Bearing Witness

The storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was a ghastly bookend to an American presidency unlike any other in this nation’s history. President Trump began his term in 2017 by promising to end “American carnage” and “make America great again.” He ended it last week by encouraging a violent coup against democracy.

Those developments provide only the latest reason why academics should speak out publicly. We need to lend our voices to the work of preserving and reforming the political system that the president and his allies have tried to destroy.

I must admit that, after more than 40 years of teaching, it was hard for me to find my bearings at the start of the Trump era. But the more I saw the damage the president was doing to public discourse, and to the simple idea that truth matters, the more I became convinced that my academic colleagues and I needed to so something to address what was happening in the United States.

Doing so required spending less time in cloistered conversations with each other and more time drawing on our expertise to speak to a public audience. At this moment in our history, too much was at stake for college and university teachers to stand idly by, to ignore the noise, keep our heads down and persist in our teaching and research, as we did before the current president came on the scene.

So I decided to take the plunge and joined the conversation about the issues and outrages of the day.

I have sometimes felt like an envoy from a place where facts still matter to a world in disarray. I have left comfortable routines behind and devoted energy that might have produced more specialized contributions to my field’s journals in order to illuminate public issues, participate in public debate, and speak truth to power. Even old academics can learn new tricks.

I pledged myself to follow a few rules: leave the jargon behind. Write and speak to all citizens in ways they might find compelling. Help them see what I know to be true even when they seem uninterested in, or hostile to, that enterprise. Get into the arena.

None of this came easily or felt natural.

Part of my difficulty came from the fact that I have long sought to keep my political views out of my classes and off my campus. I publicly eschewed using my position to become what I once derisively called an “advocacy academic.”

More than 30 years ago, the sociologist Susan Silbey and I published an essay entitled “The Pull of the Policy Audience.” We examined the involvement of academics in the early New Deal and took to task our colleagues who followed in their footsteps by conducting scholarship designed to promote political causes.

There and elsewhere, I was highly critical of public intellectuals, who, as Russell Jacoby notes, are those “writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.” Their work seemed to sacrifice rigor in order to reach people outside the academy, and it did little to advance the academic fields that accorded them the platform from which they spoke.

I confess that I was one of those faculty members who, as Arizona State University professor Devoney Looser puts it, hung on “tenaciously to the notion that speaking exclusively to the fewest, smartest people is evidence of thinking the deepest, best thoughts.”

As I tried to get a foothold in the “commentariat,” I had to hope that few would remember what I’d written about pulls and policy audiences. But even without that worry, the transition was not easy. I have had to learn the tricks of the trade, most of which rub up against deeply engrained academic habits.

I learned: when you write, be short. Pithy. Colorful. Put the lead up front. Show you know something that others do not. Present a clear critique and policy recommendation. Preferably in 1,000 words or so.

Because I was not a regular columnist for any outlet, I also had to figure out when and how to peddle my wares in an environment where things move very quickly, where saying the unexpected and garnering likes, retweets and reactions -- often even hostile ones -- is the order of the day.

News makers are in a hurry. Speed counts. Deadlines matter. Be ready to drop everything when breaking news intersects with your expertise.

Which is what I did during Trump’s first State of the Union speech, when I saw him make outlandish claims about allegedly escalating violence plaguing America’s cities. Right then I turned off the television, rushed to my computer and produced a piece that CNN.com published. It drew on my studies of violence to debunk Trump’s false claims.

Since then, my writing has appeared in Inside Higher Ed and a variety of other media outlets, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate and The Conversation, as well as CNN. But along the way, I have had to get used to the fact that the usual response to my pitches and submissions would often be no response at all. Nada. Not even an acknowledgment that editors received or read what I submitted.

When they do answer, the usual response is that they will pass. Do they learn this way of saying no in editor school? Pass, such a gentle term for rejecting something. It is as if the editor is obliquely acknowledging missing an opportunity. And never an explanation for this result. No peer reviews with close readings, extended commentaries and suggestions for improvement. Revise and resubmit? Forget about it.

But I admit it is great when you catch the moment and an editor responds, “We’ll take it.”

The rewards: seeing things appear quickly, using scholarly expertise for the public good and sometimes reaching a large audience.

One my pieces got more than 300,000 hits, substantially more, I suspect, than the total number of readers for all of my academic work over the course of a 46-year career. And the day an op-ed appears, I have the pleasure of friends and neighbors who never read my academic work telling me how much they enjoyed or learned from it.

Combating Half-Truths and Lies

There are, however, clear downsides, like seeing your work vanish from public view just as rapidly as it appeared. The market for yesterday’s news, let alone last week’s op-ed, diminishes fairly quickly.

I also have to admit that I am not sure what my colleagues think. I wonder if they regard me with the same jaundiced eye that I once cast on the public intellectuals and the policy audience.

Moreover, colleges and universities don’t really know how to assess public writing. While communications offices may praise public writing and further promote our work, it doesn’t seem to “count” with deans or promotion committees in a way that helps secure jobs, tenure or salary increases.

Has any piece I’ve written about Trump’s authoritarianism, former attorney general William Barr’s fecklessness or the continuing cruelty of America’s death penalty changed anyone’s mind or otherwise made a difference? I cannot see it yet, and I’ll never know.

But in the world that Trump leaves behind, there is no sign that the assault on truth will end. I will continue to write and offer fact-based arguments for a public audience.

As Edward Said rightly noted, public intellectuals help the societies in which they live to maintain “a state of constant alertness.” Their work serves their fellow citizens by manifesting “a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along.”

I took on the role Said describes to combat Trump’s half-truths and insidious lies. I am staying with it, though, in the hope that I can help alert Americans to injustices and dangers that my expertise helps me see and understand.

I will continue to write as I have in order to bear witness to the power of truth and the possibility of building a more just and less dangerous society. I hope others who have not already done so will join in that work -- and that colleges and universities will encourage them to do so.