Jenny Kim / Inside Higher Ed
David Perry has written hundreds of op-eds, published in The New York Times, The Nation and The Washington Post, among others. In The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Perry shares how he has navigated the risks and rewards of this work. As the associate director of undergraduate studies in the History Department at the University of Minnesota, Perry makes the case that op-eds are actually one of the professionally safer ways for scholars to engage publicly—safer, he argues, than the classroom itself—and that fears of harassment and professional fallout are largely out of proportion to the risks. We talked about how he got started, what he does with hate mail and how drafting an op-ed can feel a lot like teaching an 8:30 a.m. Monday class.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TPS: Among your first op-eds was one about eugenic abortion published in The Minnesota Star Tribune, written while you taught at a Catholic university. What prompted it, and how did its publication unfold?
DP: In 2008, I was an assistant professor [at Dominican University], and Sarah Palin, who was nominated for vice president, had a son with Down syndrome about the same age as my son [who also has Down syndrome]. I was frustrated with a lot of the conversation around it and wrote a piece that was implicitly pro–reproductive choice.
At Dominican, one of the promises to every student was that we would teach them how to take a stand. After years of teaching, particularly issues around disability, I thought I should also take a stand on something I care about. That propelled me to do this work more seriously.
Before I was out of bed [on the day the article published], I had emails from my dean, the provost and the president praising the piece for taking a position. From then on, I knew that as long as I was thoughtful, measured and supported what I was saying, I would be fine there.
I credit this with some generations of Midwestern Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters who believed in Catholic social teaching. A lot of schools have mission statements about making the world a better place, but those sisters really believed it, and they pushed us and the leadership to believe it, too.
Q: In your book, you write that significant professional consequences for academics have come more from social media posts and off-the-cuff appearances and less from considered public essays. What are your thoughts behind this?
A: Writing an op-ed is professionally safer than many other forms of public engagement that academics might do. Teaching is significantly more dangerous. A student might record what you say in a classroom, and then they control what gets released to the public.
In an op-ed, you’re going through mediated process where you have significant control over what you’ve written and what’s connected to your name. And you’re writing for outlets that themselves do not want to be sued. They may or may not care about you, the writer, but they definitely care about themselves. That’s a more controlled environment to articulate important or controversial ideas.
Q: Does public conversation need scholars who are willing to weigh in on difficult topics?
A: A robust and diverse public discourse requires some people like us, those with deep expertise, to engage directly. If we don’t, those spaces will be filled when a news cycle happens. It’s better when they’re filled by people who actually know things.
Q: We’ve discussed what scholars give the public, but what’s in it for the scholar?
A: I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of editors, and I’m now many hundreds of pieces into my writing career. Editors are very individual, very idiosyncratic. They’ve pushed me to think about what the audience does and doesn’t know. They help me take a complicated idea and articulate it much more sharply.
In the world of volunteer, unpaid [academic] editorial and review labor, it’s not reasonable to expect that would happen. I feel incredibly grateful to the to the [newspaper and magazine] editors who have taught me over the years.
Q: You write that you want to neither minimize nor overstate the dangers of writing a risky op-ed. What fears are out of proportion to the risks?
A: Most pieces of public writing do not generate any significant reaction at all, let alone a significant hostile reaction. The stories people have heard of widespread harassment campaigns are extreme outliers.
But it does happen, and it happens in ways that are intensified according to categories of identity with increasing marginalization. When I’ve had it go really bad, it’s been because people discover that I’m a Jew. Otherwise I’m a cis, white man and I tend to mostly skate.
The social contract between me and my students requires me to listen to them even if they are mean, rude or dismissive. I need to try to engage them. But academics do not owe their attention to people responding on social media or in media outlet comment sections and the people sending you emails. They are not your students.
I get hate mail constantly—almost every time I write an essay. I read the first two sentences and say, “Oh, that’s hate mail,” and I hit delete, unless it seems like it’s actionable and I need to call the cops. But I don’t read it.
Q: For a scholar who opens a blank document tonight to draft the op-ed they’ve been postponing, what advice can you offer?
A: Instead of [thinking you’re] writing an op-ed, imagine you’re going into a classroom. You have 50 minutes. It’s 8:30 on Monday morning. You’re not quite sure who was signed up for your class, but you know they will be semi-awake and at least semi-interested. What are you going to do with your really complicated thing you want to talk about in those 50 minutes?
You have been trained, or at least self-taught, as a teacher. That’s a great place to begin the process of figuring out how to write an op-ed that is accessible to a broad variety of readers. That’s also how you can write something you can live with that’s not saying something that flattens the complexity.
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