In 鈥淪traight Talk with Rick and Jal,鈥� Harvard University鈥檚 Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords and jargon, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what鈥檚 being proposed and what it might mean for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we鈥檒l try to be candid and ensure that you don鈥檛 need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us.
Today鈥檚 topic is the value of scholars writing for the public.
鈥�Rick
Jal: I am a dreadfully slow writer. Articles, books, you name it鈥攊t takes me forever to figure out what to say, how to structure it, and what tone to strike. But there is one kind of writing that comes fairly easily: blog posts.
Why is that? I think it鈥檚 because in blog posts, you just speak in first person about an issue and you try to communicate what you think as simply and clearly as you can. You don鈥檛 have all the trappings that come with academic writing. You draw on your knowledge, yes, but you aren鈥檛 limited to what you can prove scientifically. You can abandon the fiction that what you say isn鈥檛 influenced by your values. At risk of sounding grandiose, I find it liberating鈥擨 can be my whole self, not just the part of me that can demonstrate certain 鈥渢ruths鈥� social-scientifically.
As someone who has regularly engaged in this kind of writing since graduate school, I also think that there is a positive feedback loop between public writing and academic work. Blog posts are places to try ideas, see what resonates, and realize which threads are worth developing in longer and more formal writing. Much of what became my second book, , initially appeared in shorter form at the Learning Deeply blog that Bob Rothman and I edited.
When I was a junior professor and coming up for tenure, some people discouraged me from blogging. It wasn鈥檛 serious, they said, and it took time away from academic writing. But I think what they were missing was that it was helping my academic writing. It gave me a place to concisely develop ideas and see what would resonate with the field. To this day, I鈥檝e gotten more feedback on 鈥�Deeper Learning Has a Race Problem鈥� than anything else I鈥檝e written in my whole career鈥攑roof that short and pointed can sometimes be a lot more compelling than long and academic.
Rick, you long ago traded an academic track for one that put you in the middle of the public square. What say you?
Rick: I think you鈥檝e captured a larger tension here. Today, 鈥渆xpertise鈥� has too often become a synonym for incomprehensible jargon and an excuse for incoherence. Hell, most academic writing seems more intent on scoring points with the scholarly fraternity than on providing clear explication, analysis, or argument.
There are obviously some lucid scholarly articles and books (just as there are some unfathomable blog posts). But scholarly publications reward econometric jabber and critical theory, with too many editors and scholars apparently mistaking this stuff for profundity. One consequence is that authors have little incentive to worry about things like word choice and none to make things easy to understand.
This is a problem. College students read this argle-bargle in classes, study it in grad schools, and see it modeled by their teachers. Bad behaviors get and passed on. I long ago stopped being surprised that razor-sharp new grads (with dazzling grades and sparkling resumes) tend to be pretentious, stilted, awful writers. I don鈥檛 blame them; I think it鈥檚 a consequence of years spent in classrooms that don鈥檛 model or value good, clear writing.
As someone who believes that truth, understanding, and public discourse matter, this drives me to distraction. These things benefit mightily from clarity of word and thought. That means doing our best to help students and readers grasp our meaning, weigh our claims, and appraise our assumptions. Unintelligible word salad does the opposite. It sows confusion. It obscures claims. And, along the way, it divides the world into those who have and haven鈥檛 learned the shibboleths buried in the garbled jargon.
Given this dynamic, do you see any obvious implications for educators and scholars?
Jal: I know this isn鈥檛 for everyone. But I think more people should try it. The converse鈥攚riting only for other academics鈥攃an have significant drawbacks. It can encourage whole fields to develop where people are writing in prose that only a few others can understand and it can narrow scholars鈥� vision to whatever will win the approbation of a few colleagues. Because editors are ferocious at eliminating jargon and pushing for clarity, public writing breaks that self-reinforcing loop and forces you to see if you really have anything to say. It also creates a disciplining force in favor of questions that matter to the field as a whole rather than just a few colleagues. And it will improve your academic writing because you get used to plain language and shorter sentences.
Public writing also encourages some breadth, fighting against the specializing forces of academia. The goal is not simply to 鈥渢ranslate鈥� one鈥檚 research for public consumption but rather to take up the issues that are facing the world and try to inform people based on what you know. Scholars seem quite willing to take on this task when they teach: Framing a syllabus and responding to students鈥� questions necessarily requires some range and willingness to leave one鈥檚 narrow comfort zone. Why not write down some of these thoughts and share them with the broader world?
A related point is that if we don鈥檛 engage, others will fill the void. Journalists, partisan hacks, think tankers, and others will inevitably publish public-facing writing that they hope will shape and influence the debate. When I read these folks, I tend to think, 鈥淲ell, what you are saying is not factually wrong, exactly, but if you really understood the institution you were writing about, you wouldn鈥檛 frame it that way.鈥� Journalists in particular are drawn to extremes鈥攖he parents whose kids are sitting out tests, 鈥淐RT鈥� or 鈥渘ot CRT,鈥� etc.鈥攚hen the real issues are about whether slow, piecemeal, incremental, institutional changes are making education better or worse. We study these things, and the public deserves to know the real story鈥攏ot just the hot one.
Rick: Writing for the sake of the reader (rather than for the sake of showing off) forces writers to think, 鈥淲ill this be clear to anyone but me?鈥� Frequently, of course, the considered answer is: 鈥淣ope.鈥� Now, I鈥檓 as guilty of that as anyone. I鈥檝e spent a huge chunk of my career revising (or abandoning) pieces because something I thought scintillating actually made sense to no one else. And, if you can鈥檛 find a way to say it clearly, odds are that your insight isn鈥檛 nearly as insightful as you initially thought.
A big problem is that many academics have never spent much time working on their writing. As a result, most don鈥檛 get many practice cuts or the kind of humbling feedback that asks, 鈥淲hat the heck are you trying to say?!鈥� It鈥檚 the rare professor who offers stylistic feedback on writing (most of the time, it鈥檚 fair to say that length and footnotes are enough to earn a good grade). In graduate school, there are lots of classes in research methods but hardly any attention devoted to writing or clear communication. Academic incentives reward writing journal articles, working papers, and book chapters, all of which tend to foster bad habits rather than good ones. In fact, much of academic culture suspects that, if writing is accessible, it鈥檚 probably not as smart or important as writing that isn鈥檛.
I despise that mindset. But it鈥檚 pervasive. I have talented research assistants who, when handed some piece of jargon-laden, horrific writing, treat its ineptitude as evidence of deep thought. They鈥檒l nervously poke and prod at it, worried they鈥檙e failing to appreciate its brilliance. A bit of that humility is healthy; I鈥檓 all for humble readers. But, c鈥檓on, man.
There was a time when the academy celebrated public-facing scholars who debated one another in national newspapers and magazines, not just in obscure journals. They were clear about their views and didn鈥檛 try to hide them behind impenetrable jargon. From the 1960s to the 1980s, economists Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson regularly duked it out in Newsweek. While they were both Nobel laureates, they also famously took pride in seeking to persuade the public and public officials鈥攏ot just intimidate them with 鈥渆xpertise.鈥�
Jal: You know, I had a number of models when I was in graduate school, including my advisor Christopher Jencks, who started as a journalist for The New Republic and is the most direct and clear writer you will ever find. (Sandy, as he is known, red-penned my writing throughout graduate school, which was one of the kindest and most helpful things anyone has ever done for me.) People like him鈥攁nd also William Julius Wilson, Katherine Newman, Gary Orfield, Xavier de Souza Briggs, and others鈥攖aught me at a young age what publicly engaged scholarship could look like.
At the same time, we should acknowledge that it is not all rose petals. Sometimes, people make a fool of themselves by writing far beyond what they know. Public writing can incur resentment from more traditional scholarly types. I have heard from junior scholars of color, in particular, that they are wary of writing anything that could be perceived as not fully academic or grounded in data.
I think these concerns are real but not dispositive. As with anything, context matters, and the content of what you say will be judged and will contribute to your reputation, for good or ill. So I think the question becomes less whether to write publicly or not but when, about what, and how. If you are drawing on what you know, adding to the debate, and making salient points in plain language, then on the whole, people will respect that.
Rick: This is all well said. At the same time, I鈥檓 also concerned that some readers may get the wrong idea. For me, the point is less about academics bestowing their expertise on the world than challenging them to write more clearly, cogently, and accessibly, so that an audience beyond their scholarly mafia can weigh the evidence and arguments on offer.
Too much academic discourse today takes the form of mystical incantation, with claims that 鈥渢he evidence says鈥� often relying on some scarcely understood study of suspect provenance. This has led to plenty of dubious decisions. And it has fueled cynicism, especially in an era of populist distrust. While advocates, policymakers, and educators who wield research as a cudgel are certainly culpable, it鈥檚 also on the shoulders of those academics who seem to revel in being regarded as oracles. We鈥檇 be far better off if part of the academic job involved writing forthrightly for the public, allowing assertions, assumptions, and evidence to be more readily weighed.
Writing for the public offers an important educational platform. More important, though, is that it imposes a healthy discipline. And colleges that have become repositories of in-group double-think and credentialitis would benefit immensely from doing much more to encourage, cultivate, recognize, and reward that kind of writing.
