FF wrote: 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