How Broken Is Academia?
Pleased to appear in Persuasion…
Speaking as a seasoned veteran of public broadcasting and Ivy League PR—having spent a formative few years under the wing of PBS icon Bill Moyers and then working for a decade plus as a reporter and flack across Columbia University—there’s one overarching truth about marketing higher education. No matter what the discipline, the very most rigorous scholarly research tends to be pretty damn boring and incremental and hard to promote.
Almost all actual progress gets inched out excruciatingly deep in the footnotes; the real world remains a frustrating, contradictory, endlessly complicated mess awfully hard to reconcile with the news cycle and whatever various donors, journalists, and grantmaking entities like to hear. Even the most masochistic of academics can scarcely bear to read much academic literature, so most of it goes essentially unread and unchallenged.
But in casting and canonizing superstar public intellectuals from throughout the academy, mass media and upper middlebrow audiences tend to prefer clear-cut triumphant breakthroughs, the stuff of headlines and biopics, right on mark and schedule—sheer sparkling salesmanship for popular consumption even as less heralded stalwarts of higher ed stolidly pursue the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
In STEM, the crowd-pleasing goods are typically delivered via excessive exaggeration of the revolutionary landmark significance of each and every latest research paper in a valiant attempt to help capture the imagination of a lay public raised to expect electrifying science fiction. In the social sciences, the ever-metastasizing replicability crisis is always hiding behind the seductive talking points and press releases, while in the humanities the discourse is often so jargon-laden and deep in the weeds that even specialists’ eyes glaze over. If nobody’s actually bothering to double check the details, why wouldn’t ambitious students, faculty, and administrators quietly cut corners and fudge as necessary to snatch up the bigger money and most coveted opportunities for professional advancement, delivering what wider audiences want to hear?
So I haven’t been the least bit surprised that Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Harvard President Claudine Gay, and now Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Ann Charleston have turned out to have past records of plagiarism and/or academic misconduct. What’s surprising is that the hollow credentialism and politicized infotainment that define so much of today’s academic establishment are at last coming to light.
It’s been a long time coming: I’ve spent much of my career feeling queasy about a lot of the content I’ve had to package and sweeten for the market as it is, regardless of when I’ve strongly suspected it to be empirically shaky at best. In terms of the struggle to land jobs and funding and tenure from a stagnant or shrinking pie, even honest scholars with the best of intentions face constant temptation to simply deliver the goods.
From what I’ve seen in public broadcasting and at Columbia Journalism School, that dynamic often incentivized artful incorporation of consistently slanted narratives on hot-button political issues. At Columbia Law, it seemed to be a top priority to help codify talking points into statute—particularly when it came to expansive definitions of “equity.” In nearly a decade of reporting for Columbia Engineering, I watched the school move from sleepy backwater to enthusiastic cheerleader and enabler for whatever the sexier fields desired. And at the School of Public Health, in my final job for Columbia, I helped celebrate striving technocrats testing the outer limits of their authority since, during Covid, almost any social problem could be framed as an “epidemic.”
In drafting and editing for various eminent institutions, the usual distortions tended to come in a handful of predictable forms. I certainly witnessed a distinct lack of academic rigorousness throughout the process—whether that meant consistently caricaturing the opposition as unreasonable extremists or playing it fast and loose with numbers.
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Oh my gosh. Spot on, every word. Except I think you cut STEM too much slack. I was quite often the only person in the way of some bullshit STEM claim just because no one else could or would challenge it. Magic crystals, cold fusion, cloak devices - I saw it all
Spot on. Thanks for this.