As a frequent flyer I have begun to be able to spot those airline passengers who have not yet twigged to the cabin crew’s role. A flight attendant could give you a more accurate figure, but I’d guess roughly a tenth of passengers think the plane is equipped with on-board waiters. A small paradigm shift is required to understand that the core value of a flight attendant is his safety expertise.
I fear I have been part of that ten percent of ingrates in another area: That of university faculty members. Last year I approached a neuroscientist at University College London with some questions about his work and an invitation to speak at a lecture series. His response was borderline hostile. “Do they care about this?” he asked of my audience. When I assured him there was eager interest in his field, he dismissed me and ignored my questions. I’m washing my hair that day, whichever day you pick, was in essence his position.
For months thereafter, whenever I thought of this exchange, I felt my outrage growing. Can he even do that? I thought. Do the people in his department know he behaves like this? Who funds this work – are we not all entitled to access his knowledge while he enjoys his plushy job security, geniusing about all day?
Finally I worked up the nerve to approach some other academics for confirmation of my views. Is it not every faculty member’s fiduciary responsibility to make their work accessible to the public? It turns out I should have marveled, rather, at the fact I’d never before – in the decade since I’d stopped being a student myself – had such an invitation declined, let alone aggressively.
“I’m not, like, on call for some random person to ask me these questions,” scoffed one Chair of a Philosophy department. “People show up at your office and think your job is just to drop everything and talk to them.”
In his view, a person who is paid to be a professional intellectual is NOT paid to be a public intellectual. He once quoted an independent scholar $200/hr as a consultation fee when he tired of the man’s off-base questions.
“It’s really actual work to do this. You’ve got to bring it down a level and explain things everyone you know already knows. It’s not like asking about a movie I just saw.”
Though “outreach” – as these sorts of activities are known – is completely a matter of personal choice, the University of Toronto, for example, will factor such efforts into a salary review. Evaluated 40% on research and 40% on teaching, the review includes a 20% service element. This has to do with the production and dissemination of original results as well as tenure committee service and the like. But engaging with the press and drumming up interest in high school classrooms is never going to have a major effect on professional incentives.
Part of the reason for this is that very few academics will ever be invited to give a public lecture, but a very few – climatologists are very popular, for example – get dozens of requests every year. The contribution of this toward tenure and promotion are frequent loci of resentment and disgruntlement.
So to all of those brilliant researchers who have taken time out of their actual work for a curious writer’s uninformed questions, thank you. I’ll never take it for granted again.
How interesting, Jessa. I wonder whether the reaction you found is most likely with the Brits than with Americans? I was always surprised at how willing busy scientists and doctors were to come talk to writing students — let alone grant an interview for me to ask them dumb questions. Maybe I’m like you were and should now marvel?
But yes, Mr. Philosopher, it is indeed your job to answer questions from random persons. Otherwise who are you talking to? your colleagues and your tenure committee, period?
Yeah, I agree. If you are getting NSF money (and who isn’t, right?) or other public cash, you have an obligation to communicate with the public. The scicomm police won’t come beating in your door, I suppose. But if you don’t, you contribute to the wide-held belief in certain places that most professors are a waste of tax dollars.
I can’t help but think of the Albert Einstein quote:
“Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.”
Scientists have worked hard to be at the fore-front of humanity’s understanding of some of the toughest challenges facing us today. I would hope that motivations behind this hard work run deeper than a tenured position.
Public property? Maybe not… but I don’t buy that a scientists’ piece of mind must come paired with an hourly salary each time an important discourse needs an expert opinion either.
I agree that it’s a moral imperative for academics who are paid from public money to be ready to communicate to the public–in fact we could go further and suggest that they should do it actively–but they are not rewarded for doing so. Often a funding bid involves a promise, for example, that the project will have a really nice website (or nowadays a project blog) but that’s never the most important outcome, because ultimately research is supposed to advance specialist understanding of its subject, which means academic publication. Advancing general understanding, well, is called teaching (or indeed journalism). Only by its impact in specialist publication can a project’s outcome really be judged, and it will be. It’s not surprising that academics resent activities for which they receive no direct recognition and which take time away from their preferred means of achieving that. But it is regrettable, not least becaue it implies that they don’t love their job so much that they want everyone to know about it, and that is one of the great joys of academic employment as far as I’m concerned.
The issues are different when a given academic is not funded by public money, of course. If their salary comes from their university’s endowment or fees, what is their obligation to the public supposed to be? And it’s often not clear how to decide if that’s true.