The World Beyond the Ivy-covered Walls
The community of scholars must overcome its disdain for all things nonacademic.
Recently, Dr. Louise Richardson, executive dean of the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study and an expert on terrorism, got the kind of fawning treatment on Salon.com that the media usually reserves for such weighty topics as the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes baby pictures. Using phrases like “dispassionate” and “admirably clearheaded,” the feature writer praised Richardson for “effectively demolish[ing] virtually every myth that the Bush administration has promulgated about terrorism, and demonstrat[ing] why its policies have greatly increased the threat to the United States.”
Now for those of you who don’t read much beyond the rarified air of Diverse and other higher education publications, I can assure you that those are words of high praise indeed.
Media coverage of academia is usually something to be avoided; something that generally penetrates no deeper than spoofs of cultural studies panels at the annual Modern Languages Association convention. Occasionally, a snotty putdown of some academic’s book will appear in your local paper’s book review page. But that’s often as far as it goes.
So to read such a serious treatment of an academic figure — to hear her describe how she “emerged from her academic shell” because lives were being lost — was to glimpse a world in which the academic mission of fearlessly seeking out new knowledge suddenly mattered to the world.
Then, of course, I read the e-letters in response to the article: “Thank God this book was written by an academic,” wrote a self-described conservative, “because no one will ever read it.”
