New York Times Op-ed: America Should Pay More Attention to Professors
The piece is by Nicholas Kristof who notes that America would probably have more respect for college professors if it weren’t for the darn Republicans.
I especially like the part where he says we have a law professor in the White House.
Professors, We Need You!
SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.
The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.
One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold President Obama as “a snob” for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.
“All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public,” notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New America Foundation.
There are plenty of exceptions, of course, including in economics, history and some sciences, in professional schools like law and business, and, above all, in schools of public policy; for that matter, we have a law professor in the White House. But, over all, there are, I think, fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.
A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.
“Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research,” said Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution. “This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”
Comments
We might have more respect if the profs dropped the indoctrination, union membership and tenure. Competition would place the most qualified in teaching positions. The univs are filled with dead wood and are in need of sever pruning.
I think Robert S. Hartwell has it right in his statement about intellectuals(/professors) in “The Politicization of Society” (1979) which I saw in the Wall Street Journal Notable and Quotable editorial page box on August 21. 2013. This might explain the lack of respect many in America have for them:
“Are not the actions and beliefs of the intellectuals self-interested in a very obvious way? Intellectuals dislike [classical] liberalism because the market economy does not reward them according to their own estimation of their obvious social worth. Intellectuals, therefore, prefer economic systems which give them a place in the sun, in which their cash rewards are almost certainly higher, and in which power rewards are undoubtedly higher. Intellectuals play leading roles in the bureaucracies of the state, as advisors, experts, and administrators, and increasing the power of the state means increasing the power of the intellectuals.
Their “cult of the powerful state,” therefore, is not disinterested, even though their self-interest is well rationalized.”