Did you know intellectuals are lousy at talking about our work? | Amy Young | TEDxTacoma
[Music] [Applause] [Music] let's do a little thought experiment when I say the word intellectual what words or images come to mind you know if you type intellectuals are into Google the top three responses are stupid useless and annoying now I have an eight and a 5-year-old in my house and we do not say the words stupid shut up or butt pants but but useless and annoying I get it and you know what that's our fault I think we seem useless and annoying because we spent quite a lot of time making ourselves appear irrelevant and I think we appear irrelevant because we are lousy at talking about what we do and we're lousy about talking about why it matters until the early 20th century experts that we would call public intellectuals that is those people that can translate their expertise outside of their peer group or their discipline were public figures they were known thought leaders in their Community they were writing for newspapers and magazines they were giving public lectures intellectuals moves into the academy hastened under mccarus witch hunts intellectuals became academics seeking the protective cover of tenure against the frothing at the mouth invective and professional ruin of Kami hun hunters and to be honest being a university Professor is a pretty sweet gig if you can get it you get to think and write about things you care about you get to teach Bright Young Minds you get to work with smart colleagues but there's a catch to get the job you have to go through a PhD program that requires you to write a dissertation and you have to earn tenure to stay when you start a doctoral program you start with really Grand ideas but by the time you're writing a dissertation you're doing a Theodor zelden uses laying down the law about some tiny fragment of Truth like the habits of the earwig or the foreign policy of medieval Zanzibar and then comes tenure to earn tenure you work for six or seven years and you try to publish as much as you can in top journals and books and to do that requires speaking a language that even other Specialists if they're totally honest do not entirely understand in fact if you type in academic writing is into to Google the first hit is but I think the real problem is that we are afraid it is so much easier in so many ways to preach to our own choir to write in equivocations and to not take STS we think to be good Scholars we have to be detached and apolitical but social scholarship is neither detached nor is it apolitical and as Rick cherwitz argues we have an F ethical obligation to discover and put to work knowledge that makes a difference we have to demonstrate our public worth and in many ways this talk is my way of trying to move beyond the walls of the classroom and the Ivory Tower and engage with audiences who are Savvy and astute but may not be experts in my field in other words I'm trying to prove Google wrong so what do we do I'm up here advocating that intellectuals take our work public that we tell you why it matters and that we reclaim our relevance and I think we can do that but we need to pay attention to three things time political scrutiny and translating the relevance of our work in terms of time in the modern University Junior faculty spend much of their time and energy on Research publication to meet the ever moving goalposts of tenure and promotion and yet faculty at all ranks are pursuing questions Central to our communities like what does it mean to be a good citizen or how can we reclaim our democracy from moneyed interests and if we asked and answer these questions on the pages of journals and books we're in good shape but if we ask and answer these identical questions on television on the radio or in our blog our work goes from exciting to unserious fortunately there are a number of places where that kind of thinking is being re-examined or frankly blown up the University of Texas at Austin has a program called intellectual entrepreneurship founded by Rick cherwitz that gathers groups of Scholars from around campus to Think Through problems of concern to the community interdisciplinarily on the other side of Tacoma at Pacific Lutheran University we count public scholarship as legitimate work toward tenure so my colleague Robert Marshall Wells and his student organization media lab can continue to make documentary films like their most recent was not on food waste and food insecurity and we think he merits tenure and promotion so we need to change the system from the inside and that is happening but slowly political scrutiny can scare any well-meaning wouldbe public intellectual away intellectuals are trained to reason to conclude based on evidence and data and rationality but the state of our political environment is such that people believe Less in truth and More in what Steven colar calls truthiness our human preference to follow our own intuition despite the presence of actual facts or evidence we need to be able to make arguments based on evidence but we've got to do that in a different way than we have historically so that might mean moving arguments up the letter of abstraction starting with something particular like global warming and moving to something Universal like America solves the energy crisis for the rest of humanity now what that doesn't mean is abandoning evidence or ethic but what it does mean is changing the frame of the argument as it is presented to the public the other thing we can start doing is attending to the power of stories is evidence if people are wary of Eggheads stories are a way to do that kind of work grounding our arguments and evidence without raising red flags or getting ourselves on a Hit List finally we need to think about how our work is relevant to audiences outside of our fields and beyond our campuses the scholars I admire are all working on significant questions of social and political concern what we don't know how to do very well is to deliver that news in a way that doesn't sound pedantic or as Google instructs as James gallith explains communication outside the journal and the classroom is an art form to craft a good oped syndicated column or radio commentary must be learned and practiced intellectuals are lousy at talking about our work because that is how we have been trained and I am arguing that we need to do better because it is no longer okay to pretend that that is not true or to stand aside and to check out we need to express our convictions our enthusiasm and even our anger rather than constantly striving to sound impersonal or distant or elitist we should still be writing for and speaking to our peers but that can't be our only project and doing more of this is one way to start making those changes thank you [Music]