{"id":2949,"date":"2010-12-28T14:47:25","date_gmt":"2010-12-28T18:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2949"},"modified":"2011-01-04T13:54:22","modified_gmt":"2011-01-04T17:54:22","slug":"how-to-be-a-public-academic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2949","title":{"rendered":"How to be a public academic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I woke up this morning to frost on the roof (which may be typical in late December where you live, but not in Tampa), picked up the paper, said good morning to my spouse, saw my son was up though it's vacation, and then trimmed my beard and hair.* I must have been working very hard at all this, especially the beard-trimming, because I check online and discover I'm #29 on the Billboard Education… uh, Rick Hess's 2010 Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings<\/a>. Lesson to all academics out there: pay attention to hygiene! <\/p>\n

Hess's approach is very different from that of Russell Jacoby<\/a>, whose 1987 book The Last Intellectuals<\/a> came long before blogging existed. But they approach the same question: what is the obligation of faculty to engage in public writing and other outreach? For my taste, Hess missed a bunch of folks such as Jonathan Zimmerman** who definitely engage in explicit public writings (in Zimmerman's case, op-eds such as one that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor December 14<\/a>), but I'm going to skip past the construction of his list to address the larger issue. Obviously, since I've had a blog for almost 10 years, I'm in favor of writing for and speaking to the public. How can faculty do that?<\/p>\n

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My own blogging: not originally meant as a vehicle to help me take over the world, and still not. If you truly wish to read my entries from 2001 to 2004, you will see that a good bunch of the entries are "slice of academic life" descriptions, including one week where I documented that I worked long hours (unlike lawyers, faculty don't have billable hours and thus rarely keep strict track of time). I did not regularly write about education policy until the spring of 2005. We had a crazy bill in the state legislature that year patterned after David Horowitz's misnamed "Academic Bill of Rights," which would have let Florida students sue their teachers in court if they disagreed with what they taught. Horowitz was raging around the country about faculty, and I had an outlet that no one else in the state could use quickly and easily. It's important to note that my blogging about the Florida legislation had minimal impact on what happened here (my friend Roy Weatherford and other statewide union officials at the time were more critical), but it did let others concerned about academic freedom around the country know what was happening in Florida, and it pushed me to develop a more public style of writing. Since I had gone through the pain of learning how to write short pieces on short notice, I've continued to do that.<\/p>\n

The same investment is required to write op-eds (as Zimmerman does) or become a source for reporters–they are all specific professional skills, and they require some time to learn and some long-term commitment. Take talking with reporters, who need three things from academics: timeliness, brevity, and breadth.<\/p>\n