In recent years it has become fashionable to bemoan the state of higher education in the United States.Footnote 1 Universities are too bureaucratic; college is too expensive; graduates are poorly prepared for professional life, or life in general; government, or business, or both, funds too little, regulates too much, and (worst of all!) ignores the advice and counsel of the faculty. Political scientists are unusually voluble in sharing our pain at being spurned by policymakers whose heads have been turned by far less deserving pundits and bloggers. Indeed, I have expressed some of these complaints myself although, as I will suggest here, I sometimes think I have been tugging at the hem of an emperor who actually has no clothes.Footnote 2 That is to say, we are so concerned about retaining our authority and influence as experts that we have failed to notice changes in the public sphere that are reshaping our audiences, whether undergraduates or policymakers, so profoundly that what we have historically done, and how we have done it, is increasingly unconnected to the needs and aspirations of those our work is intended to serve.
Stephen Walt's recent observations about the “growing gap between university-based scholars and both the policy world and the public sphere” echo, as he points out, many such laments in recent years, and much virtuous self-criticism in the academy.Footnote 3 Political scientists have been quick to castigate themselves about the irrelevance of their work and to worry about the growth of a competitive “alternate-universe” policy world of think tanks that seem not to share our standards but nonetheless seem to enjoy the regard of a public we think is rightfully ours. While much of the hand-wringing is well taken, or at least well intentioned, we sometimes seem to “protest too much” or, as my children might say, our complaints offer up stories that are all too revealing: “TMI”—too much information! We catalogue our anxieties eloquently and at length but we are far less adept at explaining, much less solving, the problems that give rise to our worries. As a result, the solutions proffered are too often palliative responses to our pain rather than the thoroughgoing remedies that might actually solve our problems, which may be why the proposed solutions are rarely adopted in any event. We are told we should reformulate the incentive systems for our graduate students, we should stem the insidious growth of administration and reestablish faculty governance, we should reward the public intellectuals among us, and so forth. But few of even these simple reforms have ever been deliberated, less adopted, in any of the high-prestige departments in which they might actually make a difference. Indeed, as Rogers Smith has recently suggested, over the last few decades,
declining public support and the increased segregation of higher education faculty members into a small cadre of high-paid researchers who do limited teaching, and a large number of economically insecure teachers who lack time and resources for research … further diminish the discipline's capacities to enhance broader public understandings of politics.Footnote 4
What many of the most influential members of the discipline say we want—more engagement—has become uncoupled from what we do, which is typically less teaching, administration, advising, service, or outreach. That we have been able to sustain this contradiction for so long is itself a worrisome sign, suggesting that for many purposes it really does not matter what we do.
This essay examines the vexed relationship of the American university-based political scientist with the policy world and wider public sphere. It draws on my several decades of practice as an American political scientist who is particularly interested in policy, but it also reflects the fresh perspective afforded by looking at the issue from outside the United States. Most of my references will be to the United States, but I will also bring examples and observations from Egypt, where I now live and work. There is a measure of objective justification in selecting Egypt, apart from the fact that it is where I am: the country enrolls well over half of all Ph.D. students in the Arab world, nearly half the Master's level students, and well over a million undergraduates.Footnote 5 And it is where, of course, one of the most interesting and important political upheavals in recent history transpired just last year, as hundreds of thousands of Egyptian citizens gathered in central Cairo's Tahrir Square in eighteen days of protests that ended the thirty year reign of President Hosni Mubarak.
I followed these events from the American University in Cairo, of which I am president, and so a word about it is in order. AUC is the third-oldest university in Egypt, after Al-Azhar, which was founded in the tenth century, and Cairo University, which was founded in 1909. It was established in 1919—in the midst of an earlier revolutionary moment in Egyptian history. AUC has two campuses—one on the now iconic Tahrir Square and a new purpose-built campus in suburban New Cairo—and 6,800 students. Obviously this represents only a tiny fraction of Egyptian university students but many are from the country's elite, both social and intellectual, and the university's students, faculty, and alumni are disproportionately visible in positions of political, intellectual, and economic influence within the country. This university thus furnishes an illuminating vantage point from which to reflect on the relationships between higher education, political science, and democratic politics.
In what follows, I will argue that a transformation in the availability of information has eroded authority, undermined hierarchies, and upended the organizational mechanisms by which knowledge is developed, collected, and disseminated around the world. This has meant a decline in interest in and deference to universities and university-based research and has lessened popular estimates of what the university-based political scientist has to offer to students, citizens, politicians, and policy makers. If we as political scientists are to regain the esteem of the public, it will be because we have engaged them on new terms—the terms of a twenty-first century in which information is abundant and the sort of formal credentials we university-based political scientists have all worked so hard to secure are relatively inconsequential. What we must be prepared to do is engage our students and colleagues, as well as our fellow citizens and policymakers, in the relatively informal, non-hierarchical networks of collaboration, reciprocity, and shared wisdom in which the next generations are already beginning to live, learn, and work.
After a brief examination of surprising parallels in the plight of Egyptian and American universities, I consider the impact on political science of the changing nature of information and expertise in the public sphere, illustrating my argument with a critique of a recent essay by Stephen Walt, one of the most influential public intellectuals among the American political scientists working on international relations today. I argue that, in failing to grasp the source and scale of the problems he identifies in the growing gap between political scientists and policymakers, the solutions he suggests are little more than sedatives that will temporarily ease our discomfort but cannot cure what ails us.
As political scientists, we need to be far less attached to a view of ourselves as uniquely knowledgeable; we are no longer the repositories and carriers of rare and therefore valuable cultural and scientific information. We must be far more willing to see ourselves as guides, advocates and facilitators of learning—from our students who are struggling to understand proportional representation systems to our policymakers whose efforts to write new constitutions or fix budget deficits entail the life-long, on-the-job learning that will be the common experience of the twenty-first century. The era in which individuals finished their education with their terminal degree is over; today, around the world, the ambitious are all retooling, taking refresher courses, going back to school, fulfilling continuing education requirements for professional licenses throughout their professional lives. So too, as we know, the days when professors read their yellowing lecture notes year after year and sent hardbound books, the product of years of dedicated research, off to sit in the inboxes of legislators and cabinet ministers, are over. We need to acknowledge the implications of that, however, and think of ourselves as providing our skill, understanding, and wisdom to those everywhere who are what have come to be called “experiential learners,” both students and policy makers. And, of course, as life-long learners ourselves, we have to acknowledge the reciprocal value of the skill, understanding, and wisdom of those practitioners from whom we too are acquiring knowledge and insight.
The Plight of the University: United States and Egypt
Worrying about higher education in the United States is not new, although the decibel level seems to have risen in recent years—in part because of concern that what was once the indisputable leader in global higher education may be facing increasing competition from abroad, as ambitious governments from Europe to China invest in reform and expansion of their higher education sectors. From Jonathan Cole's exhaustive treatment in The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected to Benjamin Ginsberg's more dyspeptic The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, Footnote 6 academics have been issuing clarion calls for various (sometimes incompatible) reforms and, inevitably, greater investment. The Bush Administration's 2006 Commission on the Future of Higher Education, known as the Spellings Commission, focused on four key issues—access, affordability, the standards of quality in instructional standards, and institutional accountability—and generated much controversy about the ways it proposed those be measured and assessed.
Among the most significant areas of controversy from the perspective of a practicing political scientist is the extent to which universities can, or should, retain their ivory tower remove from the communities and constituencies around them—from their neighbors, government regulators, industry funders, and the interested public.Footnote 7 Many humanists and some natural scientists worry that the imperatives of the real world—students who want to get jobs when they graduate, funders who want tangible results from research—will contaminate the freedom and integrity of contemplation and discovery. Political scientists, by contrast, have typically wished for more rather than less public attention, bemoaning the failure of policymakers to consult them as much as they ought to, and worrying that their work does not have the impact it merits.Footnote 8
In Egypt, the problems are not qualitatively different—the value of university education and research is frequently questioned and the impact of academic experts and specialists on public policy is debatable —but their magnitude is vastly greater, and the situation much worse. In the 1960s, Egypt, like most of the countries of the Middle East, was seized with an impulse common in many developing countries—to open university doors to anyone who passed the requisite national exam. University education was to be free, at least to the students. Moreover, anyone who obtained a university degree was guaranteed a government job—the public mission of the national universities was obvious to all. Not surprisingly, over the course of the succeeding decades, these promises became unsustainable. Today, Egypt spends about $1,200 per university student per year.Footnote 9 Its public sector is bloated with six million poorly paid and inadequately trained university graduates, virtually all of whom are moonlighting to make enough money to sustain themselves and their households. The universities, and their faculty and students, are trapped in a vicious cycle of inexpensive, low quality, and not very enlightening education. But, while the problems are well known and often remarked, very little has been done, in part because of the enormity of the challenges.
But it is also because there has been little encouragement of the sort of debate that might have produced solutions. The universities in Egypt were not only slowly allowed to deteriorate; in many respects, they were deliberately debilitated decades ago. What had been a lively and quite politicized student movement in the 1970s was crushed in a crackdown late in the decade—the presidential decree authorizing student government elections was cancelled in 1979—and for the last three decades, political expression, even about mundane campus issues, was tightly controlled. The tumult that rocked the national universities after the January 25 revolution was therefore no surprise, as faculty and students mounted demonstrations and strikes demanding the removal of the deans and university presidents, all of whom had been appointed by the president of the republic, Hosni Mubarak. Their demand that these offices be filled by election speaks volumes about the high, indeed perhaps unduly high, regard in which democratic institutions are held in Egypt today. To most Americans, the prospect of elected deans and presidents would be a recipe for scaling up petty departmental politics to genuinely paralyzing proportions, but to Egyptians it is an opportunity to institutionalize the accountability and transparency that has been lacking at universities, as elsewhere, for years.
Thus, for these sorts of political and economic reasons, universities have not been places of invention or innovation in the Arab world, and it has had a predictable effect: as the well-known Cairo University professor of medicine and university activist, Mohamed Abou El-Ghar, observed in 2006, “Egyptian university graduates are capable only of waiting for orders and executing them. No thinking, no arguing, no questioning: no objecting and not even dialoging: a personality that does not (and cannot) create or think. This graduate is usually stuck with this type of passive personality for the rest of his or her life.”Footnote 10 And, tellingly, it was not as university students that the young people of Egypt rebelled against their government, but as frustrated and fearless citizens, unwilling to continue to defer to rulers who had lost their authority.
Information and the Demands of the Twenty-First Public Sphere
Not surprisingly then, like their American counterparts, Egyptian academics worry about the deterioration of education and the failure of universities to promote inventive teaching, worthwhile learning, and imaginative and influential policy analysis. But in fact, this concern is becoming a feature of modern life around the world. It is not just political scientists, or even the universities in which they are housed, that seem to be beset by public indifference (not to say contempt) and which exhibit the existential anxiety that such disregard engenders. So are newspapers,Footnote 11 banks,Footnote 12 armies,Footnote 13 political parties,Footnote 14 governments,Footnote 15 practically everything.Footnote 16 In fact, most of the cornerstone institutions of mid-twentieth-century modernity are fretting about their sustainability, indeed, their very viability. This suggests that both the problem and the solution—insofar as there is, or should be, a solution—is not in the individual institutions but in the very environment in which they operate. Evidently, unbeknownst to most of us, the air we breathe has gotten richer in some element we have not yet measured, the ambient temperature hotter, the water shallower, the daylight brighter—that is, something has changed that is affecting all of these institutions.
Perhaps the inability of political science, in the United States or elsewhere, to engage effectively with the public sphere is a reflection not just of our own foibles, but also of the larger world in which we operate—that is, the public sphere itself. Perhaps our trials are merely a part—a symptom—of a larger environmental change in the way the “public” interacts with authorities like professors, generals, senators, journalists. And insofar as they are, what accounts for that environmental change, that general circumstance, which might contribute to the frailty of all these institutions?
I believe that it is the transformation in the availability of information that has diminished authority, undercut hierarchy, and challenged the organizational mechanisms by which knowledge is developed, collected, and disseminated in almost all domains of social life. This systemic environmental change has caused a dramatic decline in interest in and deference to universities, university professors, and university-based research around the world. Like most senior academics, I can trace the resulting changes in relations between professors and students, not to say research scientists and the public, in my own career.
Political Science in an Information-Rich World
When I was starting graduate school, I had a professor who had been born in Eastern Europe before the First World War. Even then he was a bit “old-school”—formal by the standards of the heirs of the student revolutions of the 1960s—but not qualitatively different in his expectations of his students from his fellow professors. He had a trick he used at the beginning of every semester to ensure that we paid attention—he would slowly and carefully draw a detailed map of Europe freehand on the blackboard, all the while berating his (largely American) students for their feeble grasp of geography. We were naturally mesmerized, and after that class, he had us in his thrall—we believed he knew, and would probably always know, more than we did and we could do no better than sit at his feet (metaphorically—he preferred we sat at rapt attention in our rows of desks) and receive his knowledge and wisdom, which were pretty much interchangeable.
I have thought periodically of my late professor as I debate asking the students in my classes to switch off their smartphones, tablets, laptops and netbooks. On the one hand, of course, these devices are terrific distractions—I myself have received e-mails from students that were sent during class to listservs of which they had forgotten I was a member. On the other hand, why bring a map to class, much less learn to draw one freehand on a blackboard, when virtually all the maps, recording all the political changes, military campaigns, population fluctuations, GDP figures, and crop harvests at any time and place any of us could possibly want to know, are quite literally at our fingertips—just a few redemptive clicks away from the distractions of e-mail and Facebook?
Much of what the great institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do—indeed, probably since the “Age of Discovery,” when empiricism began to triumph over faith and civil institutions began to supersede religious hierarchies in public life—is essentially trade in information. The universities, the media, the markets, militaries, banks, governments and parties that shape our public life were designed to both utilize and compensate for information scarcities and asymmetries. Banks and commercial firms had privileged access to, and sometimes developed, information about market trends; governments collected and elaborated “data” from censuses; political parties aggregated opinions, newspapers disseminated … well, news—selections of information they deemed “fit to print.” Universities collected and transmitted the accumulating wisdom of the past and periodically discovered “new knowledge,” which was duly stored in great museums and libraries for transmission to future generations.
Despite the dramatic transformation in the availability of information, many of us still operate as if the role of universities—and specifically political science professors—is to collect, interpret and disseminate scarce information. In his recent essay on “International Affairs and the Public Sphere,”Footnote 17 Stephen Walt, for example, cites three ways in which he believes academics can contribute to public discourse on global affairs. All of these assume the public's limited access to information in ways that, I will suggest, no longer obtains in our “information rich” society. In the first place, Walt argues,
although the digital revolution has made a wealth of information from around the world accessible on a near real-time basis, most of us still lack both extensive direct data on events in far-flung areas and the background knowledge necessary to understand what new developments mean. When citizens and leaders seek to grasp the dizzying complexity of modern world politics, therefore, they must inevitably rely upon the knowledge and insights of specialists in military affairs, global trade and finance, diplomatic/international historians, area experts, and many others. And that means relying at least in part on academic scholars who have devoted their careers to mastering various aspects of world affairs and whose professional stature has been established through the usual procedures of academic evaluation (e.g., peer review, confidential assessments by senior scholars, the give-and-take of scholarly debate, etc.).
My recent experience of a political revolution in a “far-flung area” leads me to believe that, quite the contrary, political scientists and area specialists are not privileged in their access to, or advantaged in their interpretation of, “direct data” from the field. In the first place, of course, Tahrir Square is outside my office window, which does not seem all that remote. Thanks to the globalization of information, communication, research networks, and policy communities, the difference between those of us “collecting data in the field” and those of us analyzing it “back home” is quickly vanishing. Moreover, the “usual procedures of academic evaluation” typically test less for genuine familiarity with the culture or organization of the military in Egypt, the tribes of Libya, or the Islamist party of Tunisia, than for the ability to fit them to a political science case or category. We political scientists in Cairo, and presumably elsewhere, have passed endless happy hours debating whether these uprisings are revolutions, or democratic transitions, or military coups, or collapsed states or civil wars but, while these deliberations have been amusing and entertaining, they have not contributed nearly as much as one might hope to our analytical insight or interpretive acumen. It has been an eye-opener to see the alacrity with which political scientists with only the faintest familiarity with Egypt or the region have flocked to Tahrir Square for a few days of what we in Cairo have come to call revolutionary tourism. We read with bemusement their accounts of their encounter with regime change in the Arab world, written as if they were pioneers exploring “far-flung areas,” much like modern-day equivalents of the intrepid scientists and adventurers who accompanied Napoleon's legendary expedition to Egypt in 1798.Footnote 18 But it is not clear what exactly familiarity with the literature of political science actually added to deep understanding of events as they unfolded.
To understand what was happening in the Arab spring, neither I nor any of my political science and area studies colleagues relied much on the specialized literature of our disciplines and—worse yet—as F. Gregory Gause pointed out, when we did return to our books and articles, we found we had been largely wrong about the persistence of authoritarianism, the growth of religious politics, the impact of regime type, and many of the other things about which we have been writing for the last twenty years or so while we waited for something interesting to happen in the Arab world.Footnote 19 All of us have profited from familiarity with the history of modern politics—could this be the rise of fascism? maybe the Islamist parties are the contemporary incarnation of Europe's interwar Communist parties? has Egypt seen its Thermidor?—and we are comfortable with scholarly debate. We slip easily and securely into thinking systematically and comparatively—that is, we are “disciplined.” But these are not necessarily the skills and perspectives that make us valuable real-time interpreters of the “dizzying complexity of modern politics” to citizens and policymakers.
Interestingly, however, while familiarity with the literatures of political science might not make us particularly good at instant analysis, it might make us somewhat more effective practitioners—the story of the role of political science students, graduates, and faculty in the uprisings themselves is yet to be told (and, it being Egypt, it is engineers who are most prominently represented in public life—engineering being rather like law in the United States: the all-purpose professional degree) but Egyptian political science graduates, whatever their formal employment, do seem to have played an important role in political mobilization in Egypt, both during the uprising and in the subsequent elections. Familiarity with the currency of strategic games and campaign tactics; aggregation of public opinion; theories of representation, balancing, and band-wagoning; institutional design; social mobilization; repertoires of contention; political patronage; campaign finance and the rest of our capacious toolkit seems to be very valuable, at least for newly empowered activists, who daily translate theory into practice. It was, after all, one of the young activists, Gigi Ibrahim, who told The Daily Show's Jon Stewart that she joined the protests against Hosni Mubarak because “I took a class. A class at the American University in Cairo. It was called ‘Social Mobilization Under Authoritarian Regimes.’”Footnote 20
Familiarity with the ideas and impulses of political science may make us better political actors but it does not make us privileged analysts. In fact, as we all know, today pretty much anyone with a mobile phone can find out who led the Egyptian revolution of 1919, when the Italians invaded Libya, where the Friday protest will gather, which political parties have endorsed it, how the military reacted to its announcement, not to say what the president of AUC is doing, and how the traffic on the way home will be. Ordinary people do not seem to need facilitators, gatherers, aggregators, interpreters, analysts or—let's face it—professors, at least as we have historically interpreted our role and purpose. What was once a necessity—someone to gather scarce facts, weave a plausible story about how they are related (which we called “the truth”), and use that story to explain the world and interpret its significance—has become at best a luxury, at worst a nuisance. Today collecting information is the job of computers and algorithms, and compiling it into knowledge—a plausible, perhaps true story about the world—is within the reach of virtually anyone with an internet connection. Facts, or what pass for facts, are hardly a scarce resource, and everyone is equally capable of relating them together in some way, sharing the resulting worldview with millions of other people, and acting together with likeminded people in their neighborhood or around the world. A global jury of peers decides which sources are most reliable, which causes most compelling. If you think that is not happening, just read any of the dozens of timely, sophisticated, and informative blogs about current events written by Egyptians who are otherwise housewives, human resources managers, or students—but not credentialed experts or authorities, much less political scientists.
Walt also argues that government efforts to control access to information require that the disinterested and skeptical political scientist assist in its interpretation:
Much of what we know about the outside world is ultimately derived from government sources (especially when dealing with national security affairs), and public officials often go to considerable lengths to shape how that information is reported to the public. Not only do governments collect vast amounts of information about the outside world, but they routinely use secrecy laws to control public access to this information. Government officials can shape public beliefs by leaking information strategically, or by co-opting sympathetic journalists whose professional success depends in part on maintaining access to key officials. Given these information asymmetries and their obvious interest in retaining public support for their preferred policies, it is hardly surprising that both democratic and non-democratic leaders use their privileged access to information to build support for specific policies, at times by telling outright lies to their own citizens.
Most citizens, much less policymakers, are aware of the efforts of governments to spin information these days, perhaps more so in Egypt, where the government made no pretense of doing otherwise. Power asymmetries are not the same thing as information asymmetries, however, and the changes in how information can be discovered and disseminated became apparent relatively early in Egypt—the government there was cracking down on bloggers long before most Americans even knew what a blog was.Footnote 21 In part this is because of the astonishing growth of mobile telephony in Egypt; today there are 85 million mobile phones in a country of 85 million people and the associated eagerness and enthusiasm with which people have embraced the new information technologies is palpable. What is true in Egypt is true, however, everywhere. Users of these technologies are less reliant on—and less deferential to—conventional authorities of all kinds. This means that students—even students in high-priced, well-appointed universities in the United States—are less and less reliant on their faculty. (And most conventional faculty, at least at US research universities, seem to be quite content with this arrangement, judging from the correlation between low teaching loads and high status—a point to which I will return.Footnote 22)
Walt's final reason why professional political scientists are necessary to collecting and interpreting data is because
the scholarly world also offers a potentially valuable model of constructive political disagreement. Political discourse in many countries (and especially the United States) has become increasingly personal and ad hominem, with little attention paid to facts and logic; a trend reinforced by an increasingly competitive and loosely regulated media environment…. By bringing the norms of academic discourse into the public sphere, academic scholars could help restore some of the civility that has been lost in recent years.
Insofar as the media environment in Egypt is “increasingly competitive and loosely regulated” (and it does make the American media look like paragons of honesty and decorum) almost anything would seem civil by comparison. The norm that the academy can add is not civility as such—I do not think we academics are always such models of collegial tolerance in any event—but the power and the complexity of responsible free expression. The right of free speech and especially academic freedom means, of course, putting up with other people's nonsense as the condition for being able to question, to criticize, and to differ from the powers that be. In a recently authoritarian context, the exercise of free speech is a shocking and often bewildering experience. I am reminded of a moment shortly after Hosni Mubarak stepped down when I was talking politics with two Egyptian associates. One turned to the other and asked his opinion about the issue. When he responded that he had none, his questioner burst out “This is a free country now, you have to have an opinion!” Political scientists certainly bring ample experience with having and expressing opinions about virtually everything, and insofar as that is a contribution to the public sphere, we are well equipped to make it.
In fact, however, I would argue that it is the young people of Egypt, not the world's political science professors, who have actually revealed something profoundly important about the nature of knowledge, education, learning, and authority in the twenty-first century.Footnote 23 What appeared to be a revolt against authoritarianism is also, in important ways, a revolt against increasingly anachronistic conceptions of authority itself. And in this the Egyptian protestors share something with the US Tea Party, Spain's Indignados, Britain's summer rioters, and the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. The year 2011 saw new anti-authoritarian social organization take on a strength and energy entirely unexpected—and often misunderstood—by the establishments against which they raised their voices.Footnote 24
This has clear implications for the relations between governments and their citizens, businesses and their customers, newspapers, and their readers. It also has important implications for universities. The once bright lines dividing the credentialed authorities in universities—the professoriate—with their scholarly articles and books, and professionals in think tanks, with their policy memos and op-ed pieces, and the amateur activists on Facebook, with their blogs and tweets, are increasingly blurred. When political scientists assign essays written by students in their own class as authoritative interpretations of contemporary politics—as happened in classes at the American University in Cairo in the spring of 2011; the students in question were also political activists and bloggers—the upending of relations of knowledge and authority in the classroom is virtually complete.
Eroding Authority and Professional Anxiety
It is in this context that all the big public institutions are struggling to find new purposes and identities. The news media ape lifestyle magazines and hire self-referential “public editors” to worry out loud as they lose readership. American political parties compete for the growing numbers of “independents” and look to social movements like MoveOn.org and Tea Party to capture the energy and enthusiasm they once represented. And, although college applications in the US are at an all time high, universities anxiously flaunt fancy food courts and sports complexes to make sure the “college experience” is appealing to prospective students. Universities have become places to pass time and collect credentials, and only a small minority of students actually acquires knowledge and learns skills they could not get elsewhere.
The widespread worry about the declining proportion of tenured faculty among those who actually teach college students obscures the fact that American students spend less of their time studying with anyone than they once did; in 1961, full-time students allocated 40 hours per week to class and studying while forty years later, they spent about 27 hours per week.Footnote 25 The “teaching and learning” that goes on at universities is increasingly unanchored in the formal curricula, as students who are lightly supervised by what has come to be known as the “contingent faculty” (that is, adjuncts, part-timers, and graduate students) learn what they learn from other students, outside the classroom, while the tenured faculty conduct research.Footnote 26
All of this suggests that university-based research faculty now work at institutions where what they do is increasingly irrelevant to the financial health of the institution, to the “learning outcomes” of the students, to the development of public policy, or to the accumulation and transmission of knowledge in society. This will not change simply because graduate students are encouraged to spend a year at think tanks, or op-ed pieces are counted towards tenure, however desirable these experiences might be in themselves (and I think they would indeed be valuable).
Research and Engagement in an Open Access World
Perhaps we should think again about the purposes of universities, and of scientific research, and ask whether in our current institutional configurations and professional guises we are serving those purposes. Insofar as universities are actually places devoted to learning of various kinds—both methodological (how to do laundry, make an argument, conduct an experiment, or run a regression) and substantive (what is cleanliness, friendship, a lunar eclipse, or democracy), then all of what we do in our professional lives should be about learning—our own, as researchers, and that of others, notably our students but also presumably a wider public of policy elites and fellow citizens.
There are many more places and more media in which learning and teaching take place today—classrooms and wet labs are being supplemented and sometimes supplanted by “learning commons” and computer simulations, students are becoming “peer mentors” and teachers are attending summer seminars and professional association workshops on new developments in their field. Just as proliferating research networks are eroding barriers between national scientific establishments (not to say once rival universities), so too is “life-long learning” erasing the categorical distinctions between student and teacher. The hierarchical relationship of deference once accorded those with privileged access to information is fast disappearing, replaced by collaborative learning, crowd-sourcing, social networks, and webs of reciprocity.Footnote 27
The youth of today, who are the first generation to have mastered—indeed to have developed and disseminated—technologies they were not taught to use by their elders, do not have much regard for the institutional hierarchies that shaped the lives of older generations even two decades ago. A quick illustration from close to home in far-flung Egypt makes the point.
In August 2011, the AUC Student Union leaders hosted student leaders from across Egypt in a conference re-establishing the long-suspended Egyptian Student Union. AUC's Student Union was subsequently elected to a place on the executive board of the ESU. This is an indication of how dramatically the landscape in Egypt is changing; until this year, the only independent, elected student government in Egypt was at AUC and, in many ways, students across the country have looked to their counterparts at AUC for guidance in the new, freer Egypt. Unlike Mohamed Abou El-Ghar's passive and obedient students, AUC's have always been taught the signal importance of critical thinking and civic engagement,Footnote 28 and as a result AUC students, faculty, and alumni have been disproportionately visible in the January 25 revolution and its aftermath.
This outreach to the national Student Union contributed to student activism on the AUC campus as the semester got underway—AUC students could hardly be seen as models to other students if they seemed to be complacent about concerns at their home university—and we saw several weeks of tumultuous protests at the start of the semester.Footnote 29 Like other university administrations facing similar situations, we were surprised by the magnitude and the resonance of these protests. Yet unlike our counterparts elsewhere in Egypt (or, for that matter, in the United States), we did not call the police onto campus, nor did we expel the protestors, as several Egyptian private universities did when they faced similar calls for more transparency and lower tuitions. Instead, while we did not decrease tuition (like everyone else in Egypt, we are running a budget deficit), we invited the students to join governance committees, to examine our budget, and to propose reforms in how we allocate our resources. Six months later, the results were still modest but very gratifying; new proposals for how we might streamline our transportation services, equip our workers, enhance campus sustainability, and simplify registration all reflected serious and continued engagement by students, many of whom, of course, were also caught up in the country's continuing political turmoil. And, to the astonishment of my son who is a college student in the United States, many of the student activists at AUC are Facebook friends with their university president, and their preoccupations—from pop stars to political parties, social justice to soccer victories—are mine as well.
Does this change in the environment in which we operate—the appearance of an information-rich atmosphere and the consequent empowerment of students and citizens—mean a wholesale redesign of what it means to be a university in the twenty-first century? Probably not. Academics are, after all, creatures of habit, slow to change and rightly skeptical of faddish proposals. We are also, however, restless and hard to satisfy, committed by temperament and training to teaching and learning, discovery and invention, and today in the Arab world, at least, a willingness to experiment unleashes enormous energy, intelligence, and optimism. And as political scientists, we should be particularly alert to the implications of even modest institutional shifts. As Fernando Dominguez Rubio and Patrick Baert suggest, for example,
The development of new communication and information technologies … defies conventional hierarchies of expertise as well as the institutions through which knowledge has been customarily produced, circulated and legitimated. By enabling the creation of communities and bodies of knowledge that exist beyond the boundaries and control of hierarchical institutions, these technologies open the door to forms of political association and action which unsettle the traditional identification of the political with the formal structures of the state apparatus.Footnote 30
This is just as true in governance of universities as of polities, and as political scientists, we should be expected to recognize this change, study its implications, and use what we learn in our own workplace. Today's students are creating “communities and bodies of knowledge” beyond the classroom and the campus. We can ignore those communities and, like the Egyptian government, be surprised by the deep alienation and extensive organization of the “Facebook activists.” Or we can permit—indeed, welcome—their active engagement in the management of everything from their courses to their university, thereby gaining access to the enormous reservoir of energy, loyalty, and ingenuity they represent to create institutions that are more flexible, responsive, efficient and sustainable.
Political Science, the Spirit of Inquiry and Public Engagement
What is, or should be, unique about university life is its unmitigated devotion to the spirit of inquiry. It is the search for understanding that marks the academy, and which shapes both the opportunities and limits of its influence in the public sphere. The political scientists wishing to “bridge the gap” between academic scholarship and policy debate will need to revitalize the spirit of playful, inventive, open excitement that is, or should be, the hallmark of genuine education—and to do that they will need to remember that, unlike the think tanks and policy shops of the world, their principal line of work is, well, education. This means that they should be vying for undergraduates, not emulating their think tank colleagues in jettisoning teaching, and they should approach their audiences in the public sphere—among policymakers and in general public—just as they approach the most inventive of those undergraduates, with provocative ideas, suggestions, tools and instruments and prods to understanding.
Presenting the finished, polished, completed findings from research conducted in a political science department to policymakers today is rather like drawing a map of Europe on a blackboard: it is neither what today's policymakers need—it takes too long to produce, it is not interactive or mobile, it precludes questions; in short, it does not reflect the requirements of the audience, any audience, today—nor is it what a true political scientist is, or should be, really good at. Our contribution—to the lives of our students as to the work of our policymakers—should be more in the way of guidesFootnote 31 or coaches.Footnote 32 As such, we support and test, encourage and question those who are confronting the challenges of living in and governing human communities. The joy of learning is a spirit that can be reflected and replicated elsewhere—the “campuses” of Google and Microsoft come to mind—but it should be the hallmark of university life, and it should be reflected in the interaction of the denizens of universities with their communities, whether policymakers, neighborhood communities or, not least, students.
Walt catalogues some of the worries about the dangers of such interaction:
closer engagement with the policy world and more explicit efforts at public outreach are not without their own pitfalls. Scholars who enter government service or participate in policy debates may believe that they are “speaking truth to power,” but they run the risk of being corrupted or co-opted in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the same individuals and institutions that they initially hoped to sway. Powerful interests are all-too-willing to use the prestige associated with academic scholars to advance particular policy goals, and scholars are hardly immune to temptations that may cloud their judgment or compromise their objectivity. Furthermore, scholars who embrace the role of a “public intellectual” may be tempted to sensationalize their findings to attract a larger audience or find themselves opining on topics on which they have no particular expertise. Instead of improving the quality of public discourse, such behavior may actually degrade it.”Footnote 33
As Walt knows, however, the temptations of corruption, bad judgment and self-aggrandizement are hardly novel features of academic life; for many of us, the transparency associated with the erosion of traditional hierarchies and the access afforded by networks of collaboration is as likely to be a salutary corrective as a retreat from the public fray. Either way, “engagement” may have “pitfalls” but it is the social physics of the twenty-first century—there is no avoiding it and not much point in worrying over it. Walt would no doubt agree with Louis Menand's pithy suggestion in a slightly different context, that “the divorce between liberalism and professionalism as educational missions rests on a superstition: that the practical is the enemy of the true. This is nonsense. Disinterestedness is perfectly consistent with practical ambition.”Footnote 34
Moreover, of course, as attentive teachers have long known, most students learn better by doing than by reading about doing; more and more of our curricula will come under the rubric of “experiential learning.” For political science students, this will take many forms—all of them requiring engagement, whether with political parties planning electoral campaigns, legislators mobilizing parliamentary coalitions, local town councils debating environmental regulations and job losses, or university administrations grappling with trade-offs between raising tuitions and cutting services.
Efforts to persuade universities to adjust their criteria for hiring, promoting, and rewarding our colleagues to reward public engagement are certainly harmless, and may be useful, but they are unlikely to be the principal incentives for political scientists to acknowledge and embrace the changing opportunities presented by our new environment. Our claims to superior authority, and the special protections we assembled to guard it—academic freedom, tenure, university research budgets unsullied by market or government pressures—may once have helped ensure that our work would not be contaminated by the source of its funding or the desires of its intended recipients. But we can no longer rely on the reflexive deference of the less knowledgeable; expecting consumers or citizens to pay for something whose value they do not understand will no longer suffice. They can get information and will calculate its value—right in front of you, on their smart phone. Effective, influential political scientists will not be the cloistered but those who bring professional standards of rigor and probity to all of what they do, including engagement with the policy community and wider public.
We must all embrace opportunities to interact with others, be they our students, colleagues, policymakers (all three of whom may be, let us remember, the same individual at different times). Encouraging, conducting, and showcasing collaborative research across these fast-fading professional boundaries will be valuable, to them and to us. This should start with undergraduates, the first and often the best place for genuinely collaborative teaching and learning. Today, liberal arts colleges are encouraging student research not merely to provide assistants to their research-active faculty (though that is certainly an element, since faculty at good liberal arts colleges are no longer content to remain in the now devalued role of “merely” teaching faculty) but also because, as the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sarah AbdelRahmansFootnote 35 of the world have again made plain, undergraduates may have very good ideas. And in fact, so do many policymakers, not to say pundits, bloggers, and others whose credentials as classical political scientists may be non-existent. Card-carrying political scientists would do well to invest in collaborations with everyone—from Washington's policy pundits to Egypt's political activists.
The ancient rituals of our guild—our slow and deliberate systems of graduate apprenticeships, and of peer review and tenure, our attachment to “science” and its esoteric language as a shield against, as Rogers Smith suggests, the inevitable politics of studying politics—may have been valuable in creating and sustaining a community of scholars in a context in which information was rare. In today's information-rich world, however, they are fast becoming a sort of debilitating obsessive-compulsive behavior—a sign perhaps of our deep anxiety but, like all such conduct, self-defeating in their inhibition of the open, spontaneous engagement which fosters the spirit of inquiry in the world. In a world in which university professors are teaching less and university students are studying less, we should be worrying less about how many papers should count in a tenure dossier and more about how to embrace, foster, and support the lively world of teachers and learners beyond the academy—including our friends, colleagues, representatives and readers, consumers and constituents in the public sphere.
If we as political scientists are to deserve the regard of the public in the twenty-first century, it will be because we have engaged them on new terms—the terms of a century in which information is abundant and credentials are less important than the skill and knowledge they once certified. We need to surrender our view of ourselves as uniquely knowledgeable—as the repositories and carriers of exotic and precious cultural and scientific information—and refashion an identity as active and engaged practitioners ourselves, providing skill, understanding, and wisdom to those who are, or aspire to be, responsible citizens, lawmakers, advocates, and politicians—that is, our students and our policy makers. In doing so, we will create and sustain communities of learning that value our skill in a public sphere in which we ourselves are full participants.
