Let's Value Quality Activist Scholarship as Much as the Traditional Variety

After the Great Debacle of 2008, I decided to connect my scholarship more deeply to the real world because the people in charge, who ranged from close to clueless to utterly useless, clearly needed help. I left the Stern School of Business for a more policy-oriented position in South Dakota, began writing policy history, and joined the board of Historians Against Slavery (HAS), an international NGO dedicated to using scholarship to help reduce the number of people enslaved in the world today. Subsequent events, including the Citizens United decision in 2010 and the 2016 election results, have only strengthened my conviction that America’s policy-making apparatus bears a striking resemblance to a toxic stew of incompetence and venality.

Other scholars have also decided that they can no longer remain on the sidelines. Joining the hundreds active in HAS are hundreds of others affiliated with the Tobin Project, “an independent, non-profit research organization motivated by the belief that rigorous scholarship on major, real-world problems can make a profound difference” and “improve society.” Named after James Tobin, recipient of the Nobel prize in Economics in 1981, the Tobin Project won the McArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions in 2013.

My goal is not to lure out researchers who desire to remain in their ivory towers conducting traditional forms of scholarship because I, like most scholars, believe that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a noble endeavor. Rather, my goal is to induce ivory tower-types to: first, not stand in the way of those of us who would like to address real world problems in direct, yet scholarly, ways; second, ask themselves if they actually pursue knowledge for its own sake or if they merely engage in intellectual self-titillation.

On the first point, I have heard too many promising scholars say that they would like to try to improve the world but they cannot work on that right now because their chairs, deans, or provosts expect them to push out articles or books if they want tenure. If they dare push back, they are met with malarky about metrics, standards, and other bureaucratic detritus. If department chairs and other campus administrators cannot discern the quality of their own faculty without outside crutches like ‘journal ratings,’ they ought to step down, or at least aside, and leave the decision to those who are unafraid to make difficult judgements.

Many tenured professors also feel pressure to conform to the dictates of administrators and churn out ‘scholarship’ that few will read but that will raise their department’s ‘ranking,’ as if a number based on essentially nothing matters while people needlessly suffer and die, the environment deteriorates, and institutions of higher education degrade. Again, almost everyone values those seeking knowledge for its own sake but I would like to see scholars who want to improve the world not be punished professionally for doing so, i.e., to enjoy the academic freedom they once did. As John Stauffer noted in a recent speech at the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the best historians long engaged in activist scholarship, as have important scholars in other disciplines, including John Dewey, the Lynds, and Robert J. Lifton, among many others who conducted research before the professionalization virus struck the academy, like the swine flu, several generations ago. In short, those who like the ivory tower should by all means stay up there but out of the way of scholars-activists like Sara Goldrick-Rab, who makes a telling distinction between scholarly activism and political advocacy.

I would also enjoin traditional scholars to introspect and ask themselves if they truly seek knowledge for its own sake or if they merely amuse themselves and a few acolytes. Veteran economist Steven Payson raises the same difficult question in How Economics Professors Can Stop Failing Us (2017), a scathing indictment of academic economics. The economics journal ranking system, he argues, is rigged in favor of the students and friends of superstars, most of whom simply churn out derivative mathematical models too abstract to represent any real economy, past or present. (Little wonder, then, at the events of 2008.) The emperor of economics has no clothes, Payson explains, because he is actually buck naked, not because non-economists lack the mathematical prowess to see his highness’s resplendent garb. Based on personal experience, casual conversation, and discipline-specific critical literature, I believe that Payson’s critique of academic economics also holds to some degree for other social science disciplines, history and the humanities, management, and even science and engineering fields.

Acknowledging the shortcomings of traditional scholarship, however, should not be taken to imply that all activist scholarship is worthy. The new subfield called the ‘history of capitalism’ is particularly suspect. Most historians of capitalism have an activist agenda, whether they openly admit it or not. They want to expose the flaws of capitalism (which they never define but basically equate with the status quo) to pave the way for financial reforms and reparations for the descendants of slaves. Their activist impulse is not the problem, though, their poor scholarship is. Most of the subfield’s canonical works have been heavily criticized by economic historians, like myself (The Poverty of Slavery, 2017), and economist historians, including most recently Eric Hilt (“Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of Capitalism’,” Journal of Economic History, 2017).

Contrary to common assumption, scholarship with any chance of improving the world has to be better, much better, than traditional scholarship. That is because its audience, so to speak, is reality, not a handful of self-appointed experts or the friends of the author’s dissertation adviser. To have any chance of improving the human condition, activist scholarship has to address real world problems rather than traditional academic questions, follow the rules of logic, and ground itself empirically as well as theoretically. (For an excellent recent example, see the 2017 Tobin Project volume attacking the Citizens United decision edited by Naomi Lamoreaux and Bill Novak, Corporations and American Democracy.) Even the best activist scholarship probably will never help anyone or anything, but it is far more likely to improve the world than is careerist work, like proposing marginal tweaks to some arcane ‘literature’ and getting it published with help from academic nepotism.

So let’s all endeavor to start valuing quality activist scholarship truly aimed at improving our deeply troubled world as much as we value scholarly work performed for its own sake, self-gratification, or professional advancement.