A few years ago, I asked a man--PhD, published author, teacher in various venues, mentor of many people of influence, commonly-asked speaker--I deeply respected why he had never taken on a full-time professorship. Surely, he had chances, I reasoned, and he confirmed that I was correct. In his answer, he said something I'll never forget. Yes, he had received offers, but that out of his fear of becoming disconnected from the realities of work and world, he had oriented his vocation away from academia.
Yesterday, I was sitting in workshops for English faculty in anticipation of the incoming IUPUI students this week. One of my sessions focused on the use of sources in writing and the other on revision, both important topics, obviously. We were warned that our students might fall for the "fools' gold" of a website like http://www.martinlutherking.org/, a site run and updated by a white supremacy group. But as we got to work, both sessions turned into much of the same: slight disagreements about semantics, which basically eliminated the possibility for any possible output from the meetings. That is to say, we did what academics do: we argued. Little consensus was formed.
But if there was a stream of thought that connected both sessions, it was the assumption that a better source is a more academic one and a better paper is revised to become more academic. (For all the "tolerance" academics espouse, we do not seem to be very "tolerant" in this regard.) Before I get to my criticism, let me say that there is definitely something to be said about going to "experts" for information about a topic (although more access does not necessarily even indicate more accurate analysis). And the process of peer review is definitely a good practice. Even in this world of social media and Internet democracy, all sources, arguments, and papers are not created equally. This much is true.
But still I question the notion that a better source equals a more academic source. Just because a researcher or a professor holes himself up in a library and reads every quantitative study about making policy, does that mean he knows politics better than a, for example, governor? Does the academic who reads every newspaper article know more about journalism than a journalist? Does the one who publishes about business know better than a CEO? I'm sure you see what I'm getting at. Academics, in our pursuit for what we think is "perfection" (or something like it), we often isolate ourselves from the very world we study. And if we think that isolation does anything but skew our conclusions, we are mistaken. Insofar as there is vast differences in ideology between academia and "the rest of the world," I imagine that pride about how "intelligent" we are should be flipped into a concern about how detached we are from the realities of the world.
From a more technical standpoint, in any inquiry--academic or otherwise--we start from assumptions, and we finish our work by "leaping" to conclusions. No one can stick fully to "the facts." So even if our rational or quantitative data is flawless in the middle--definitely a rarity--our viewpoint is still limited, far from perfect. We cannot escape that humility, no matter what professorship we're offered, books we publish, or reputation we develop.
To be clear, I do not write all this to suggest that academia is irrelevant or unnecessary. It has a place. But that's what it deserves, no more or less. A place. A seat at the table. An opinion to be considered. In the "what is acceptable" conversation about sources and writing and revision, purpose also deserves mention. It is not that Twitter is less valid than an academic journal. It is just a different venue. You don't use them for the same thing. Same could be said (or taught in a class) about blogs or popular media or Wikipedia. Some of these things can be used as good "launching points" for papers or other projects. Purpose is also important to consider about revision. How much we revise definitely depends on what we're writing. (To see a good reflection on revision, go here.) If it's a book, tons of revision will be necessary. If it's an article due tomorrow, probably not so much. An academic paper? Hopefully somewhere in between.
The reasons we could not find consensus about revision or what sources were helpful is that there are no cheap answers. It's messy, not black-and-white. Even if I were to interact with the King website, perhaps to make a point about white supremacy or to offer a criticism or whatever, it could be a valid "source." The answer is in how we use a source, not whether we use it. Academics would do well to heed the advice from Montaigne, a French philosopher who warned us in his "The Art of Discussion" that we should evaluate arguments based on their merit, not on who made the argument. And I should add, to Montaigne's critique, that not only should we consider the merits of the argument, but perhaps out of what human experience that argument came.
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