What if the academy actually mattered

In mid-February, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof kicked over an ivy-covered hornet's nest when he complained that too many professors sequester themselves in the ivory tower amid "a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.

Judging by the number of submissions that Foreign Policy gets from doctors of philosophy, we suspect that more than a few are trying to break out of the abbey. But the question of academia's isolation from the "real world" is one that FP's editors debate as well. In fact, three weeks before Kristof's article ran, we convened nine current and former deans from top public policy schools to discuss when and how scholarship influences policymakers -- and whether academics even care if their work reaches a wider audience.

The deans quickly distinguished between policy schools, which embrace public discourse, and disciplinary departments like political science, which focus on "pure" research.

Nevertheless, the dilemma remains: Academics may produce incisive foreign policy analysis, but if a research paper falls in the forest … well, Washington couldn't care less. And our participants remain concerned, as one bluntly put it, that too many talented professors and students are doing work that has "nothing to do with improving the human condition. Avey and Michael C. Desch into how policymakers and academics see each other.

We hope this discussion shows how academics do and do not impact foreign policy — and what needs to change. So part of the motivation is to better fulfill the mission universities have qua universities. And we see benefits on the other side of the gap too.

SCOBLIC : Steve, the Kennedy School is an international affairs school, but I get the sense that there are still pressures on junior faculty to write for their academic discipline as opposed to a general policy audience.

They decide what the norms and incentives are that are going to be rewarded. So if international affairs or political science or public policy schools wanted to have a different set of metrics and a different set of criteria for evaluating faculty, they could decide to do that. Second, one of our criteria for promotion is in fact contributions to public policy or public management.

Now, in practice, does that mean every junior faculty has had a big impact? I think that we still tend to weight academic contributions for junior faculty more highly than other forms, but you could imagine that set of criteria becoming more widely followed throughout the discipline.

When you are evaluating someone for tenure, look at how often they are cited, but also look at how often they are mentioned in LexisNexis. Sometimes the answer will be no, and you might still think the work is very good. But sometimes the answer would be yes, and you would want that information if you were judging someone for promotion.

WALT: I think the Kennedy School has had a lot of impact, as much by its faculty who then participated in government, people like Joe Nye and others, and by people getting involved directly as advisors and consultants.

In some areas, I think our scholarly work has had a big impact. I think many academics have a mistaken view of how policy impact is achieved. You have to be willing to shop it. You have to be an entrepreneur of your own ideas.

Some are closest to traditional academic work, and some are much further away. And so some are pure academics; others are much more on the public intellectual side. But I think the incentives have to be in place to cultivate that whole range of functions. There are at least two bodies of conversation we could have. One is the discipline-policy school conversation. And then the second part, which I know we all want to talk about, is whether the policy schools are doing what the people in government would have them do to prepare their students for government service, which is more your question.

First part: The way I would capture it is that there is a mismatch between all the talent that goes into the discipline-based departments — the political science departments, the government departments — and the policy schools, like Kennedy and Georgetown.

And on the other hand, the really talented people who are working on things that I would say are really remote from things that matter in the real world. Some of the very best undergraduates and graduate students in the country are doing work that has nothing to do with improving the human condition. Is it good for policy people? It has zero impact, I would say, in any kind of direct way. Is it for education in some way?

Advancing the science of the discipline in some way? As for government, the first thing that government people want in international affairs is regional expertise. And then after that, there is a functional expertise, depending on what you do for a living in government.

A deep third is someone who can write the front piece of the memo. There are thoughtful people in government who — yes, they read Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy — but they will also read International Security. In other words, they can actually read an academic journal if the journal is interested in real scholarship that impacts the policy world they live in. I think if you opened up the American Political Science Review , you would see lots of pieces that no one in the policy world would dream of looking at.

My own view is that the six years to get to tenure is really short in the life of a scholar and that I know I spent a lot of that time learning new things, learning new tools — things that if I were trying to play in the policy world at the same time, I would not have had the time to do.

So I think the six years of the junior faculty time is a time of investment. That said, I think there are some things that we can do to take advantage of changes that are going on.

So there is a big mismatch. Given that, it changes the time frame in which I think about trying to have an impact. If you are willing to take a slightly longer time frame, one of the ways in which I think all of us can have an impact is by training the next generation and equipping them with the tools that are really needed — with language skills, with regional expertise, with the sets of quantitative tools that they need.

I would say, crudely, economics, to my experience, has almost entirely abandoned this as a focus of professional rewards. There are some disciplines, particularly history, that remain essentially rooted in area studies. Anthropology, as well. But the change that concerns me most is in political science, and as we see the senior ranks of the area-trained political scientists begin to face retirement, we are very concerned about recruiting a next generation of people who are really rooted in area studies.

On area studies, I totally agree. There is sort of this talismanic view of the world in Washington — everything revolves around us, right? And I think we see this pattern on both sides of the gap — not enough sense of really understanding the world. Some of it is methods.

If you look at a curriculum in undergraduate or graduate, there are a finite number of courses people take. And there is a tension between how much goes to methods and how much goes to history, regional studies, language, et cetera. My concern — and I think this affects a lot of the APSIA schools, too, frankly — is that methods are taking up too much of that turf. My model still works. We want people to write these grand-theory articles.

But a lot of us worked with and were inspired by Alexander George , and he always used to talk about middle-range theory , right? The biggest impact we have is not necessarily directly tying the research to policymakers but in training the next generation.

The people who are policymakers in this town, they went to school somewhere. They learned about the world somewhere.

So what we do to get them excited so that they want to study countries and regions is important. Did you develop a worldview that you brought into government? What an opportunity that was — to spend all your time, your first year, with arguably one of the greatest international political theorists. Writing for them, I should imagine talking to my six year-old. He knew I loved, and loved talking to, my six year-old. Nevertheless, I would neither want someone in his state of mind in charge of an enterprise nor are the many managers I meet and work with like that.

Portraying managers as impatient, action-oriented, and result-obsessed people with no regard for elegance, depth, and nuance, however, not only insults their intelligence and humanity — and ours. It also signals that we should deploy a minimal amount of both in order to occupy our roles.

Concrete, uplifting recipes to lead or more precisely, become richer and more powerful might get more clicks and sell more books.

If the business literature was more literature and less business, however, it could shake off its instrumental provincialism — its reluctance to value critiques or reflections that do not offer immediate solutions.

Doing so might free us up to ask important questions. We could ask whether turning talent development into the acquisition of habits dictated by competency models generates cheerful conformity or cynicism, and how to foster the responsible subversion real leadership requires instead.

We could stop asking, in short, whether we matter and ask instead how the meanings we give to success, leadership and learning matter. What difference they make. That would be critical, hopeful, and practical.

Words shape our worlds. Even, perhaps more so, when they promote illusions under the guise of visions, theory, or advice. You have 1 free article s left this month. You are reading your last free article for this month. Subscribe for unlimited access. Create an account to read 2 more. We need real thinking, not quick fixes. Greg Rakozy. Read more on Leadership or related topics Business education and Leadership development.