Posts tagged with arts.
Get out there and stop complaining
Reading the latest edition of Academic Matters, published by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, the following sentence in a piece on tenure jumped out at me: "Most academic work, specially in the humanities, is published for an audience smaller than a successful cocktail party, and the rest falls still-born from the press, ignored by citizen and colleague alike."
The statement is very true and goes to the heart of why funding for the liberal arts is not a public priority: the majority of liberal arts academics don't bother to communicate with the public.
Why is this? Are they stereotypical academic snobs who don't want to be associated with the unwashed masses, or is it a problem caused by the structure of the academy?
I attribute the primary reason for the disconnect being the complete lack of reward or recognition of the value in engaging an audience outside the academic bubble. To my academic readers, I ask the question: When was the last time you gave a public lecture outside an academic setting?
Therein lies the problem. Liberal arts academics are not leaving the academy and actually giving the public a reason to value their work. I shared pints with a tenured professor last week and we discussed this problem. This professor wants to deliver a public lecture on the topic of media and religion at an off-campus venue. The challenge is there are no incentives or supports for the professor to do so.
They cannot put this lecture on their C.V., they cannot count it toward their support to the university community, it will not be a "named lecture," and it does not count as research or teaching. In short, the academy gives no substantive value to this act of public engagement.
Yet, it is these acts of public engagement that are necessary if the liberal arts are to be valued by the general public. Academics often complain government funding is increasingly directed to research that can be "commercialized." While there are examples of research funding being directly tied to commercial applications, the change in funding models is more reflective of a general trend toward assessing value in government spending.
Blaming commercialization for new funding schemes allows the liberal arts to avoid self-reflection, a necessary exercise if the liberal arts are to reverse their downward spiral.
Taxpayers are demanding more value from government services and funding. Many people do not see the value in a lot of the liberal arts. It's up to liberal arts academics to convince the public of their value. Slapping an "arts matter" button on a briefcase and walking around campus isn't going to achieve this. Awareness events on campus will not, either.
Liberal arts deans across the country need to be bold, they need to burst the academic bubble that surrounds their faculties and encourage their academics to engage the masses.
We are living in an era of easy communication. Blogs can be set up in minutes, Twitter allows for instant communication and engagement, and the public thirsts for knowledge. So, why do academics continue to stay in their bubble, complaining?
Make off-campus engagement a requirement of the tenure process and give it the weight it deserves; engaging an audience of fifty citizens advances the academic mission more than a peer-reviewed article read by maybe a dozen people.
Tagged with
funding,
arts,
engagement,
liberal,
public
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JOEY COLEMAN