Jonathan Zimmerman says scholars need to broaden their audience
Suppose I visited a dog park, to observe how people behaved when they saw dogs mating. Then suppose I submitted an article to this newspaper, arguing that our reactions to dog sex revealed our attitudes towards rape by humans.
The editors would dismiss me as a crank who had spent too much time locked in his ivory tower. Professors aren't typically required to share their ideas with the broader public. Most of us talk only to each other, in ways that almost nobody else can understand.
That's also the key to understanding the recent hoax involving the dog-sex article, which was accepted — really — by an academic journal. So were six other bogus articles produced by a three-person team, who went public with their ruse last week. Their aim, they said, was to highlight the sloppy group-think in what they called "grievance studies," especially in research about gender.
And they certainly did that. One of the articles pretended to analyze table talk at so-called "breastaurants" like Hooters, uncovering "macho" behavior — can you believe it? — by male customers. Another claimed that men who masturbate while thinking about women are perpetrating sexual violence against them.
Some of the articles even made up statistics, which gave them a more scientific sheen. According to the dog-park essay, humans intervened 97 percent of the time when male dogs were humping other male dogs but intervened only 32 percent of the time — and laughed out loud 18 percent of the time — when a male dog was mating with a female.
When readers stopped laughing themselves, reactions to the hoax broke down along predictable culture-war lines. To conservatives, the entire affair underscored the endemic progressive bias of the politically correct academy. As if to prove them right, meanwhile, liberal professors cast the hoax as a reactionary attack on their campaign for social justice.
But both sides missed the heart of the problem, which is that most academics write only for each other. Just last week, a study of promotion practices at more than 100 colleges in the U.S. and Canada confirmed that most institutions don't reward scholars who engage wider audiences.
To be sure, we all give lip service to serving the public. But the people who get the most recognition — and the highest pay — are the ones who publish in traditional academic journals. Writing for popular venues, like this newspaper, doesn't count nearly as much.
It might even count against you. When I was a junior professor, several seasoned faculty members advised me to stop writing my oped column. It made me look like a journalist — God forbid! — rather than a scholar, I was told. And if any reader could understand my ideas, how profound could they be?
But when we insulate ourselves from others, we narrow our minds. We fall prey to jargon, the Achilles heel of academia. And we echo the worst aspects of contemporary American culture, which has fractured into mutually hostile ideological cocoons.
Perhaps this latest scandal can help us forge a new truce around a simple premise: Academia needs to broaden its audience. If you're a conservative worried about liberal bias, wouldn't you want professors to be forced to defend their ideas in the public square? And if you're a liberal dedicated to social justice, shouldn't you want every professor to share their wisdom with people who haven't encountered it?...