what if academia... but better
my pipe dream could be reality - if you have any rich friends... send them my way
It is an impeccable skill to be able to weave between academic disciplines, synthesize piles and piles of dense information, and to then make it accessible and applicable to most people in our current moment.
This is, for a variety of reasons, not what academics are encouraged to do or even really directly trained for. Why would those who have benefited from our culture as it is want to fund criticism of it? And though the Academy is often critiqued and literally referred to as the ivory tower, many institutions and academics seem to prefer it that way, with their research paywalled and obfuscated by technical jargon. There was a study that found that half of academic journal articles have no more than 3 readers, which is debated, but even the debate is pretty gloomy.
The relationship between academia and the public discourse is fraught, and the porosity of boundaries varies across disciplines and based on the luck of who is charismatic and concise enough to sell a book right now.
So many of the people who have fundamentally altered the way I look at the world and given me new language and analysis are academics who have to have five or six jobs or former academics who have found their way into some form of public intellectual-dom via journalism, book-writing, and intensive brand-building.
In a 2014 interview with Jia Tolentino on leaving academia for Buzzfeed News, Anne Helen Petersen says:
This is very interesting, starting with the “good fit” thing. What makes your work not a good fit for academia? You yourself seem like a great fit. You love teaching; you’re a great teacher; any media studies department would be lucky to have you. What feels off, and how did it feel to simultaneously love something, be excellent at it, and have it feel seriously unsuited?
Oh man, this is a sensitive subject, and I might burn some bridges with it, but here goes: much of academic writing prides itself on being as inaccessible as possible, and I mean that both literally and figuratively — you can’t understand it unless you’ve had at least five years of graduate school, and you can’t actually get your hands on it without affiliation with a major institution…
So for me it’s a combination of what I study, but also the way that I write about it — I study something feminized and devalued, and I do a lot of that work on the internet, which is still considered to be not “real” scholarship. I was always doing “real” scholarship alongside this internet work — I’ve published eight peer-reviewed articles — but if my time on the market is to be believed, it simply didn’t matter. Same with my book: because I got paid to write it, and because it’s with Plume/Penguin instead of a university press, it’s not legit.
What academia has deemed important, as AHP notes, is not necessarily what most people find worth reading or important. It is not necessarily what is important to humanity in terms of knowledge production either considering how funding of research works.
In her titular essay from the essay collection Thick, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom notes that she has six-figure student loan debt, and didn’t have a credit card that could buy an airline ticket until 2016. Tressie! McMillan! Cottom!* A certified (MacArthur) genius.
When academia is this precarious, we select mostly for people who can afford to and have the psychological safety to forgo meaningful income for several years, for people whose parents have graduate degrees, for people who feel comfortable and represented in what academia looks like now. What we lose is so vast we cannot even imagine it properly.
It is not hard for academic institutions to say all the right things, throw the words “community engagement” in there a few times for good measure. But ultimately, academia’s priority is preserving its reputation through prestige measures so that the hedge fund can keep churning.
I want intelligent people like Anne Helen Petersen and Tressie McMillan Cottom and Angela Davis and others to be able to have one job where they do what they do best! They could help people to see the water they swim in and better understand their society and call out institutions in order to challenge the status quo.
Challenging public consensus is easier to do when you know you’ll still have a job afterward. On the other hand, if you have your job because you’ve spent the last several decades upholding your institution and being rewarded for following the rules…
I don’t have time to get into all of this here but several public health people spent months parroting Biden administration/CDC points that ran counter to epidemiological realities as they angled to get appointed into the administration (some succeeded). The loudest people I have seen thoughtfully critiquing the government are mostly non-tenure track faculty and the Patreon-funded Death Panel podcast (highly recommend). I have been thinking about this piece on Emily Oster and school reopenings for months. There are reasons it was written by public health professionals who do not have tenure, and there are reasons that many of the conventionally impressive advocates of public health either did not engage with any of this aforementioned critique or simply dismissed it as ad hominem even when it wasn’t.
The currently winding, obstacle-ridden path to public intellectual-dom also permits a lot of epistemic trespassers to grab the microphone. People who have significant platforms already are able to opine on everything without looking into anything. I would much rather have someone who has devoted their career to studying the thing speak on it than a grabbag of pundits who can only read a graph if it furthers their personal political views.
So here’s what I want, what I genuinely with my heart of hearts would love to help make a reality. An institution that truly and actively acts as an interloper between academia and “the real world.” One that salaries academic and academic-adjacent work without the publish or perish mindset, and encourages accessible, engaging interaction with not just policy but also grassroots activists and the general public. Where people get to not only ask interesting questions but also search for answers to those questions that will work in real life, for real people. A place where we can admit that four different fields have been studying the same things under different terms and frameworks—I’m almost positive putting everything together will work better. The burning question I often have when I’m finished reading a sublime piece of writing on a social problem is: what do we do with this? Give me an institution devoted to facilitating the beginning of an answer to that question.
Do I think that academic and academic-adjacent people are the people best built to enact the change they gesture at in their writing? Not necessarily, and often not! There is also a lot of applied knowledge and extraordinary human capital that resides in fields like consulting, nonprofit, etc. that could be better leveraged if we cleaved it from profit motives (probably more accurate to say that nonprofits have donor motives) and let people be more closely connected to broader theories of systemic change.
That would require even more funding, so again, if you have any rich best friends who want to chat… you might think I’m kidding but I promise I am not. The difference between your rich best friends funding me and the nonprofits I mentioned earlier is the number of strings attached and amount of micromanagey grant reporting details involved.
There is a clear appetite for critical engagement with our world—it’s visible in the cultural analysis that floats around TikTok (a mixed bag but I support the concept), the Substacks and other newsletters funded by subscribers, the Patreon-supported video essayists on YouTube, the viral long-form pieces that established magazines put out. Academia trickles out through journalism and the loss of promising PhD students. I don’t want it to be based on appearance or affiliation with legacy media or the luck of the algorithm anymore; let it be formalized and let’s take it a step further by creating a home for critical thinking and the action that should accompany it.
*If you don’t understand why I am exclaiming, may I recommend Thick and also Tressie on Dolly Parton and on pregnancy and competence as a Black woman and in conversation with Kiese Laymon on life’s revisions and on shame versus stigma.
Links
More pregnancy-related death is only one of the tragedies of the Dobbs ruling. There are other hellish complications. This piece is by Annie Lowrey and I am glad she’s okay and no longer itchy. I wish that for everyone.
We can’t be climate doomers.
I have profound, deep envy for talented musicians and their live performances and their lyricism and everything. Obsessed with “I’d give you the world if you asked me to / I could break a glass just to watch it shatter.” Also the new Rina Sawayama!
Also have profound, deep envy for music writers and the tremendous way they review music. Wesley Morris on Renaissance is excellent.
Thinking about how I wrote an essay in junior year English class about Tinder and now I read this essay in The Cut about ten years of Tinder and hate everything.
This episode of Death Panel on the history of trans standards of care and how one man’s biases became codified, an example of how what we now think of as medical fact is often steeped in much more complicated history.
I’ll read anything Jia Tolentino writes. Her point about the psychic fuel that powers the housing crisis—our desire for the insulated safety of obscene wealth, while knowing the existence of that wealth drives our problems—is an idea that has long haunted me.
“The only way to shut up Alex Jones, for a moment, at least, is to place him inside a courtroom.”
Sad to announce that orange Lamborghinis are not self-care.
How is Jon Stewart’s return going?
My most listened-to artist on Spotify is also the most carbon-emitting private jet owner. How does this fit (or not fit) into our ideas of individual responsibility when it comes to the environment?