Are we academics lazy?
I read this piece, “Downplaying your value isn’t humble – it’s lazy” by Colleen Bordeaux, a couple of weeks ago and I can’t get it off my mind. In particular, the following line has been circling my brain on repeat, “It puts the work on others to infer your value, then blames them for not getting it.”
This hit me like a ton of bricks right in the gut. Ouch.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve thought multiple times on multiple occasions, something to the effect of, “Why don’t they get that I’m right!!??” or “Why can’t they see that this program would work, and be great??!!” Only to watch poor decisions get made, or other programs be implemented by people who didn’t know what I know. Aside from being disappointed when the outcomes weren’t what any of us would have wanted, I also can’t help but to feel a little superior saying to myself, “I told you”.
The sentence above turned that all upside down.
I’m not sure about all of you, but one of the learnings I took from my training in grad school was the importance of ideas. Specifically, the emphasis on “good ideas”. Good ideas were so good that they just caught on and were taken up by the people who needed them. An example from my generation might be smoking. I knew from the first second I saw and could talk about smoking that it was bad. You shouldn’t start and should quit if you had started. That knowledge was taken for granted in my house, because it’s something my parents believed and instilled in my siblings and me. Of course, I now understand that the stop smoking campaign took decades to gain steam and remains an important public health intervention to this very day.
The reality is that every idea that’s had any impact on the world had a group of people standing behind it explaining its value and its importance over and over and over again. I also now understand that ideas by themselves have no value. We (society, culture, community etc) put value on them. What do I mean by this?
Let’s go back to the smoking example. At one point in time, it was advertised as low risk 😳 and “cool” (and yes, I know that this was in fact false advertising, and extensions of that practice can be seen everywhere today). However, as the amount of data demonstrating its ill effects increased a group of dedicated healthcare providers and public health advocates worked to change the value we placed on this activity.
The Bordeau article helped me to see that as an academic I have been assuming that the “goodness” of my ideas was sufficient for them to be taken up and used. But if I am not actively participating in shaping the value of my ideas to the larger world and working to have them taken up, how are people going to know they are useful? And worse yet in our current moment my non-participation runs the risk of allowing my ideas to be co-opted and used inappropriately.
So, do I think academics are actually lazy? No. But I do believe that maybe we’ve taken for granted the inherit value those outside of academia may see in our work. This has also been reinforced by an incentive structure that is largely disconnected from measuring real impact on the world – I see you T&P guidelines focussed on articles published and grant dollars obtained.
Assuming for the moment that this is true, how do I think about my own work now? How I talk about my work with external audiences? The kinds of questions I ask about my topic areas of interest? I don’t have answers yet. But I do know this new perspective changes a LOT. I’ll keep you posted on how I make out. In the meantime, I’m curious about what you think?
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