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While the public looks for answers to big issues, academics too often shrink from engagement.
In last month's State of the Union address, President Obama sounded the alarm on climate change, pausing to enumerate his administration's accomplishments but also underscoring the problems that lie ahead. Though his speech encompassed myriad issues facing the American public, Obama emphasized that "no challenge--no challenge--poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change."
His comments follow years of political inertia on the issue, despite scientists' increasingly bleak predictions. This lack of political will prompted the president to appeal to the room full of policy makers to heed the scientific consensus on climate change and take decisive action, recalling to them their responsibility to take seriously the expert testimony of the research and academic communities.
Yet, just as the members of Congress have an obligation to listen to the informed advice of researchers and scholars, so too do academics have a duty to make themselves heard in the public and political spheres, inserting their voices into debates where expert knowledge can move the conversation forward. Unfortunately, the present culture of academe often runs counter to this kind of open and accessible engagement, to the detriment of both the voting public and the academic community.
One reason for this disconnect is that academe has become a field of "brick makers." This was the theme of a letter by Bernard K. Forscher published in Science magazine in 1963, and his critique, in the form of a parable, is even more relevant today. Forscher lamented that academic scholarship had become fixated on generating lots of pieces of knowledge--bricks--and was far less concerned with putting them together into a cohesive whole. In time, he said, brick-making had become an end in itself. Indeed, his metaphor aptly...