Academic Experts and the General Public Must Learn How to Understand Each Other

Imagine a company where revenue is generated through a combination of customer fees and government subsidies. The company’s product depends on intellectual capital, and people spend years acquiring the training they need to join the team. Due to government funding, the company is subject to significant external regulation and needs to maintain its paying customer base to survive.

However, the incentive structure of the organization encourages employees to put their efforts into advancing in their field and exchanging information through professional channels. It does not reward them for sharing their findings with their customers or the public in non-technical ways. It often discourages such efforts by penalizing people who take time away from other job duties.

When political or public support for the company drops or revenues decrease, the prevailing attitude in the corporation is that what they do is too complicated to explain to the general public, who “should” simply accept and respect their expertise. Welcome to the world of higher education.

Humans have managed to dominate the world because we have developed the ability to communicate with each other better than any other species. As we moved from verbal means of sharing knowledge to reading and writing to communicating digitally, we have gotten extremely proficient at sharing information and building complex bodies of knowledge in various areas.

But the way we transmit that information hasn’t kept pace with the need. While one-room schoolhouses are now a rarity, we still struggle to offer equitable instruction to children across our public education system. The prevailing system of funding schools based on tax revenues means that the students in poor neighborhoods often attend schools that lack the resources to provide them with the educational background they need to keep up with children from more affluent neighborhoods.

In the past, this wasn’t as big of a disadvantage. In 1960 less than 50 percent of Americans had completed a high school diploma, but in today’s world, entry-level jobs often require a minimum of a high school diploma and additional training or education. Recognizing the economic value of education, Americans are starting college in higher numbers than ever before, but less than half of those who start complete a degree.

Coupled with the explosive growth of knowledge in fields ranging from traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields to social sciences and the humanities, it has become increasingly clear that relying on a short period of educational exposure to create an informed citizenry is ineffective. And yet, as a society, we are in dire need of people who know to help us understand and advance these fields and to solve pressing problems, including climate change, economic stability, and managing large-scale public health risks such as the recent Covid-19 pandemic.

Certainly, there are plenty of academics studying, writing, and talking to each other about these topics but there is rarely much incentive to spend time telling people outside their discipline what they are working on. The typical tenure and promotion guidelines faced by young faculty members and the annual review guidelines used to evaluate people on an ongoing basis strongly prioritize research productivity over teaching. They give virtually no credit to written materials or public presentations that serve as informal sources of continuing education and enable non-academics to learn about crucial topics in accessible, jargon-free ways.

In addition, faculty who attempt to build research programs by collaborating directly with colleagues in the community to explore problems and design solutions for mutually engaging issues often find that their research is considered less rigorous or important than more traditional approaches precisely because it is disseminated in less technical, public-facing ways. In short, the relationship between the public and the people who have devoted their lives to higher education has come to resemble a dysfunctional relationship. Both feel that the other side is not listening to them.

Members of the general public find those of us in higher education to be aloof, elitist, and unwilling to explain our research or to share knowledge with people outside their field. Meanwhile, faculty, who have spent decades mastering their field, are astounded by individuals who assume that doing some reading online qualifies them to support or dismiss complex theories and facts that have taken others years to master.

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Perhaps if we encouraged and rewarded faculty for explaining what they are doing to lay people and their peers, we could alter this equation. At the same time, members of the public need to acknowledge that they wouldn’t hire a plumber to repair their electrical system, so it makes sense to listen to people who have experience in specialized areas.

Just as couples function better when they communicate and play to each other’s strengths, we could work together more effectively to solve our most complex social and scientific challenges. I am sure that a company that refused to explain itself in terms that its shareholders and customers could understand would find itself unable to remain viable in a rapidly changing world.

Likewise, investors who dismiss the need to listen to people with the expertise they don’t are unlikely to make a good return on their investment. As the pandemic has demonstrated, lives are at stake if we don’t start talking and listening to each other.