FF wrote:
Ah yes, and I've got good friends who are black...
(if I could roll my
eyes through e-mail, I would)
Actually, Charles is one of the few people at wikipedia with significant
life experience both in and out of academia, so he probably is in a good
position to judge how accurate those "ivory tower" stereotypes really are.
I don't think it's an ivory tower parody to say that academics are poor at
popularization. That's how they are trained. A premium is placed on the
ability to write highly technical material for experts and to amass as many
such publications to put on one CV as possible. Who cares if you actually
have something important to say. Relatively little premium is placed on
communicating with others outside one's little research area, or on
explaining the significance of research to the larger citizenry. (And I am
not talking about undergraduate pedagogical issues.) People who focus on
this citizenry aspect of scholarship risk putting their career in jeopardy,
unless they amass a large number of publications or grant money first. At
the very least, they risk getting denied tenure.
(There are some institutions which are exceptions, of course. But there is
no denying that publishing technical papers in research journals is what
most tenure committees and administrators are looking for first and
foremost.)
darin