the international system. There is no third party to hold the system accountable and represent children and their interests. We are actually at the point where we have had to introduce lawyers to the system to assure special needs children's rights. So, I don't see where a marriage with Academia is in the public interest, because who would know enough to hold the Political Structure accountable, as many blogs have done, like Informed Comment.
That does, however, raise the question of what is the role of academia? Is it to be irrelevant and unaccessible? Who should be accessing it and why?
Certainly, we are all heartened, after an era of where intelligence was bandied about as if it were a sin, to see academics rise to positions based on their knowledge, not their political loyalties. Yet, is it the role of academia to run such things. Desch did hit on this when he said what drives academics is different than the forces guiding politicians. My understanding was that the job of academics was to produce knowledge that was as unbiased as we could make it through the process of scientific method and peer review. The job of politicians is to represent the people and their interests. Really, this is two different worlds. I doubt their marriage would do more than corrupt Academia the way it has the educations system from asking hard questions.
So, what of the people and the media? The point brought home to me over the Iraq war was that knowledge held in the field of Political Science was not being used to either inform policy or to hold policy makers accountable. I sat as a citizen listening to the media build up to the Iraq invasion, looking at the media "experts" and saying, this is not the right person? By what standard is this an expert? I watched as BOP theories were ignored and people were surprised at Iran's rise in regional power. I watched as ME experts and democratization experts were ignored and what was obviously going to be a civil war without previous pacts expounded on by O'Donnell and Schmitter's work unfolded before a surprised world. Thank goodness Patraues tried to do ex post facto the these agreements to secure peace. It was not the job of the military I would say, though. So, where does academia's faithfulness lie, to policy or to informing. If it is to create knowledge, then their job is to create and spread it. Did they try? I think the blogs that arose show they did, and it was the media that was asleep at the wheel.
Why were the realities not presented to the people? Why did they not seem accessible or valid to policy makers? Is it because they did not exist? They were not comprehensible? Or, was it that other systems were more accessible, like think tanks?
I tend to think it is a certain laziness in our media. The information was attainable, and even simple people like myself could understand it. How hard is it to find out that the only Pol.Sci. prof consistently putting (Middle East) theories to hard data (attitudinal) is Professor Tessler in Ann Arbor? Balance of Power is standard for every lower level grad student. Why did the possibility of Iran's ascendancy seem so shocking? In the end, it is not because theories that were relevant did not exist. They simply were not picked up and the government held accountable for not listening to them.
There is a danger in the marriage of Academia and the power structures. Who better to inform and critic the power structures than those outside the structures? Having relevant knowledge available and accessible is still important, but the degree to which Academics should become intertwined with policy structures should remain minimal. If not, who is to inform the electorate well and hold politicians accountable. The last war showed us it was concerned academics opening their blogs. Who would or could it have been in this easily bought out capitalist society, if not for their ivory towers?
up to scholars
A lot of scholarship informs the government, and there are reams of scholars in the revolving door. The trouble is with those who prefer sitting in the ivory tower, balking at that door.
Promoting professors based on relevance, is extremely dangerous however. Merit aught to be the only concern. Publications are no doubt the best measure.
I agree that irrelevance is
I agree that irrelevance is an issue, but there are a few things to take into account (a caveat: I an an academic who works on Israel/Palestine and everything below is coloured by my experience/expertise):
a) Some (like myself) prefer to "speak truth to power" rather than help formulate "better" ways of governing. This partially has to do with my area of interest and expertise, but also partially because of my understanding of how powerful instiutions tend to coopt scholars.
b) I try to speak to the press (I live in the UK, so BBC World Service is an automatic possibility), but there is also a self-reproducing element to the process by which the media chooses talking heads. They have a rolodex of experts and once you are on it (and in the UK, that means having either gotten drunk with the reporters in the field, or having gone to university with the people in London), you are on it. It takes a lot to get into that register of experts.
c) Relatedly, many universities do not provide media training to their academics. Which means that while we are good at (well, some of us anyway) talking in front of large audiences for any length of time, many of us are not inducted into the dark arts of the soundbite. Universities which do provide such training and aggressively promote their "experts" (i.e. LSE here in London) also tend to get their academics in front of the media microphones.
d) In the US, there is a wide gulf between what the academics "know" and what the public "knows". This has to do with a lot of things, but the reasons include widely varying quality of education with much on the mediocre end, crap media and the transformation of news into entertainment, the continental scale of the US (which makes the foreign policy concerns of West-coasters, East-coasters, and border states different), the unlikeliness of or absence of desire in its people to travel overseas, and the absence of a coherent and well-organised and wide-spread body of dissent (identitarian mobilisation has resulted in the fragmentation of dissent). All this means that the amount of "education" we need to everytime we speak to the media (if that is our chosen route of relevance) is vast.
e) Finally, in affecting policy, may I just remind you what happened to Malley, Freeman and anyone else who has tried to advise Obama on Israel/Palestine? And Malley and Freeman were people who have thick skins because they have been in bruising jobs before. We academics are not so thick-skinned; how on earth would we survive an onslaught of the kind those two had to endure (case in point: have you seen Tony Judt recently writing about Israel/Palestine?)?
How academics matter
They encourage their students and readers to think, and to put that thinking into practise.
If the manner that academics matter is by their conclusions themselves, then academics become propagandists rather than teachers.
Noting how former solutions often turn into subsequent oppressions, I think it makes a great deal of sense to remain humble about any conclusions that one discovers/emphasizes.
Academia is such a closed
Academia is such a closed system; while the cliche 'those who can't do, teach', may stretch things a bit, your point about 'real world experience' being used as criteria in hiring decisions is a good one. From my own experience in law school, it was fairly easy to tell which professors had active practices and which had gotten tenure from writing reams of law review articles; and the ones who were actually arguing cases and meeting the needs of clients had much more of value to teach (although occasionally there would be one who took his practice more seriously than his teaching).
I'd much rather have people in government who have actually gone out and done things rather than spent their careers in academia. Actually building a business, having to meet payroll, experiencing how the tax code impacts your hiring decisions, etc. is of greater value than someone who's spent their time teaching economics, in my view. Coming up against reality tends to shake one, if even a little, from ideologically-based thinking, which dominates academia. And ivory tower presidents have not been that successful in our history.
For IR, in particular, this may be exacerbated, because it's really a degree that you can't do much with outside government and academia, as far as I know. There doesn't seem to be an intermediate step, because of the lack of real-world jobs for the degree; it's pretty much a joke outside those two areas.
"real world" vs academia
I am afraid I totally disagree about the value of what people may bring from the business/practice side. Having worked as a management consultant before going on to do a doctoral degree, I can tell you that the myths that people believe are actually far more hegemonic in the business world than they are in academia. Business experience is no more nor less "real world" than academia is.
Although I am sure "experience" in legal practice (if you are a legal scholar) or foreign policy-making (if you are an IR scholar) are valuable in understanding how the machinery of law or foreign policy works, it also may cause the kind of myopia or closed horizons (not seeing the forest for the trees) that comes from the very human tendency to universalise one's own experience as if it is the end-all or be-all, or, worse yet, to see the pragmatic constraints one encounters in law or IR as the ultimate horizon of ethics or imagination.
This is a difficult subject,
This is a difficult subject, i just want to add three points:
1) Academia: a problem in the IR theory concerns the internal disputes and fights. Currently, a lot (when not most) of the people spend their time just trying to show that neorealism is wrong: morally, ethically, epistemologically, methodologically, ontologically. Does not matter how, where and when: the important is to jump into this morass. The problem is that this is an awarding bet: look at who gets the tenure and where, and you easily see the incentive for neorealism-bashing (most of the times, this is completely useless since it repeats always the same things).
2) Policy-world: having worked in policy, I must say the panorama is frightening. These people work with anecdotes, historical examples, small-thinking and so forth, and they think to get out meta-explanations. Most of these people are so culturally poor, that it is no big deal to understand:
- why policy-makers make so many mistakes;
- why these people don't want scholars;
3) Academic in policy: beyond the aforementioned point, just a simple question. At least by a fast glance, it seems that the only scholars who succeeded also in policy were the neocons. Wolfowitz, Friedberg, Cohen, Kagan, Rice (?). Well... it seems that either policy is able to accept only those with the wrong ideas, or that the only scholars who are willing to go to policy have some bankrupted policy-stances. (AHAHA, this is a joke, but it's funny. Just to clarify, I consider Friedberg a great scholar - in contrast with the other guys I just named).
best
Interesting to compare Walt's
Interesting to compare Walt's view on this subject with Dan Drezner's more complacent take yesterday.
You'd certainly not expect all or even most academics in the IR field to serve in government, any more than you'd expect most of the best public servants to teach. During my service in government I leaned heavily on university professors -- mostly economists -- in policy areas in which I knew I was pretty green, and because I had a strong interest in not sounding like an idiot. That required of the professors I called on for counsel a sharp understanding of the kinds of questions I was likely to ask, why I was asking them, and the kinds of answers I needed. In other words, they needed to have a grasp of policy. The ones who didn't, I stopped calling.
The nature of government service is that officials at all levels will often be called on to deal with subjects with which they are unfamiliar. Even if they know what is happening now, they may not know what has happened before, or whether anything similar has happened elsewhere, or the likelihood that something worse will happen later. The people they call on for help will be people who can fill in the gaps in their knowledge in a timely way -- not to make them experts or scholars themselves, but to help them serve the public.
Academics who can't do this aren't worthless for everything, they're just not worth very much to the people actually making policy. Career incentives that lead academics away from engagement with government produce academics whose advice won't be valued outside the academy. This isn't healthy either for government or for the scholarly community.
ISA's 51st Convention
Prof. Walt, will we be seeing you in New Orleans at the ISA Convention on connecting policy and theory next year?