Perhaps the Single Most Puzzling Thing Published Over the Weekend: The Peculiar Blindness of Nick Kristof: Monday Focus: February 17, 2014
Eric Loomis, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island had an immediate, aggressive, and hostile reaction:
Eric Loomis: Shorter Kristof: “I’m Too Lazy to Find the Hundreds of Professors Writing in Prominent Places, So Why Are Academics So Irrelevant?”: “I know Nick Kristof doesn’t put in any actual work to write his columns, but this is ridiculous. Erik Voeten with the obvious rejoinder that, in fact, academics are pretty much everywhere in public policy…”
Scott Lemieux: Corey Robin has much more. Professional disincentives notwithstanding, if you can’t find academics writing for a general audience about issues that interest you it’s almost certainly because you’re not looking.
“Huh?!” I thought. And so I began chasing links…
First, Eric Voeten, Peter F. Krogh Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Justice in World Affairs at Georgetown University:
Eric Voeten: Dear Nicholas Kristof: We are right here!: “Nicholas Kristof has a well-meaning but highly dramatic and one-sided op-ed in the New York Times, desperately shouting out: ‘Professors, We Need You!’
The piece rehashes familiar claims that seem to resonate well on the Times opinion page: academics write in obtuse prose on arcane tiny issues that are of little interest to the public. Even worse, they sometimes use math. Political science is in especially dire shape….
My onetime love, political science, is a particular offender and seems to be trying, in terms of practical impact, to commit suicide.
Eric sums up:
I think that Kristof means well, and there is surely something to the general themes he touches upon. I am not saying that all is well in the land of pol-sci academia. Yet, the piece is just a merciless exercise in stereotyping…. There are hundreds of academic political scientists whose research is far from irrelevant and who seek to communicate their insights to the general public via blogs, social media, op-eds, online lectures and so on. They are easier to find than ever before. Indeed The New York Times just founded one to help fill the void of Nate Silver’s departure. I am with Steve Saideman that political scientists are now probably engaging the public more than ever.
UPDATE: Messed up math. Let’s try that again: I think: The New York Times claims a Sunday print circulation of 1 million. The Sunday New York Times costs $4. If Kristof gets 1/2000 of the time spent on the Sunday New York Times–three seconds, if the average copy is read for 2 hours–1000 hours are spent reading Nick Kristof’s column, and if the average wage of a reader is $100,000/year, an additional 40 hours are spent earning the money to buy the right to read Nick Kristof’s column in print. And I think: That level of engagement (and revenue!) on the part of readers would, one would think, lead to a substantial infrastructure supporting marquee columnists to make sure that their columns were the best columns possible. I mean: readers are spending a substantial fraction of a year of income plus attention on this, and if the New York Times spends 10% as much in resources on it as its readers, that would be 104 reporter and editorial person-hours backing up each 750-word column.
And I think: The New York Times claims a Sunday print circulation of 1 million. The Sunday New York Times costs $4. If Kristof gets 1/20000 of the time spent on the Sunday New York Times–one-third of a second, if the average copy is read for 2 hours; one-sixth of a second, if the average copy is read for an hour; one-twelfth of a second, if the average copy is read for 30 minutes–that’s and if the average wage of a reader is $100,000/year, that’s 10,000 hours spent earning the money to buy the right to read Nick Kristof’s column in print.
And I think: That level of engagement (and revenue!) on the part of readers would, one would think, lead to a substantial infrastructure supporting marquee columnists to make sure that their columns were the best columns possible. I mean: readers are spending five person-years of income plus their attention on this, and if the New York Times spends 1% as much in resources on it that would be 100 reporter and editorial person-hours backing up each 750-word column.
And so, one would think, in the twenty-first century, that Nick Kristof would, as he wrote his column, know what his own newspaper announced just two days ago:
Meg Sullivan: Vavreck to help fill void in New York Times left by popular blogger Nate Silver: “UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck is joining a team of reporters, analysts and other contributors who will be posting to a new website on politics and policy in The New York Times that will launch in the spring with a focus on demystifying politics, economics, health care and other issues with data.
Vavreck is an associate professor of political science and communication studies who is known for relying on sophisticated statistical analyses to parse data. She will contribute at least one column every other week to the new, as-yet-to-be-named online feature. Some of the columns will appear in the print edition as well. In a tweet announcing Vavreck’s role, former Times Washington, D.C., bureau chief David Leonhardt, who will lead the project, called her a “great translator of politics and debunker of myths.”
Vavreck, a frequent blogger, author of op-eds and media commentator, expressed enthusiasm about her new role.
I’m very excited. There’s an increasing demand for data-driven journalism. Reporters don’t always have the time, data or training to dig into a problem in this way. Scholars and analysts [do], but we rarely have the opportunity to reach a public audience. So this seems like the perfect combination.
Vavreck will be joined at the blog by Times journalists and outside contributors…. Sendil Mullainathan, a Harvard professor of economics…. Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College…. Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian… and Justin Wolfers, a frequent op-ed author and professor economics and public policy at the University of Michigan.
But Kristof appears oblivious. Nor does his research for the column lead him to drop any links to any other engagement by political scientists with the public sphere. For example, he does not note that his newspaper’s competitor Washington Post has links with political scientists stronger than it has ever been before:
And I cannot let this moment pass without noting that I have long relied on Dan Nexon’s Duck of Minerva for publicly-engaged political scientists.
Plus, of course, for public engagement there has long been the New York Review of Books.
Kristof does drop links:
- To a Stimson Center Report that he says found that “scholars were among the most oblivious” to the possibility of the coming of an “Arab Spring”.
- To an article by Lee Sigelman about the history of the American Political Science Review that Kristof says shows “in the late 1930s and early 1940s, one-fifth of articles… focused on policy prescriptions; at last count, the share was down to 0.3 percent.”
- To the biography of Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group.
- To the biography of Jill Lepore and to her article in the Chronicle of Higher Education](http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Economy-of-Letters/141291/). The article seemed to me to confuse itself. It argued, alternately, that there were no public intellectuals, that there were too-few left-of-center public intellectuals, that there were too-few female public intellectuals, and that the fact that it is too easy to speak–“self-publishing and tweeting and blogging and MOOC-ing”–robs of their proper platforms the right kinds of public intellectuals: “the modest, the untenured, and the politically moderate… women… [because] an online culture that values opinion and personality over research and reporting [requires] academics… to offer cavalier and often unsubstantiated opinions, promote their own work, and even expose their lives to public view”.
- To protests against an International Studies Association proposal that editors of its scholarly journal not run their own weblogs.
- To an article about Republican attacks on humanities funding.
- To Rick Santorum’s denunciation of Barack Obama as a snob.
And Kristof quotes:
- Ann-Marie Slaughter: “All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative, making them less and less accessible to the general public…”
- Will McCants: “Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research. This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized…”
- Ian Bremmer: “Political science Ph.D.’s often aren’t prepared to do real-world analysis…”
And he writes:
Nick Kristof: Professors, We Need You! – NYTimes.com: “SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates….
America[‘s]… sharpest minds… have… marginalized themselves… fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago… glorifies arcane unintelligibility… disdaining impact and audience… culture of exclusivity… publish-or-perish tenure process… attempt[s] by academia to wall itself off from the world… encode their insights into turgid prose… gobbledygook… obscure journals… university presses whose reputations for soporifics… submitted meaningless gibberish… nonsense respectfully published… political science… a particular offender… academic disciplines… reduce their influence by neglecting political diversity… academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook… it was TED Talks by nonscholars that made lectures fun to watch…
I read this and I think: Is it really the case that there are fewer public intellectuals on America’s campuses than there were a generation ago? That is certainly not my impression. How does Kristof know?
And as I chase links, it becomes more and more clear that Kristof just does not know–that there is an extraordinary disproportion between the investment in expertise, reporting and analysis behind the work of… most of… the New York Times’s marquee op-ed columnists and the attention paid to them by the wider world, and that something has gone hopelessly wrong.
Nate Silver is trying to fix this. Ezra Klein is trying to fix this. David Leonhardt is trying to fix this. I wish them all luck.
UPDATE: Corey Robin: Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now: “Nothing to say? Nothing on your mind? Not to worry: here’s a beating-a-dead-horse-piece-that-writes-itself about the jargony academic who writes only for her peers in specialized journals that only a handful of people read. To wit, Nicholas Kristof’s column in today’s New York Times….
The usual volumes of complaint: too much jargon, too much math, too much peer review, too much left politics. Plus a few dubious qualifications (economists aren’t so bad, says Kristof, because they’re Republican-friendly…and, I guess, not jargony, math-y, or peer-review-y) and horror stories that turn out to be neither horrible nor even stories….
Kristof need only open the pages of the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Boston Review, The American Conservative, Dissent, The American Prospect—even the newspaper for which he writes: today’s Times features three opinion columns and posts by academics—to see that our public outlets are well populated by professors. And these are just the established academics. If you look at the graduate level, the picture is even more interesting. When I think of my favorite writers these days—the people from whom I learn the most and whose articles and posts I await most eagerly—I think of Seth Ackerman, Peter Frase, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Lili Loofbourow, Aaron Bady, Freddie de Boer, LD Burnett, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Adam Goodman, Matthijs Krul, Amy Schiller, Charles Petersen, Tom Meaney…I could go on. For a long time….
Even from the limited point of view of what he’s talking about—where have all the public intellectuals gone?—he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what is he really talking about, then? You begin to get a clue of what he’s really talking about, then, by noticing two of the people he approvingly cites and quotes in his critique of academia: Anne-Marie Slaughter and Jill Lepore… one the former dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, the other the holder of an endowed chair at Harvard…. Slaughter was Obama’s Director of Policy Planning at the State Department…. Lepore is an immensely prolific and widely read staff writer at The New Yorker…. There are a lot of gifted historians. And only so many slots for them at The New Yorker. The problem here is not that scholars don’t aspire to write for The New Yorker. It’s that it’s a rather selective place. Kristof says that Lepore “is an exception to everything said here.” She is, but not in the way he thinks. Or for the reasons he thinks….
Kristof… [in Aaron Bady’s words] “only reads The New Yorker, and then complains that everyone doesn’t write for The New Yorker”. He doesn’t see the many… writing for public audiences. Nor does he see the gatekeepers…. Kristof’s a fellow who likes to save the world. So maybe this is something he can do. Instead of writing about the end of public intellectuals, why not devote a column a month to unsung writers who need to be sung?
And:
**Greg Weeks:** Two Weeks Notice: A Latin American Politics Blog: Kristof on Academia: “This Nicholas Kristof article really made the rounds yesterday on Twitter, where political science professors took exception with an argument that perhaps once was true but now is out of date….
Outlets like The Monkey Cage are well respected, and contributors include top scholars of all different generations. Back when I started blogging in 2006, people talked about whether to blog while untenured. Nobody does that anymore…. Political scientists are doing “real-world analysis” all the time. I do it pretty much constantly. I have colleagues in my department who are interested in various kinds of increasingly sophisticated methods yet are involved in a large Defense Department grant to understand the relationship between natural resources and conflict. I could go on and on for my department alone. Now, maybe they don’t phrase their research in terms of “policy prescription,” but why should they? The important thing is to give policy makers the analysis they need to make decisions rather than tell them what decisions to make.