Attention, Professors …
Nicholas Kristof recently wrote about our need for academic activists. How can we bring the best minds to bear on our biggest problems?
His article begins:
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.
He describes the problem of
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.
He also notes the problem of academic writing which turns off readers:
“a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.”
Here’s to reflective activists and activist academics …
