Academic Evolution

Scholar or Public Intellectual?

After listening to Henry Jenkins and a few others speaking about public intellectualism lately, I have felt a sense of civic duty coming over me, something that links participating in democracy with the participatory media of Web 2.0. How obvious, how appropriate, that we share our best thinking with the world at large; how simple it is to do this, now, through blogs and online media.

Here's the problem: I'm a scholar. A scholar is not a public intellectual; a scholar is a private intellectual. We who are trained in a discipline speak to our peers in that discipline, and the response of that extremely small brotherhood determines tenure, promotion, and the various perquisites of academia. We are conditioned through all our training that what we have to say only matters if it matters only to very small, very private audiences.

When a scholar does choose to address the public, as when a colleague of mine once chose to write a column for the local newspaper, that scholar is considered not to be doing his or her job. This is why "academic blogger" is still an oxymoron, sadly. College faculty are to direct their best energies to developing disciplinary knowledge. As my colleague stated previously, "you have been given your place in the university for a purpose: it is to engage in the academic process of making and validating disciplinary knowledge." We scholars are not to be diverting ourselves or dissipating our attention by placing our pearls before swine.

The disciplines within academia train professors to withdraw from public life and to aim their most thoughtful attention to narrowly specialized audiences. Those special audiences will reward the scholar for advancing knowledge in that field, but implicit in this approbation is the agreement to promulgate the system of private knowledge and peer approvals through which the priesthood of academia sustains its authority. The primary tenet of that brotherhood, the article of faith to which the scholar must swear obeisance in order to be considered a scholar, is "No knowledge is knowledge that falls outside of the system of private peer approbation."

This is how a scholar is doomed to a life of private intellectual inquiry and expression. In the epistemology of academia, no knowledge truly is knowledge if it is not vetted and approved through the channels it has established over time. Those channels are esoteric, made up of the "few, though worthy" who are the elect in the kingdom of knowledge. The epistemology of academia proceeds on the basis that the public has nothing to do with real knowledge. It doesn't make any sense intellectually, of course, but it makes perfect sense if the primary goal is not really the development of knowledge but the preservation of a well-designed, internally self-confirming authority economy.

I don't want to be a private intellectual. Too much is real, too much at stake, in the public sphere. The interaction between the scholar and the world should not be solely within the classroom or the lab or through the occasional snippet quoted by a journalist. All the tools are at hand for scholars to be public intellectuals. It truly does not require a rocket scientist to communicate with the entire world online. But it may require someone who is not a scientist or scholar to believe he or she has the right and privilege to express and develop ideas without first seeking peer permission to publish those ideas.

I don't want to be complicit in sustaining a knowledge economy that rewards its participants when they invest in burying and restricting knowledge. This is why Open Access is more than a new model for scholarly publishing, it is the only ethical move available to scholars who take their own work seriously enough to believe its value lies in how well it engages many publics and not just a few peers.

What stands in the way of scholars respecting the public enough to address it and to contribute their best thinking to the broader world? Well, scholars do. So long as institutions of higher education sustain the system that punishes those who aim their work to broader audiences and rewards intellectuals only when they speak in the private code of a subdiscipline, then what are you going to get? You get scholars who speak in code to the brotherhood, instead of public intellectuals.

I'd rather be a public intellectual. It seems more honest, more ethical, more true to the life of the mind than does adding another line to my CV for an article that will only be distributed to a few hundred places and read by even fewer.

Our values are upside in academia when the whole trajectory of establishing scholars and scholarship is aimed at hiding and restricting knowledge, when the business model that accompanies traditional scholarship attaches a monetary motive to keeping ideas out of circulation. I think it will soon become hard to call someone "published" if they agree to having their work hidden, delayed, and restricted (the primary traits of restricted-access scholarship) when this is not a necessary condition to the circulation of knowledge.

I think that universities that claim they are serving humankind are disingenuous when they continue to invest in a system that disenfranchises the best work of their faculty. The public good is not served when the public intellectual is not a role welcomed or encouraged on a university campus.

As I teach my students to take their ideas online, early, and to develop their ideas and their identity in the back and forth of online discourse, I know that I am teaching them to be the very opposite of a scholar. They won't all become public intellectuals in some grand sense, but cumulatively, I hold more hope for my blogging students who are growing their thinking in the fertile electrons of digital exchange than I do for those more interested in counting peer reviewed publications. If an idea can't circulate as freely as the untrammeled prose of a blog post, in time it really won't count for much anyway.

Digital Fundamentals for Education and Scholarship (1): Getting the Big Picture

What are the digital fundamentals for students and scholars?

This question will frame a series of posts in which I will outline the basic concepts, principles, goals, skills, and literacies now required of students and scholars within the new communication paradigm.

Fundamental #1: Getting the Big Picture

There are two kinds of "big picture" thinking to be done at present in the education and scholarship space: 1) What is the nature of our new world? and 2) What are the goals of teaching, learning, and publishing?

I know these big-picture questions are simplistic to the point of sounding trite, but the tide of technology and its massive cultural forces washes over us constantly, and if we do not revisit these basic questions of environment and purpose we will drown in both novelty and complexity.

Coming to Terms with the Digital World

What is the nature of our new world--the world of knowledge and learning, of teaching and publishing? It is a digital world, of course. This is a commplace, I admit. But our institutions of learning have not yet come to terms with this basic fact as they continue to run their programs of education and publishing as though print publishing was still the baseline for how we know and learn. (See more on the print paradigm handicap here.)

The new world for education, higher learning, and publishing is one in which our knowledge is mostly mediated through electronic means. Another commonplace, yes, but for far too many this simple fact has not yet sunk in. It doesn't sink in until one recognizes that the electronic means for communicating now at hand are not efficiency measures for sustaining the status quo; they are transformative catalysts rewriting the rules for what knowledge is and does.

Teaching, learning, and publishing now reside in a world of media, mobility, and connection. They do not live within the restraints of the print medium, the walls of a classroom, or the prestigious isolation of peer-reviewed journals. Learning has burst the physical restraints of the book, even if we continue to learn from books. Teaching is not restricted to school settings, though we continue to matriculate. And publishing has been so thoroughly democratized that the restricted-access model of publishing that still reigns in academia would be laughable were it not so self-defeating.

The digital world is a world of liberated learning, transcending the structures for sharing knowledge that have dominated us for so long that we find it hard to think the world could be otherwise. How could education not be primarily book-centered? How could education not take place mainly within the social framework of a school? How could the publishing of anything that matters happen outside of the peer-review process or the academic press?

These are not rhetorical questions. Th digital world has begun answering them while compelling us to reconsider the very nature of learning or publishing and the relationship of these to one's career or avocations. The digital world is a liberating world, but in freeing us from many presuppositions about the meaning of schooling or the circulcation of ideas, it presses new and difficult questions upon us about our identity, our professions, and habits of mind.

All the more reason to revisit our fundamental purposes.

The Goals of Teaching, Learning, and Publishing

We are likely to vary in our purposes for education or spreading knowledge. I offer this more as a guiding consideration for individuals and organizations to stay focused on what they believe truly matters most--an especially important activity during times of crisis or rapid change.

It is useful to consider what other functions and purposes an institution (like a school or publishing firm) serves apart from simply generating or transmitting knowledge. For example, a publishing firm usually has a strong financial motive. Or, a college serves vocational, social, and civic functions in addition to general educational instruction. We should also consider the fact that there is a compelling inertia to most institutions, an implicit goal to preserve itself. This is often tied to the way that an educational institution controls privilege both within and outside its walls.

If we truly believe in larger goals such as a general education or the foundation of character, we have to be ready to ask hard questions like whether we are more focused on preserving traditional social, political, or commercial structures or on achieving our central mission. For example, consider a college book store. The market for textbooks is enormous. Some universities depend upon that income. But what if open textbooks or media, or perhaps print-on-demand technology, reduces or eliminates the need to sell students expensive textbooks? Which is the more important goal to reach?

Or consider that many universities have as their central goal to promote "life-long learning." Well, if such a university revokes the library privileges of its graduates, is that university making a good faith effort to promote life-long learning for its alumni? In principle the university would like to offer access to its graduates, but contractual obligations with the database owners usually forbid such ongoing access. Time for that university to invest in Open Access scholarship that does not shut down access to the many graduates to whom it has pledged life-long learning.

Once one keeps a steady eye on the rapidly evolving resources in the digital realm and revisits those reasons-to-be that should be animating every school or press, one finds repeatedly that business as usual is no longer the best way to reach those goals. In fact, I will go so far as to say that any school or press that does not consider how it can better reach its primary goals through the innovations in the digital environment is not worth tuition dollars or other monetary sponsorship. The philanthropic institutions that fund university endowments are not committed to keeping a business model or a set of power relations in place; they are typically committed to those same larger-vision goals that one finds in a university's mission statement.

It bears repeating that the changes to be considered when thinking through one's goals in light of the digital world should be more than seeking for better ways to deliver the standard product. We must be open to the fundamental changes that the new tools of communication and connection provide. But those will be topics of later posts.

Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Middleware"

A "legacy system" in the world of computing provides a useful analogy for understanding the precarious state of contemporary academic publishing. This comparison might also keep us from stepping backward in the very act of stepping forward in promoting Open Access publishing and Institutional Repositories. I will argue that, vital as it is, the Open Access movement should really be seen in its current manifestation as academic "middleware" servicing the "legacy system" of old-school scholarship.