The Engaged Scholar: Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World 9781503629257

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T H E

E N G A G E D

S C H O L A R

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T H E

E N G A G E D

S C H O L A R Expanding the Impact of Academic Research in Today’s World

A N D R E W

J .

H O F F M A N

stanford briefs An Imprint of Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hoffman, Andrew J., 1961– author. Title: The engaged scholar : expanding the impact of academic research in today’s world / Andrew J. Hoffman. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020055228 (print) | LCCN 2020055229 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503614819 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503629257 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education, Higher—Political Cover design and photographs: Rob Ehle (book pages; Renaissance Center, Detroit) Typeset by Classic Typography in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

CONTENTS

Preface   vii 1   The

Engaged Scholar   1

2   Limitations

of the Academic Reward System   24

3   The

Rules of Engagement   44

4   The

Scholarly Uses of Social Media   76

5   Engagement

and the Arc of Your Career   113

Acknowledgments    135 Notes    137 About the Author    165

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P R E FA C E

Why did you choose to become a professor? When I feel myself losing track of the purpose or meaning behind my work, I return to this simple question. And my answer is equally simple—I want my research, teaching, and outreach to have a positive imprint on the world around me. Citation counts, A-level publications, and an h-index pale in comparison to that simple outcome. Yet our reward systems elevate these metrics, and they don’t come close to capturing my deeper purpose. So, that leaves it to me to decide what is valuable and important in my academic pursuits. I know that that kind of independence is hard to assert, especially when you are early in your academic career. But as you advance, you will have more freedom to exercise your independence. For me, I keep in mind the challenge from Jane Lubchenco, Oregon State marine ecologist and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), that academic scholars must abide by “scientists’ vii

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social contract”—that they have an obligation to provide a service to society, to give value for the money provided by public funding, government grants, and tuition revenue.1 It is an obligation that is born out of both a societal need for the expertise that academics possess and a recognition of the responsibilities that come with the privileged life that academics lead. I am writing this at a particularly precarious time. The Covid-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc on our lives and our livelihoods. People are suffering and society needs answers. Yet many people are turning away from science, distrusting its conclusions and its motivations, and even questioning its assessment that the virus is real. This is happening because we are now immersed in an array of confusing and conflicting messages that question facts, blur the line between opinion and fact, and dismiss formerly respected sources of information as merely political interests pushing a partisan agenda. This, according to the RAND Corporation, is the existential crisis of our time.2 If we do not improve the scientific literacy of our public and political discourse, how can we make sense of the challenging issues we face? You can’t set policy or make informed decisions about nanotechnology, stem-cell research, nuclear power, climate change, vaccines and autism, genetically modified organisms, endocrine disruption, gun violence, or Covid-19 if you do not agree on a common set of facts to ground the conversation. To my mind, this existential crisis lays the gauntlet at the door of the Academy. If academic scholars do not provide the kind of scientifically grounded knowledge that society

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needs, who will? But this societal crisis is happening at a time when the Academy is facing a crisis of its own. Academic research is becoming increasingly irrelevant as the work becomes too insular, the language too opaque, the journals too inaccessible, and the cultural norms of disciplinary boundaries too balkanized. We need to break out of our siloed research communities and bring our work to a world that needs it. In the words of former University of Texas at Austin President Larry Faulkner: “The antidote to irrelevance is engagement of the university with the real needs and aspirations of the supporting society.”3 Not every academic must take on this role, but this book is a call to make that path more acceptable and legitimate for those who do, to enlarge the tent to be inclusive of multiple ways that one enacts the role of academic scholar in today’s world. Some may prefer impact in the world of scholarship, but others may wish to have more impact in the world of practice, bringing their insights and knowledge to directly solving the great challenges of our time. While both are needed, unfortunately the academic reward system steers people only toward the former. This very book that you are holding will not register highly in my annual review because it is not “academic.” A-level publications are the coin of the realm. But if you want to have impact in the real world, you must take your work beyond the academic publications and bring it to the world of practice. An illustration: I recently asked attendees of an academic seminar to raise their hands if they were concerned about climate change; everyone did. I asked how many

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devoted their research to the topic; most kept their hands up. I asked how many aimed that research at A-level academic publications; all hands remained raised. I asked how many felt that another A-level academic paper would change how society addressed the issue of climate change; most hands came down. This is the strange irony in which we find ourselves. And it is an irony that some have begun to question. A new generation of scholars is emerging into the field with a strong desire to make a difference in the real world. This book is for them in particular. Whether they are new PhD students just entering their degree programs, young professors just starting their careers, or mid-career professors who have begun to question the purpose behind their work, my hope is to inspire a career path rooted in rigorous research but expanded with the goal of relevant impact on practice within society. Even seasoned senior professors may find some value in these pages. It is never too late to consider the measure of your life’s work based on meaning and purpose instead of status, however defined. This book is not going to summarize the entire field of public engagement. While it will offer some coverage of the field, it will chiefly focus on the posture and spirit for adopting engagement as part of the academic portfolio. At times, it may stride into the domain of a polemic. But overall, it will be about amending the types of questions we ask in order to blend rigor and relevance, redirecting what we do with the answers to bring them to the atten-

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tion of those who need them, and recreating the institutional structures for supporting and accelerating changes in how we create and disseminate research. And it will be about offering hope. I have talked with many PhD students who entered their program with the desire to have real-world impact, make a difference, and improve society, but after just a couple of years they feel pushed into a corner and toward disillusionment. I don’t want them to let the spark die. I want them to hold a vision of their career that strives toward the elusive “Pasteur’s Quadrant”4 that will be discussed in Chapter 1. Public engagement has been the goal throughout my academic career. I study environmental issues because I care about preserving and protecting our natural world. I earned a joint doctoral degree between the schools of business and engineering and was held to that goal by a committee of advisors that included business school professors who asked about the theoretical rigor of my work and engineering professors who kept asking, “’What’s the point?” For me, the point is that I want to see the impact of my work in the thoughts, values, and behaviors of those I reach in business, policy, and society. My work stands on the shoulders of the social theorists who came before me. But I use that theoretical knowledge to understand and change the empirical world, not using the empirical world to contribute to theory within the academic literature. And as I have advanced in my career, the balance of my portfolio slowly shifted in its emphasis from academic to public audiences. I still write academic

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papers, but I write more books intended to span academic and lay audiences. I take my work to more public audiences through practitioner journals, web essays, radio interviews, and talks at business, government, and nonprofit conferences. I’ll speak to high school students, senior citizens, local community groups. I feel like I am fulfilling my purpose when someone approaches me after one of my talks to say that I changed the way they thought about an issue, or an executive tells me that I provided tools that can help them in their job today. I have the same feeling when my books appear in syllabi around the world or are assigned as required summer reading for incoming freshmen. Twice I have been invited to give a freshman convocation address, and the satisfaction I feel in reaching those young minds far exceeds anything I have felt in reaching my academic peers in the seminar room. In the end, these activities define the role of the academic for me, and I want to encourage other scholars to do the same when the occasion presents itself. I am a tenured full professor and that means I can do anything I want. I do not intend to cease academic work. But this stage of my career is an opportunity to branch out into domains where I can have real-world impact. Why don’t more senior faculty use the opportunity to experiment? In the words of one of my colleagues, “a problem with our field is that we have too many senior professors thinking like junior professors.” They chase the same publication counts that they did as junior pro-

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fessors because it feels safe. In the words of University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel: We forget the privilege it is to have lifelong security of employment at a spectacular university. And I don’t think we use it for its intended purpose. I think that faculty on average through the generations are becoming a bit careerist and staying inside our comfort zones. If we’re perceived as being [in] an ivory tower and talking to one another and being proud of our discoveries and our awards and our accomplishments and the letters after our name, I think in the long run the enterprise is going to suffer in society’s eyes, and our potential for impact will diminish. The willingness of society to support us will decrease.5

I have seen some senior professors who, upon reaching retirement, became embittered because their work was not fully recognized by the world. But I wonder what those professors had done to make the work known by the world? Did they write articles in academic journals and think they had contributed to public discourse? For the most part, neither the general public nor lawmakers read them. People will not search out our work in academic journals. We must bring it to the public. But, other interests are beating us to the punch, publishing their own reports, often with a political agenda, and using social media to have far more impact on public opinion. Add to this changing landscape a rise in pseudoscientific journals,6 and we must face the reality that if we continue to write only for specialized scholarly journals, we become relegated further to the sidelines.

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As professors we have an opportunity, indeed an obligation, to bring our work to the world. I once heard it proposed that professors should, upon receiving promotion to full professor, be required to write a book that pulls together the 15 to 20 years of their research and aggregates it into a cohesive whole—a book aimed at a lay audience. What an experience that would be! It would both terrify professors and change the view that they hold for their work and its purpose. The role of full professor is a rare and wonderful gift. Should we not use that gift to make a real and lasting difference in the world? Should we not learn new skills and models for how to play a new role, and see our careers in the long arc that leads to that possibility? The seeds for that possibility must be planted early. One cannot shunt all interest in engagement aside for the 15 to 20 years it takes to get a PhD, tenure, and promotion to full professor, and then expect to suddenly reignite the passion. We must cultivate that passion while recognizing the expectations and demands of the institutions in which we live and work. Then, when we are ready, we will have found the voice to contribute to society at a time when society most certainly needs us. Now, more than ever, we need engaged scholars who can bring their expertise to the world, informing public and political discourse on the great challenges of our day. For this to happen, we need a more socially literate scientific community to engage a more scientifically literate public. We need scientists who can be effective commu-

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nicators of what science does, how it does it, what it tells us, and what it means. We need scholars who can take complex issues and ideas and make them understandable to all demographics, young and old, poor and affluent, liberal and conservative. I hope this book stirs enough scholars to begin, or affirm, their journey toward that goal and in so doing make a difference in the world.7

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1  THE ENGAGED SCHOLAR

The times are uncertain for academia as it faces what many consider to be a crisis of relevance.1 New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about the problem in this way: “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.”2 Startlingly large numbers of people are dismissing the conclusions of science as mere opinion, preferring to believe more simplistic accounts of our challenges from other sources that package information in a more convenient and tidy form. A January 2015 Pew Research Center study found “stark fissures between scientists and citizens on a range of science, engineering, and technology issues.” For example, 87 percent of scientists believed that climate change is due mostly to human activity, compared to only 50 percent of the American public; 87 percent of scientists accepted that natural selection plays a role in evolution, while only 32 percent of the public 1

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agreed; 88 percent of scientists thought that genetically modified foods are safe to eat, but only 37 percent of the public agreed.3 In such an environment, Jenny McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can lead parents to choose not to vaccinate their children for fear of autism, despite the vehement rejection of that supposed causal link by the world’s medical institutions.4 This is a cause for concern. The conclusions of scientists have been caught up in the so-called culture wars,5 with their work being delegitimized as mere opinion in a world of hyperpolarization that makes meaningful dialogue on some issues fruitless if not impossible. A July 2015 Pew Research Center study found that climate change and energy policy in particular were more affected by ideology than food safety, space travel, and biomedicine.6 This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the public is not well versed in science. According to the California Academy of Sciences, the majority of the U.S. public is unable to pass even a basic scientific literacy test,7 and the National Science Foundation reported that two-thirds of Americans do not clearly understand the scientific process.8 A 2015 survey by Research!America found that twothirds of Americans could not name a single living scientist. Of the one-third that could, half named Stephen Hawking (who died in 2018).9 This lack of knowledge coupled with an increased degree of antagonism toward science prompted National Geographic to devote its March 2015 cover story to “The War on Science.”10

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The Covid crisis of 2020 laid bare the extent to which science’s authority and legitimacy have been degraded. Large swaths of the American public prefer to believe convenient conspiracy theories that the pandemic is a hoax and that infection and death data are fabricated. Pseudoscience,11 misinformation, and so-called alternative facts are increasingly corroding our civic sphere, even to the point that there have been threats against medical professionals who present science that contradicts the unfounded theories.12 Numerous factors explain these disconnects between scholars and much of the public, such as motivated reasoning,13 political partisanship,14 threatened political or economic power,15 social media, the 24-hour news cycle, and “a general weakness in civic education, media literacy, and critical thinking.”16 People cling to the comfort of their beliefs and values when the complexity of scientific evidence challenges them.17 But another explanation for today’s distrust of science deserves special attention: scientists, themselves, have been ineffective or disengaged in explaining the gravity of scientific findings. While surveys show that academics often “believe the public is uninformed about science,” they do not see it as their role to inform, mostly because they “do not believe there are personal benefits for investing in these activities.”18 Through our academic culture, rewards, and concerted effort, we have become a field of “brick-makers.” Bernard

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Forscher leveled this critique more than 50 years ago,19 lamenting that academic scholarship was becoming fixated on generating lots of pieces of knowledge—what he called “bricks”—but was far less concerned with putting them together into a cohesive whole that housed and conveyed the corpus of their inquiry. With time, he worried that brickmaking would become an end in itself. Today, his fears are becoming true.20 Contemporary academic success lies in publishing A-level academic journal articles that make incremental contributions to theory, not summarizing the broader contributions of the community of scholars. Specialization, not generalization, is the signal of academic rigor. The conventional rules of academic tenure and promotion steer us all in this direction. Today, with some notable exceptions, few scientists are building an edifice, telling a whole story as it exists, and connecting new pieces of information that may be necessary to tell the next chapter in the story. Fewer still are telling that story for the public and policymakers, the very people who can put it to use. Instead we are encouraged to make bricks that are cited by other brick-makers. The predominant focus on A-level journals leads us to pursuits where practical relevance is overshadowed by theoretical rigor; empirical evidence is used to inform theory, not the other way around. Taken to the extreme, some view any speaking to the general public as a distraction from our “real” work or as an anti-intellectual waste of time.21 The increasing insularity of our individual academic fields tends to distance us from the

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worlds around us.22 At its extreme, we find ourselves talking to smaller and narrower academic audiences, using a language that even well-educated readers do not understand, publishing in journals they don’t read and asking questions for which the public has little concern. Whether this work could create real-world change is a question rarely, if ever, asked. Nicholas Kristof argued that academia is in thrall to a “culture of exclusivity” that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience,” leading to his conclusion that there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”23 This is dangerous for both society and the university. So serious in fact that the RAND Corporation calls it the existential crisis of our time and a threat to U.S. democracy. In a 2018 report titled Truth Decay, they warn that “in national political and civil discourse, disagreement over facts appears to be greater than ever. Opinions are crowding out and overwhelming facts in the media, and Americans are placing less faith in institutions that were once trusted sources of information. This shift from facts and data in political debate and policy decisions has farreaching implications: It erodes civil discourse; weakens key institutions; and imposes economic, diplomatic, and cultural costs.”24 The report concludes that if we can’t solve this threat, we can solve nothing else. Toward finding a solution, the Academy has much to offer. Scientifically derived facts and analysis are our stock and trade, and we have an ability to inform the

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general public and our politicians about the nature of our problems and potential remedies. The challenge of the RAND report is a challenge for the Academy. For the benefit of society’s ability to make wise decisions and for the benefit of the Academy’s ability to remain relevant, the academic community needs to accept its role in public engagement. Those who create knowledge must find ways to move it beyond the ivory tower. While data show stark gaps between public perceptions and scientific conclusions, public confidence in scientists themselves remains paradoxically strong.25 A 2019 Pew Research Center survey of Americans found public confidence in scientists high and on par with confidence in the military.26 Overall, 86 percent said they had at least “a fair amount” of confidence in scientists to act in the public interest. This included 35 percent who had “a great deal” of confidence, up from 21 percent in 2016. Among the British public, the most trusted professions in 2019 were nurses (94 percent), doctors (91 percent), teachers (87 percent), professors (85 percent), and scientists (83 percent). Professors increased by 15 points and scientists by 20 points since 1983.27 But politics infects even this kind of data. More Democrats (43 percent) than Republicans (27 percent) have “a great deal” of confidence in scientists. Sixty percent of the American public say that scientists belong in public debates, but only 43 percent of Republicans agree with this statement compared to 73 percent of Democrats. Sixty-two percent of Democrats say that scientists’ judg-

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ments are based solely on facts, while 55 percent of Republicans say scientists’ judgments are just as likely to be as biased as other people’s and a slight majority of Republicans (56 percent) say scientists should stay out of policy debates.28 A 2019 survey found that 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the way things are going in the country.29 In short, the public’s relationship with science is complicated. But for those who wish to enter the field at this complicated time, there is both a seeming inevitability and an opportunity. While some scholars do not hold an interest for public engagement, increased engagement appears unavoidable in an emerging context where a college degree is becoming too expensive, the academic disciplines in which those degrees are conferred are narrowing in specialization, the people who populate those disciplines become further removed from empirical reality, and external critics are asking questions about the value they provide to society. The role of the academic scholar in society is in flux. And, while a 2015 survey found that only 59 percent of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) scientists said that this is a good or very good time to begin a career in their field, down from 67 percent in 2009,30 many are entering the field with an evolving definition of what that means, specifically adding engagement to their career.31 There appears to be a demographic shift in play, one in which young scholars are seeking more impact from their work. Many graduate

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students report that they have chosen a research career precisely because they want to contribute to the real world: to offer their knowledge and expertise in order to make a difference. And many report that if a specific academic institution does not value engagement or, even worse, discourages it, they will find a school that rewards such behavior or leave academia for think tanks, NGOs, the government, or other organizations that value practical relevance and impact. Jane Lubchenco has observed that younger scholars are not listening to the advice to “solidify your academic position before doing things that are risky. . . . They feel keenly invested in being part of the solution, not perpetuating the problem, [and] they are seeking ways to have meaningful careers that entail engagement.”32 Many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows express frustration with the barriers, disincentives, and discouragement that advisors and departments put in the way of their participation in community engagement activities and do not view the “job for life” represented by tenure as the ultimate goal. These people will be a source of vitality for the Academy, adding to the diversity and quality in the next generation of faculty. This is forcing the Academy to examine new efforts at public engagement and “the necessity and possibility of moving from interpretation to engagement, from theory to practice, from the Academy to its publics.”33 To many, the call for public engagement is an urgent return to our roots and a reawakening to the core purpose of higher education.34 It is part of what Lubchenco calls

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“scientists’ social contract,” a responsibility to devote their energies, passion, and work toward solving the pressing problems of the day in exchange for the funding they receive for the privileged life they lead.35 Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge, adds that “society gives universities their right or license to practice their work, universities in turn are charged with holding a mirror to society; a duty that sometimes requires institutions of higher learning to speak unpalatable truths that society might not want to hear.”36 But junior scholars need guidance on how to survive within an academic institution that still clings to the historic rules and norms that devalue public engagement and does not know how to train future scholars for the rapidly changing environment in which they will practice their craft. According to one survey at the University of Michigan, 56 percent of faculty felt that engagement activities were not valued by tenure committees.37 This book is an attempt at beginning to correct that deficiency. It is addressing questions that lie at the center of the individual career and go to the core of what the university of the 21st century is and will be.38 But this book is but one step. It is both a call for more research, support, and recognition into the ways in which our role as scholars is changing and simultaneously an attempt to begin to lay down some rules of engagement by which scholars can structure our professional identities. It is, at its root, a reexamination of how we practice our craft, to what purpose, and to which audiences.

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THE ROLE OF THE ACADEMIC IN THE WORLD

To understand the role of the academic scholar in the world, we must begin with an understanding of the context as it was created after World War II. And bringing that thinking up to the present, we can begin to structure a model of the engaged scholar for the 21st century. What follows is an abbreviated story of that history and trajectory. Hist orical Con text

Vannevar Bush, formerly dean of engineering at MIT, oversaw the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, which carried out wartime military R&D. As the war was drawing to a close, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Bush asking him to consider how the lessons from wartime technology development could be used to shape a postwar research system in the United States.39 The resulting report—Science: The Endless Frontier40—was presented to President Harry Truman in 1945 and laid out the parameters by which we understand academic research today. In particular, it articulated a clear distinction between basic and applied research—where the former was “painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science” and the latter took that research toward practical and commercial ends—and argued that the government had a responsibility to support only basic research in the interest of industry and the country. He proposed a “linear” model

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by which the federal government supported basic research that anyone could draw from as a public good, and those entities would then develop applied research that would bring the new product to market. Following the Bush report, university research institutions began to pursue and be influenced by external moneyed interests, most notably the new National Science Foundation, which was created by Congress in 1947. Prior to World War II, the typical university was a more independent and, some would say, more pure educational institution than what we know today, with a core mission to create, preserve, and transmit knowledge and culture based on dispassionate reason.41 The federal government provided little to no research support, and U.S. industry typically developed its own research capacity or relied on European research output.42 But the war had destroyed much of that European capacity, and the GI Bill required universities to scale up to support the influx of students. As a result, following the recommendations of the Bush report, an immense amount of money flowed into American universities to increase research capacity and create “institutes, centers, bureaus and other essentially capitalistic enterprises within the academic community”43 to continue the flow of financial support. Between 1953 and 2012, federal funding for basic research rose from $265 million to $38 billion, while basic research at universities and colleges rose from $82 million to $24 billion, a more than fortyfold increase when adjusted for inflation. By

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contrast, federal funding for applied research rose to just under $10 billion in the same time period.44 These shifts were not universally welcomed and stirred a debate that continues today. In particular, critics feel that universities lost a great deal of their autonomy as they developed closer relations to the federal government. In the words of UC Berkeley sociologist Robert Nisbett, the university as an institution lowered its “office in American society, a diminution of the esteem in which it was held almost universally,” which ultimately “led to fragmentation of its authority in society.” In terms of the individual scholar, he wrote, “For the first time in Western history, professors and scholars were thrust into the unwonted position of entrepreneurs in incessant search for new sources of capital, of new revenue, and, taking the word in its larger sense, of profits.”45 C ontemporary Cr itiques

Vannevar Bush’s report casts a long shadow over our conceptions of research in today’s world, a shadow that many are reexamining. In 1997, a report by the Kellogg Commission evaluating university research structures concluded that “we are poorly organized to deal with many issues. As the nature of knowledge changes, our departmental structure has difficulty responding. As the challenges facing our communities multiply, we find it hard to break out of the silos our disciplines create. The world has problems; universities have departments.”46 In 1998,

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a report by the U.S. House of Representatives’ science committee concluded that, while Bush’s model “served us very well during the Cold War . . . with the de facto end of the Cold War, the Vannevar Bush approach is no ­longer valid.”47 The linear model that Bush laid out still permeates and governs nearly all aspects of scientific enterprise in the United States, including government agencies, national academies, and scientific advisory boards.48 This structure has compelled universities to pursue academic prestige (measured in terms of funding) and has created internal departmental divisions that hinder the ability to focus on social problems that are multidisciplinary in nature.49 As a result, Arizona State professor of science and society Dan Sarewitz warns: Advancing according to its own logic, much of science has lost sight of the better world it is supposed to help create. Shielded from accountability to anything outside of itself, the “free play of free intellects” begins to seem like little more than a cover for indifference and irresponsibility. The tragic irony here is that the stunted imagination of mainstream science is a consequence of the very autonomy that scientists insist is the key to their success. Only through direct engagement with the real world can science free itself to rediscover the path toward truth.50

Into this context comes the next generation of academic scholars. To what end shall they devote their energies? The next section summarizes four authors’ critiques of our existing model of scientific research.

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A LT E R N AT I V E M O D E L S

In an effort to break down Bush’s distinction between basic and applied research, Princeton professor of politics and public affairs Donald Stokes published Pasteur’s Quadrant,51 arguing that the tension between the quest for fundamental understanding and considerations of use is a false one. Where Bush argued that “basic research is performed without thought of practical ends,” Stokes argued instead that “use-inspired” research can break down the divide between basic and applied research and blend the two, shown as Pasteur’s quadrant in Table 1.52 Stokes summed up, “In the setting of American democracy, a broad awareness of how deeply modern science is inspired by societal need is more likely to renew the compact between science and government than is a generalized promise of a technological return to pure science.” While useful as a more realistic model for blending “rigor and relevance” in academic scholarship,53 Stokes’s matrix raises questions about how realistically clear the divides are between quadrants and how static is the nature of these domains. Next comes a critique of Bush’s linear model by which science moves through a process from basic research to applied research to application and ultimately to social benefit. In his book The Honest Broker, political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. argued that “it is characteristic of the science and politics of the early twenty-first century to see scientists actively engaged in political debates.”54 In that

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T ab le 1 Quadrant Model of Scientific Research Consideration of use?

Quest for fundamental understanding?

Yes

No

No

Yes

Pure basic ­research (Niels Bohr)

Use-inspired basic research (Louis Pasteur) Pure applied research (Thomas Edison)

source:  D. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 73.

context he sketched four distinct roles for scientists. He began by debunking the notion of the pure scientist who toiled in the lab free from consideration for use, utility, funding sources, or political implications as a myth best found in Hollywood movies. The science arbiter seeks to answer specific questions raised by decision-makers (such as the National Research Council or the National Academy of Sciences). The issue advocate aligns with a particular faction seeking to advance its interests through policy and politics. And the honest broker of policy alternatives remains independent of such factionalism by presenting the results of research in their entirety and without commentary. It is these last two categories that garnered the most attention in Pielke’s work. Where the issue advocate focuses on the “implications of research for a particular political agenda” and “tends to reduce the scope of available choice,”

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the honest broker seeks to “expand the scope of choice available to decision-makers . . . and explicitly integrate[s] scientific knowledge with stakeholder concerns in the form of alternative possible courses of action.” Therefore, Pielke warns, it is critical for scientists to distinguish between when they are describing science and when they are advocating what to do about a problem.55 Some scientists working on controversial issues, like climate change, have been critical of this distinction and the choice of terms that one role be defined as “honest.” But rather than elevating one role over another, Pielke concluded that each role has its proper place depending on the degree of value consensus and uncertainty (political and scientific) in a particular decision context. Pielke also stressed that academics must recognize the limits of academic inquiry in the political sphere, as it is impossible to impart the values of the Academy into politics. Instead, he advocated for academics to expand the scope of political debates by offering information and analysis but then allowing the process to play out. It is not the appropriate role for academics to “save” politics from its worst offenses relative to academic values.56 Rather, he argued, academics must enter political contexts with a fuller understanding of their essentially secondary role. Even when facts are agreed upon, the interpretation of those facts and how they should inform policy will be very different for different political actors. Jane Lubchenco, with experience in government as administrator of NOAA and undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere at the

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Department of Commerce, concurred, noting that “the concept of science is to inform, not dictate.” She explicitly acknowledged that “there are multiple factors that will likely affect decisions made by an individual or an institution. Unfortunately, all too often, [science] is not at the table, and it’s important to ask why.”57 Our next critique comes from Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, who challenged Bush’s model of funding as creating dependencies on government aid and ultimately uniformity in the model by which research institutions are structured. Crow called instead for a university design that undertakes research with public value explicitly in mind and assumes greater responsibility for the well-being of the community in which it resides.58 Countering the present era of increasing public higher education budgets, escalating college costs, the blind pursuit of academic rankings, and the quest for ever-increasing selectiveness, all of which tend to homogenize university structures, Crow’s model challenged each institution to engage in its own design strategies related to its respective context and objectives. Instead of the universal pursuit of the “gold standard” prestige models exemplified by elite universities, he sought to recast the purpose of university research as addressing regional, national, and global challenges through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary schools and institutes. Finally, a fourth critique of the research model laid down by Bush’s report came from UCLA professor of history Russell Jacoby in his book The Last Intellectuals,

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in which he challenged the notions of scholars of basic research as being somehow separate from society.59 He wrote that the last great generation of American intellectuals were born in the first decades of the 20th century. Since then, with the growth of university faculties and specialist structures, “they have been supplanted by hightech intellectuals, consultants and professors—anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but do not enrich public life.” Jacoby’s argument struck a nerve within academic circles where many saw his views as narrow, selective, and suffering from nostalgia. But in the introduction to the 2000 edition of the book, he replied that he still sees: a generational move from public intellectuals earlier in the century to university thinkers at its end. Intellectuals have not disappeared, but something has altered in their composition. They have become more professional and insular; at the same time, they have lost command of the vernacular, which thinkers from Galileo to Freud had mastered. Where the Lewis Mumfords or Walter Lippmanns wrote for the public, the successors “theorize” about it in academic conferences.

He added that, while much had changed between 1987, the year the book came out, and 2000, with efforts at public psychology, public sociology, public anthropology, and public humanities, “these professionals are not heeding but bucking institutional imperatives that reward esoteric rather than public contributions.” He

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hoped that his argument could be used as “a guidepost for the future. We, in academia, have lost something. We can resurrect it anew, not to go back to the past but to learn from the past to move into the future.” New York Times commentator David Brooks offered a similar critique in 2009 when he was asked which current scholars might have influence comparable to the mid-twentieth-century intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr. My favorite period of American social science is the period roughly between ’55 and ’65. And this was a period when you had a series of public intellectuals who were not lost in academic disciplines, but who are much higher-brow than your average journalist. And there was a whole community of people like this. . . . In my view, people like that today are . . . lost to the Academy . . . the milieu that created these big daring public intellectuals just isn’t there right now.60 MODELS FOR THE ENGAGED SCHOLAR

Within these critiques lie the foundations for the current public intellectual, or what this book calls the engaged scholar—a scientist or scholar who chooses to bridge the worlds of theory and practice or applied and basic research, engaging with public and political discourse even without certainty that their advice will be accepted, connecting deeply with the communities of which they are a part, and seeking to step out of the controlling structures of the academic environment as they advance in their careers.

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Will a paper in a top academic journal stir conversations by policymakers in Washington, business circles at the World Economic Forum, nonprofit circles at funder conferences, or people at the next dinner party you will attend? The likely answer is no. Most have never even heard of the top academic journals of our fields, much less read them. This critique is not a rejection of those journals, as they are the domains in which scholars perfect their arguments and reasoning, subjecting them to the critiques of peers. But the challenge is to then take those honed ideas further, bringing them to the communities that need them and can put them into effect. Where do the public intellectuals of today’s world write, read, and speak? Is it in academic journals, or is it academic work and expertise that is then brought to the pages of the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New Republic, National Review, Paris Review, or Foreign Affairs? Is it in white papers and speeches that are designed and channeled to reach new audiences outside the Academy? Is it in new forms of social media that go beyond the traditional outlets that have dominated our craft? The answer is all of the above—and, within them, the model of the engaged scholar begins to emerge. The goal in this book’s pages is not to change the role of academic scholars such that all must engage. Instead, the goal is to widen the range of definitions of what it means to be an academic scholar, allowing more diversity within the scholarly ranks. This diversity could be based on particular roles in the scientific ecosystem, the physi-

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cal and geographic context in which the scholar resides, or the scholar’s disciplinary home. Nick Pidgeon and Baruch Fischhoff, for example, offer a model for the coordination of multiple roles within science: (1) subject-matter experts to present the latest scientific findings, (2) decision scientists who can identify the most relevant aspects of that science and summarize it concisely, (3) social and communication scientists who can assess the public’s beliefs and values, propose evidence-based designs for communicating content and processes, and evaluate their performance, and (4) program designers who can orchestrate the process, so that mutually respectful consultations occur, messages are properly delivered, and policymakers hear their various publics.61

Others engage in public or political discourse based on their personal circumstances, value sets, beliefs, and goals. What makes an oceanographer from California reach out to the surfing community in Malibu, for example, will be very different from the reasons a sociologist connects with an urban regeneration project in Detroit. Finally, the spectrum of diversity for engagement will vary by discipline, where some are biased toward more applied orientations and others are biased toward more theoretical orientations, and the span between the two extremes broadens or thins. With such diversity, an assessment of the balance of teaching, research, service, and engagement can be done at the department or school level, and not just at the individual level. A department could seek diversity of

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skills within its faculty portfolio, where some scholars are stronger in one domain, others in another domain. Taken as a whole, the department can cover the entire spectrum of scholarly modes. Penn State professor of geosciences Richard Alley believes that our triumvirate of teaching, research, and service probably needs to be applied very stringently at the department or college level but may not need to be applied so stringently at the individual level. I suspect that wise administrators are able at some point to say this person is a fantastic teacher, this person is a fantastic out-reacher, this person is a fantastic researcher, and we have room for all three of them in the department which is doing teaching, research, and service. So we will have to sneak up on this one carefully. We cannot expect everyone for their entire career to do all three of those at a high level. They’re going to find their passion in one direction or another but recognizing it in the reward structure would be important. And so if there were one thing I could change within the university, it would be the reward structure and how we are defining excellence. We want you to do excellence, but I’m not going to define excellence as tightly as I once did.62

With this as a start, the remainder of this book develops a case for the engaged scholar along the following lines. Chapter 2 assesses the existing reward structure of the academic research enterprise, and in particular the insulating effect that its present focus on A-level academic publications has on scholars’ careers and the type of impact they create. Chapter 3 presents some alterna-

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tive “rules of engagement”; models and skills for stepping outside these existing structures and creating impact within real-world debates. Chapter 4 discusses the great disruptor of the present context—social media—and the extent to which engaged scholars can embrace this evolving medium in the quest for relevance within today’s public and political discourse, developing an entirely new vocabulary, including citation search tools, search engine optimization, DOI numbers, ORCID numbers, and many more. Finally, Chapter 5 concludes with a challenge for the engaged scholar to consider a career in its long arc with all its attendant stages and consider the signs that the world of academia is changing, albeit slowly, with conversations over practical impact being engaged in by faculty, deans, presidents, journal editors, journal reviewers, donors, and students. In the end, the question for the individual scholar in this book is foundational. Why did you choose to become a professor, and what kind of an academic do you want to be? In answering this question, the scholar— you, the reader—is reminded that you have chosen an important, gifted, and responsible career path. To what purpose will you use it?

2   L I M I TAT I O N S O F T H E AC A D E M I C REWARD SYSTEM

The world of academia is a world of continual judgment and pressure for conformity. Professors are evaluated by their number of publications, citation counts, h-index1 standings, grant revenues, lab size, and more. Universities and the schools within them are evaluated and ranked, and individual scholars, in turn, are ranked by their university affiliation. This happens in formal settings, like paper reviews, grant applications, annual reviews, thirdyear reviews, tenure reviews, and promotions to full professor. And it happens in informal settings like seminar rooms and private conversations. Academia is structured around an established hierarchy, and everyone is placed within it. If one does not have a clear sense of who they are and what kind of professor they want to be, they will become what the system pressures them to be. If one does not clearly know why they are in this line of work, the kind of professor they will become will be defined by others. To borrow a metaphor from MIT organizational 24

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development scholar Herbert Shepard, they will become a cormorant.2 Shepard wrote that a cormorant is a bird that is very good at catching fish. The fisherman knows this and places a band around a cormorant’s neck and a rope around its foot and throws it into the water. The bird is hauled back with a fish that it cannot swallow, and the fisherman takes the fish and throws the bird back in the water to get another. This happens all day. The bird is doing what it does well, but for someone else’s purposes. Like the cormorant, Shepard warns, your innate skills and drive can be the basis of exploitation. And every organization of which you are a part seeks to exploit those elements of you to fulfill their objectives. For example, “schools tend to drum into your mind the high desirability of those characteristics that tend to make society prosper—namely, ambition, progress, and success. These in turn are to be valued in terms of society’s objectives. All of them gradually but surely increase your greed and make a cormorant out of you.” Those values continue with the rewards systems of every organization that emphasizes your “needs for status, approval, power—and a career consists of doing the right things to move up the ladder.” If you do not stop and think carefully about a “path with a heart,” Shepard warns, you will follow a path that you ultimately did not want. And “by the time [you] discover that [your] path ‘has no heart,’ the path is ready to kill [you].” You must recognize how the constraints of the world in which you develop your vocation can lead you in a

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direction that you may not have chosen, and so chart your own path within those constraints. THE PRESSURES OF THE ACADEMIC REWARD SYSTEM

Academia is an apprentice system in which young academics must earn their place by demonstrating the ability to perform rigorous and grounded research. The route to tenure is based on academic scholarship, not public engagement. So public engagement must be a very conscious, deliberate, and careful choice. As I worked through the ranks, I came to think of my academic writing like it was cod liver oil. It may not taste good, but you have to swallow it to make yourself physically healthy. In the same way, academic publishing is difficult and at times does not feel good, but you have to do it to make yourself academically healthy. Another way to think of it is like learning to play the piano. You have to learn your scales and play the music of others before you can improvise successfully. And that’s the key insight. For some, perfectly mastering the instrument is the end (and I enjoy hearing them play). But for others, employing the instrument toward their own particular style is the goal, and thus the audience is rewarded with something that never existed before. Within academia the development of your craft lies in your ability to write papers in academic journals. As you advance and gain the security of tenure and full professor-

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ship, you can become a master of academic publications only or you can also begin to improvise and define the role for yourself. The rules of tenure create a bias for work done by a solo author within a single discipline for small communities that include colleagues within the discipline, journal editors, and tenure committees.3 But as you advance, you can question whether such a singular and narrow pursuit makes your academic work more marginal, insular, and disconnected from the questions of the real world, questions that often require multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative forms of investigation. The dominant rules and norms of academic success can blind scholars to what the public needs. Constant immersion in academic seminars and journals to the exclusion of practitioner seminars, meetings, and journals weakens our literacy in the languages and concerns of the larger public. For example, in 2015 Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor from Virginia Tech, assembled a research team to study the presence of lead in the water system of Flint, Michigan. But when he approached faculty at the University of Michigan to collaborate, his overtures were declined because of the political implications of the work. Edwards noted that “we have all this freedom, we have tenure, but we are the last people on the planet who would exercise that freedom because of your professional survival. . . . I am eternally optimistic about the future of academia and education, but I am dismayed at the current incentives, pressures and priorities throughout academia. We owe it to the public and ourselves to do better.”4 To understand

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how academic scholars could miss an opportunity to study something as important as the extent to which Flint’s water system was poisoning its residents, look to the reward system. A seminal paper in organizational behavior sums up the problem succinctly as “the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.”5 If you want to change behavior, change the reward system. T H E L I M I TAT I O N S O F T H E A C A D E M I C REWARD SYSTEM

Each spring, academic scholars perform the ritual of filling out their activities reports to summarize their research, teaching, and service accomplishments for the year. As we fill them out, most are keenly aware that the primary metric is research, and in particular research published in top-tier academic journals, the ones considered to have “impact.” Almost every university, school, and department has a list of “A-journals,” those it considers to be the most prestigious in their fields. And the rankers of institutions have similar lists, and many universities use them to measure their impact. For example, in the field of management, many business schools adopt the list of journals designated as important by the Financial Times.6 With such lists as a guide, academics establish their credentials by publishing in these journals, and universities grant tenure and promotion for the same. Various institutions even pay their professors a bonus

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(what some people would call a bounty) for publishing in such select journals. What every scholar should ask themselves is whether these journals are reaching the audiences they want to reach or are a steppingstone to reaching the audiences they want to reach. If the reality is that you have to publish in these outlets to get tenure, then publish there. But if your goal is to ultimately reach audiences in the world of practice, then consider how to adopt the role that Deb Meyerson, professor of education at Stanford, calls a “tempered radical”; fit and succeed within the norms of your chosen profession, but maintain an identity that may be at variance with those norms.7 Over time, you can begin to draw that variant identity out into the open and begin to change the culture from within. For example, if you decide that narrowing your scope to one type of journal which reaches one type of audience using one type of content and style is limiting your innovation and impact, step beyond those confines. For some, such a limitation became so frustrating that they chose to no longer publish within the A-journals. Randy Schekman, a Nobel laureate in cell physiology, announced in 2013 that his lab would no longer send research papers to what he called the “luxury” journals of his field—Nature, Cell, and Science—because of what he saw as their distortive encouragement of research that pursues narrow and mainstream lines of inquiry instead of more self-directed and innovative directions.8

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Many junior faculty are forced to slavishly follow these lists and avoid writing for off-list journals—publishing that would “not count” toward their accomplishments and ultimately tenure. This reward system elevates “not the needs of truth but academic empire building.”9 Academic publishing is becoming more about establishing an academic status hierarchy and tenured career success than about pursuing knowledge and having impact in the real world. And that has unintended and problematic consequences that tend to marginalize academic research and distance it further from real-world debates, including a limited audience, less creative and diverse research, guaranteed irrelevance, and questionable impact. A Limited Aud ie nce

I am uncomfortable with the status implications of the terms used to describe journals. The target readership of so-called A-journals is typically a narrow audience of other disciplinary academics. Many so-called B-journals reach a broader set of academics with a more empirical focus. And many “practitioner journals” reach beyond the walls of academe to speak to policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and the general public. Further, there is an ever-widening array of nontraditional outlets, such as blogs and other forms of social media, available as part of the academic portfolio. (More will be discussed about these in Chapter 4.)

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In the A-journals, the question of whether our work will actually result in real-world change is rarely, if ever, asked. Many academics, in fact, argue that the question is irrelevant to their pursuit of knowledge. This line of thinking is consistent with Vannevar Bush’s notion of the pure scientist doing basic research, a notion that Roger Pielke Jr. described as a myth. The reality is that our work is always embedded within a social context and, as such, is meant for more than just scholarly citations. This is a compelling challenge to move away from a narrow focus on A-journals and adopt a stance as an academic that is more engaged with the world. Whether this challenge compels a senior professor to change the rules or a junior professor to change their portfolio as they advance in their career is an open question. The message in this book is for both the individual scholar to reexamine their role as an academic and the academic administrator to create institutional support to help them do it. Less Cr eative an d Di verse Research

Beyond audience, publishing only in A-journals can limit creativity and diversity, as they are one type of channel with one set of criteria for what constitutes “good” research. Should that be the only criterion? In some fields, the A-journals are generally theory driven, whereas the B-journals are generally phenomena driven. And if a journal wants to increase its stature within the academic

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field, it moves more deeply into the theoretical domain. In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, 20 percent of articles in the American Political Science Review focused on policy recommendations; by 2015, that number had dropped to 0.3 percent.10 This emphasis has led Don Hambrick, professor of management at Penn State University, to offer the critique that our fixation with A-level journals has created a “theory fetish,” where practical relevance takes a backseat to theoretical rigor, and empirical evidence is used to inform theory, rather than the other way around. As papers go through the review process, he warned, “The straightforward beauty of the original research idea will probably be largely lost. In its place will be what we too often see in our journals and what undoubtedly puts non-scholars off: a contorted, misshapen, inelegant product, in which an inherently interesting phenomenon has been subjugated to an ill-fitting theoretical framework.” Hambrick continued, “In academic management we have allowed obsession with theory to compromise the larger goal of understanding. Most important, perhaps, it prevents the reporting of rich detail about interesting phenomena for which no theory yet exists but which, once reported, might stimulate the search for an explanation.”11 In the A-journals of any field, what constitutes good research is that which propels the research tracks of the moment. That pursuit blinds the field to the interesting

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ideas that may lie outside those tracks, often within the world of practice. Universities are but “one stakeholder among many knowledge producers in new, more fluid and interdependent approach to scholarship.”12 As such, University of Minnesota organizational scholar Andy Van de Ven writes, the “gap between theory and practice may be a knowledge production problem” and to fix it requires “a fundamental shift in how scholars define their relationships with the communities in which they are located, including faculty and students from various disciplines in the university and practitioners in relevant professional domains.”13 Deviating from the standard tracks of the A-journals can, for some, be an unacceptable risk for tenure. Yet such nonconformity can lead to real payoff. For example, Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate in economics, published some of his best papers in B-journals because “They were rejected by A-journals!”14 Krugman’s story is an illuminating tale for young academics in the midst of the great explosion of publishing outlets. In 2017, there were 3 million articles published15 in an estimated 28,000 journals,16 the vast majority of them B- and C-journals. Adding to that growing landscape is the world of social media, where many academics now use blogs to test and crowdsource their ideas with peers and the general public.17 In short, current and future academics can publish in a broad portfolio of outlets to increase the creativity and impact of their life’s work.

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Guaranteed Ir re levan ce

The time it takes for an article to move from submission to publication is a clear measure of its timeliness and therefore its relevance to public debates. Unfortunately, those times can be quite long. One study found that publication lags range from 9 to 18 months, with the shortest generally occurring in science, technology, and medical fields and the longest in social science, arts/humanities, and business/economics.18 Considering the time necessary to gather the data and write the paper for submission, publication may come between 18 and 36 months or more after the paper was started. As I write this in 2020, some of my colleagues have begun work on papers related to the Covid-19 crisis. Will they come out in time to be of use in the response to this global pandemic, or three years from now? Long lag times virtually guarantee the practical irrelevance of such a paper’s research. Moreover, as the number of researchers and papers grows over time—the 3 million peer-reviewed articles published per year19 are increasing at a rate of 3.26 percent per year, or doubling every 20 years20—with ever more papers aimed at the short and fairly static list of A-journals, ever-longer publishing lag times can be expected there. The number of person-hours dedicated to publishing an A-journal paper four years after its conception could raise some questions. One study estimated that the cost of a single A-level scholarly article written for management journals was as

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much as $400,000.21 For other disciplines, the price goes even higher when you add in laboratory, staff, overhead, and material costs. If the purpose of that expenditure is primarily to add a line on the scholar’s resume that will get them tenure at a great university, one might fairly ask if that is an appropriate use of research, tax, or student tuition dollars. Could that time and money be better spent? In some cases, papers could be submitted to a B-journal, accepted, and published more quickly, with time remaining to disseminate the results in a blog, a media interview, or some other format to bring that work to a broader audience—and with the next paper begun. Further exasperating the problem, many journal articles are accessible only behind paywalls, discouraging public reading even if tax dollars supported the work in the first place. As the “new normal” of the Covid-19 crisis forces changes within academia by tightening budgets while taxpayers and tuition-paying students question the value of how scholars earn our living, one may fairly ask if this state of affairs can and should continue. Ques tionable Impact

Regardless of such sobering statistics, academics are still directed to pursue A-journals for academic status. And that pursuit disregards another sobering statistic on who actually reads them. We can take this issue in two parts: impact factors and citation counts.

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First, let’s consider a journal’s impact factor, which is one measure of a journal’s importance within the field. A two-year impact factor is calculated as the ratio of (a) the number of citations in the current year to articles published in the previous two years divided by (b) the number of substantive articles and reviews published in the same two years.22 So a two-year impact factor of 5.3 for a top-tier A-journal in management, Administrative Science Quarterly, means that, on average, a published paper is cited 5.3 times annually over its first two years. The fiveyear impact factor raises that number to only 7.5. Is that real impact? Looking more deeply, the distribution is not even, leading to what some call the 80/20 phenomenon, where 20 percent of articles may account for 80 percent of citations.23 A 2005 editorial in Nature noted that 89 percent of the journal’s impact factor of 32.2 could be attributed to 25 percent of the papers published during that time period.24 In a larger study, only 0.5 percent of 38 million articles cited from 1900 to 2005 were cited more than 200 times.25 Recognizing the importance of impact factors, many journals have begun to game the process by asking authors to cite other articles within the journal during the review process, and posting articles on the web for months or even years before actually “publishing” them so that citation counts will have begun to accumulate before the process of calculating the impact factor begins. And that leads to the second way to look at the question of impact. Citation counts are a primary measure of

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a paper’s scholarly impact, and yet citation counts on average are distressingly low. By one count, 12 percent of medicine articles were never cited, nor were 27 percent of natural science papers, 32 percent in the social sciences, and 82 percent in the humanities.26 Another study found that 59 percent of articles in the top science and social science journals were not cited in the period from 2002 to 2006.27 And of those articles cited, some estimates are that as little as 20 percent have actually been read. This leads to a conclusion that the average paper in a peerreviewed journal may be read completely by no more than 10 people.28 While some question these numbers, most accept the magnitude of the problem they depict. It is time to question the primary reliance on citations and journal impact factors for measuring impact. Their prevalence in the formal reward structures of tenure are the greatest obstacle and the strongest source of resistance to adding public engagement to an academic portfolio.29 THE INERTIA OF THE ACADEMIC REWARD SYSTEM

The institution of tenure can make faculty members conservative in their approach toward research. Many will eschew engagement since it is not highly valued in the three traditional areas of tenure evaluation: research, teaching, and service. Many schools have begun to consider changes in the tenure, review, and promotion criteria in ways that will encourage more public engagement

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and therefore more diversity in a school’s faculty portfolio. But questions persist of how to quantify and assess the quality of engagement. The peer review process and citation counts have been well vetted as a means of evaluating the impact of academic research, but this does not readily translate to the assessment of the impact of a faculty member’s engagement-based work. Today, it is becoming easier to reach a wider audience than your academic community, to join and inform discussion, to disseminate knowledge using the widening array of social media tools. Yet B-journals or journals and outlets that reach nonacademic audiences are cited much less by academics (if at all) and are therefore overlooked as having impact. I recall once being struck by a peer’s comment in a faculty meeting that he had no idea if a book had ever been read if there was no citation count. Further, as social media enters the academic portfolio30 it is generally ignored, even though increasing numbers of the public, lawmakers, and even fellow academics find their information about science there.31 How does one measure the value of this activity? How does a blog with a half million views or a TED Talk with 10 million views and 50 separate translations compare in impact to the average academic paper that was cited only 10.81 times between 2000 and 2010 (that number drops to only 4.67 for the social sciences) according to Thomson Reuters?32 How does this compare to other metrics for measuring individual impact? It is easy to capture a scholar’s quantitative metrics of academic impact. But

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similar metrics for impact in practice are harder to develop. Though some are trying, such as Altmetric, PlumX Metric, and Impact Story (to be discussed in Chapter 4), they are still in their infancy. In the future, we can expect new analytics to assess the impact of social media, analytics that can be refined to focus on selective demographics, providing a far more powerful and insightful measure than the current set of metrics. Developing such metrics overcomes some of the challenge. The rest is overcoming the inertia and resistance in the culture of academia. S agan Effect

Beyond the formal rewards of academia, informal norms and rules influence our choice as academics to pursue work that reaches broader audiences. One cultural norm has been called the “Sagan effect,” named for American astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, who in 1991 was nominated for membership in the National Academy of Sciences but was blackballed in the first round of voting. That decision, along with Harvard’s prior denial of tenure, led Sagan’s biographers to argue that this was the consequence of an academic bias that popular, visible scientists are viewed as less serious or rigorous than those who focus strictly on academic audiences. Such bias includes a belief that public scientists care more about their media presence than about discovery, that they waste time that would be better spent doing

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more academic research, and that public engagement is a low-status occupation done by “those who are not good enough for an academic career.”33 As some schools move more toward “soft money” models and increase the proportion that academics have to raise to support themselves, activities like public engagement that divert time and energy away from fundraising can become a liability.34 Research finds evidence to support the existence of this effect, particularly among underrepresented groups.35 Lester Thurow, economist and former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, suffered the Sagan effect when he began to write more trade books and speak on TV, trying to make difficult concepts related to economics and the American economy accessible to a mass audience. His peers began to mock him as “less thorough.” When he died in 2016, the moniker even appeared in some of his obituaries. In general, it has been suggested that many academics within management seek to bolster the intellectual legitimacy of their field by marginalizing colleagues who maintain close links with the world of practice. As a result, Northwestern University management professor Ranjay Gulati writes, management academics have separated themselves into “two tribes on either side of a chasm” with “brutal identity warfare” between those who focus on academic audiences and those who seek to reach professional audiences.36 That such warfare is taking place within a professional school that presumably cares about the profession is ironic, and the individual scholar who

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seeks to bridge the research/practice divide in any field can face intense identity conflicts.37 However, there is hope for the engaged scholar as more seek to bridge the divide. One study found that, contrary to what is often suggested, scientists active in wider dissemination are also more active academically. There is one caveat: the study found that their dissemination activities have almost no impact (positive or negative) on their careers; there is no formal reward nor penalty. Interestingly, this study also found that such activities were more commonly carried out by the scientific “elite,” such that those in higher positions engage with the public more.38 Other studies have found that scientists who wish to engage in certain forms of issue advocacy have considerable latitude to do so without risking harm to their credibility, or the credibility of the scientific community.39 Harvard University evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould once wrote that “I deeply deplore the equation of popular writing with pap and distortion.”40 This all leads to an observation that a substantial number of senior scholars go outside the rules of academia and participate in public engagement without harm to their reputation. C O N C LU S I O N : W H AT D O E S T H I S M E A N FOR THE ENGAGED SCHOLAR?

The norms of academia are presently structured around writing academic publications for academic audiences.

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Those entering the field today must accept this fact, and there is good reason that it should not change entirely. The top journals of our various fields, however the lists of prestige are created, become domains in which rigorous thinking can be tested and adjudicated. But the singular pursuit of publication in such outlets is what needs to change, reconsidering academic publications as only one step toward informing society of the conclusions of science. Unfortunately, many excellent scientists lack the skills, time, inclination, or incentives to take the next step, to play the role of educator to the general public and political leaders. They rest on a form of logic that harkens back to Vannevar Bush’s model of research where academic scholars develop data, models, and conclusions and then leave it to the public and politicians to find this work and use it to make change in the world. But that model is no longer valid, if it ever was. Academic scholars have a duty to both recognize the possible impact of their work on society and communicate that impact to those who must live with the consequences. Those entering the field today as well as those who have been in it for years must ask what measure they wish to use to evaluate the success of their career. Will measures such as citation counts and an h-index make for a fulfilling and meaningful career? Or will a career be measured by the extent to which scholarly research changes the way people think about the problems we face and

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helps to usher in needed solutions? Metrics for that kind of measurement are being developed yet may always lie primarily within the heart and mind of the individual scholar. In any case, the challenge for the engaged scholar is to reexamine how they choose to practice their craft, always with rigor and with an expanded focus on impact within the intended audiences of their work.

3  THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

While the last chapter focused on the rewards of academic publishing, this chapter focuses on the rewards of public engagement. Where the former charted the established path for measuring academic accomplishment, the latter asks the scholar to define it for themselves. What do you want to achieve as a professor and what gives you a sense of meaning and purpose? When you write a paper, who are you writing for, who is reading it, why are they reading it, and are they the people you want to reach? If not, what do you want to do about it? When I began my career, I realized that I was writing my academic articles about topics that had an additional ready audience. It was an audience I wanted to reach, and so I embarked on a strategy of publishing my work twice. That meant that I continued to write my academic papers, but then I wrote my findings in a new way to reach new audiences through new outlets. This required that I learn to be multilingual, 44

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a challenge that was harder than it sounds, but more gratifying than I anticipated. Many who undertake such activities report deep satisfaction at fulfilling what they see as their purpose. Explaining why he communicates science to the public, Stanford University professor of neuroscience David Eagleman offers six reasons that speak to an existential purpose and responsibility that goes beyond the extrinsic rewards of our field: First, we owe that understanding to the people who fund our experiments, the taxpaying public. Second, we can leverage our skills as scientists to inspire critical thinking in public and political dialogue. Third, researchers are optimally positioned to stem the flow of scientific misinformation in the media. Fourth, we can explain the ways and the means by which science can (and cannot) improve law and social policy. Fifth, it is incumbent upon us to explain what science is and is not: while it is a way of thinking that upgrades our intuitions, it also comes with a deep understanding of (and tolerance for) uncertainty. Finally, we find ourselves in the pleasurable position of being able to share the raw beauty of the world around us.1

This existential meaning feeds on the idea of academic pursuits as a personal vocation or calling and not simply a career. It’s about connecting to a purpose that is bigger than you and caring enough to devote your life, energies, passions, and love toward addressing it. It is a manifestation of your recognition and appreciation for the connectedness

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that we all have with the world, which includes our society, family, school, and natural world, not just the academic community. More than citation counts, satisfaction comes from an assessment that what you are connected to and care about is being addressed.2 I can think of few professions where this personal connection to a vocation can be most vivid, most real, and keep you going for decades even when the headwinds get stiff. I have had mornings that I did not want to get out of bed when a massive oil spill devastates the Gulf of Mexico, wildfires destroy vast expanses of California, or the president of the United States decides to withdraw from the Paris Accord on Climate Change. But my sense of purpose and vocation propels me forward, despite the discouraging reality. BROADENING OUR CONCEPTION OF THE CLASSROOM

University of Michigan professor of social work and urban planning Barry Checkoway described public engagement as work that contributes to public life. “People are practicing the ‘scholarship of engagement’ when they develop knowledge for a public purpose” and “think and act as members of society. Any scholar, whether a philosopher or a physicist, can be an engaged scholar when he or she develops knowledge with the well-being of society in mind rather than for its own sake.”3 The University of Minnesota defined public engagement as “the partnership of university knowledge and

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resources with those of the public and private sectors to enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; enhance curriculum, teaching and learning; prepare educated, engaged citizens; strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; address critical societal issues; and contribute to the public good.”4 The University of Illinois outlined three distinguishing features of what they call “public service”: It contributes to the public welfare or the common good, it calls upon faculty members’ academic or professional expertise, and it directly addresses or responds to real-world problems, issues, interests or concerns.5 And the Carnegie Foundation offered a definition of “community-engaged scholarship” as the application of academic expertise in new and creative ways in partnership with communities.6 One central tenet of all of these definitions is a broadening of the conception of the classroom. We teach students who willingly pay tuition to come to campus to learn. For many scholars, that is their most potent form of engagement. But with public engagement, we are trying to reach a different “public”—or perhaps more accurately “publics”—using the variety of different channels. As the channels and therefore the ability to reach a widening array of audiences grow, one should choose carefully which publics to add to their portfolio. A survey of professors at the University of Michigan yielded a list of possible audiences for public engagement, such as consumers of media, residents of local

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communities, politicians, business, nonprofits, school groups, and users of medications, and a list of discrete channels for reaching them. Ranked from most to least used, the channels were: giving media interviews, providing assistance to government agencies, giving talks or presentations to the general public, engaging in action research, consulting, giving corporate or association presentations, serving on advisory boards, using LinkedIn for professional work, collaborating with community organizations, writing editorials and op-eds, giving presentations in K–12 education, serving as an expert witness, blogging, acting as a media commentator, using Facebook for professional work, giving congressional testimony, using Twitter for professional work, creating a website, contributing to the development of policy and standards, and volunteering with NGOs and community groups.7 But while some of the skills and techniques we use in such activities are transferable from the classroom, many are not. Each group we reach out to requires different modes of engagement, and each mode of engagement requires specific skills brought to bear for communication, just as are required to write an academic article or grant proposal. There are “start-up costs,” but they are not as time-consuming as many academics may think.8 To begin, the developed expertise described in the last chapter is a prerequisite for communicating with credibility and a solid foundation of knowledge. But good communication is about more than data and models. It’s about being authentic, genuine, accessible, and passionate

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in a way that gains the trust of your audiences. In a report called Recommended Practices for Science Communication with Policymakers9 the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) cites a scientist’s ability to establish trust, build relationships, and practice respect as being critical to having influence. People decide very quickly whether to trust someone and whether to listen to them by perceiving their apparent intent: “who is friend or foe, on their side or not, or a cooperator or competitor. Those seemingly on their side are deemed warm (friendly, trustworthy). People then decide whether the other is competent to enact those intents. Perception of scientists, like other social perceptions, involves inferring both their apparent intent (warmth) and capability (competence).”10 Ask any lobbyist about how they do their job and they will tell you same thing—it is about establishing strong and ongoing relationships. With trust, you can accomplish great things. Without it, you can do nothing. You may have the best science, but if you lack the ability to build trust, people will not listen to you. One problem for academics is that they approach public communication as a science that is logical and rational.11 But public communication is also an art that is human and emotional. Academic papers with models, flowcharts, and matrices to explain public engagement are useful tools, but the actual act of communicating requires more relational abilities. Imagine talking with your romantic partner about a problem in your relationship and presenting peer-reviewed and scientifically derived flowcharts, models,

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and matrices to work it out. Maybe it would set some parameters for your discussion, but your discussion would likely fail if you did not exhibit an openness and accessibility that creates trust. So, with trust as a foundational element, we can begin to consider some “rules of engagement.”12 RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

In science communication it is not just what you say, no matter how accurate and important, but how you say it and to whom. Think of science communicators who are or were effective and visible at their craft: Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Rachel Carson, David Attenborough, Katherine Hayhoe, Joe Nye, Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Jonathan Weiner, Yuval Noah Harari, Jeremy Bernstein, Harry Frankfurt, Alan Lightman, Jonathan Haidt, Adam Grant, Cornel West, Jeffrey Sachs, the list goes on. You likely have your own list of effective communicators. Each of these people developed a special skill to capture the public with their science through a variety of mediums. They are or were authentic in their own way, understanding their audience and utilizing skills and techniques that we all can master. While it may be possible to create a handbook or guide that articulates some basics for academic engagement, the ultimate guide has to be the personal skills and abilities of each scholar, reflecting their own innate qualities. As Shelie Miller, University of Michigan professor of sustainable systems, explained it,

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“What are the rules of engagement? There aren’t any. I don’t think it is possible to distill all the variables into a single set of rules for engagement. And that’s not a bad thing.”13 The challenge is to create as much clarity in this domain as possible and then challenge each scholar to develop their skills at engagement in a way that suits their personality. Call them guidelines instead of rules, if you wish, but the next six methods can get you started on the right track. 1. Find You r Vo ice

To engage with the public, you need to find your voice after years of developing it. When you hear or read effective science communicators, they are very likely not using jargon, but are projecting a depth of knowledge and a powerful lens through which to understand and explain the world. When Jeffrey Sachs speaks, he may not be using the technical terms of economics, but we know that he speaks from a lens of economics that he has developed over the course of his career. It’s no longer about explaining a particular academic paper but about explaining the world with the depth of confidence in understanding your field. It’s less about communicating knowledge and more about imparting wisdom. Becoming an engaged professor is about moving from the narrow confines of an academic voice to the broader voice of an intellectual. It is about speaking less on the results of individual studies and more about explaining the world through the lens of what the corpus of the field tells us.

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This is an important distinction, as the dominant focus of academic research is limited in its focus on knowledge. Our research journals are driven by theory and analysis that help us first turn data into information by examining relations to create categories for analysis and then turn that information into knowledge by examining patterns that allow us to develop useful know-how (see Figure 1).14 But to turn that knowledge into wisdom requires one more step of an appreciation for principles. The truth is that public and political leaders do not make decisions based solely on patterned information, regression analyses, and p-values. Instead, they assess that knowledge and make a decision based on wisdom, character, judgment, and integrity. Many of the problems we face in today’s world are caused by applying knowledge without wisdom; “we act but we do not act wisely.”15 Scientists should bring wisdom to public figure 1 The Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom Pyramid

Wisdom

Understand principles

Knowledge

Understand patterns

Information

Understand relations

Data source:  J. Rowley, “The wisdom hierarchy: Representations of the DIKW hierarchy,” Journal of Information Science, 33(2): 164.

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discourse, not just knowledge. This takes courage, because to do that, you must share your principles in a way that is truly authentic and that makes you vulnerable. You have to find your own particular and personal voice for speaking about your work. The idea of finding your voice speaks to the challenge of timing your entry into public engagement. As faculty first begin their career, most lack the depth of knowledge to speak with authority on broader issues. An academic can best enter the public debate from the confidence, legitimacy, and security of tenure. That does not mean a junior faculty member should avoid all such activities until they are tenured. Scholars can make initial forays into public engagement before tenure and allow these activities to increase as their career advances and they gain greater security, skills, and credibility. In the words of Mark Barteau, vice president for research at Texas A&M University: “When do you have enough stature to engage? That depends on where you are, what your field is, the vehicle of engagement, and your audience.”16 Historically, disciplines vary quite widely in their posture toward public engagement. Architecture, for example, rewards professional practice in tenure decisions while many of the social sciences consider practical pursuits irrelevant. Different disciplines will have different attitudes toward delineating between the theoretical and the practical and, as a result, between the role of knowledge source and knowledge advocate. Professional schools may be more comfortable with work that leans toward the latter, while

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disciplinary schools may not. Without an understanding of that delineation, scholars may find themselves overstepping and losing the legitimacy that their field affords them. Having lost this legitimacy, they may find both their voice in public debates and chances at promotion diminished. I remember once reading a New York Times editorial by a junior professor in the physical sciences about some of her research that contradicted a great deal of the literature in her field. It was one study, and it precipitated a fiery backlash from many of her peers. I hope this does not impact her tenure chances, but it is hard to tell. I had a similar experience, but from the security of being a full professor. I had been invited to moderate a panel of senior executives in the natural gas industry to control fugitive emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. I was thrilled at the opportunity for such directly impactful work. But two weeks before the planned date, one of the executives found some attacks against my work from climate skeptics and I was promptly uninvited. Would I have changed my work if I knew such an outcome would be the result? No, but it was a cautionary tale to be aware of the permanence of your words, the boundaries of engagement, and the implications if you cross a line that may cause backlash. But where does that line exist? For the most part, it is not clearly articulated. So, it is best not to navigate this terrain alone but instead find the support of a strong network of people who can offer guidance.17 I, for example,

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found one in the Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship, a program designed to educate mid-career academics on the art and science of public engagement. The experience opened my eyes to the reality that I was not alone, that there were many others struggling to work public engagement into their academic necessities, and that there were places to learn the necessary skills. Such communities are proliferating, and you should find one that can help you in this endeavor. 2. Tell Stor ies

People remember stories. Storytelling often suffers from negative connotations within scientific communities,18 yet there is mounting empirical evidence that storytelling can be a powerful way to nurture engagement with science. Narrative storytelling helps people understand, process, and recall science-related information. 19 It can increase comprehension, interest, and engagement, which explains why mass media content often relies on narrative formats.20 Stories can be thought of as facts wrapped in emotions21 or “data with a soul.”22 People respond to information when it touches them on a personal level that resonates with their experiences and values.23 In short, stories stick. Richard Alley, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, weaves colorful humor, history, and science to personalize public understanding of climate change.

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For example, when explaining one problem as early humans began to settle in agrarian societies, he explained: “If you’re really sophisticated, you’re pooping in your neighbor’s drinking water. And if you’re not sophisticated, you’re pooping in your own drinking water. And there really isn’t a third choice.” Tying this colorful mental picture to climate change, he explained, “If you take all the CO2 that comes out of our cars in a year and you condense it to the density of horse ploppies and you put it on the roads of America, it’s an inch a year. And in a decade, you’ve got a foot of CO2 on every road in America and there are no joggers in America, we’re all cross-country skiers.”24 While administrator of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco answered questions about whether Hurricane Sandy could be attributed to climate change. In my experience, when people hear a word like “attribution” that they don’t understand, they tune out, distrust the information, or react negatively. So when I was asked that question, I responded with a baseball analogy. I would say: When a baseball player starts taking steroids, the chances of his hitting home runs suddenly increases dramatically. Not only does he hit more homers, but more powerful ones. Everyone knows one cannot point to any particular home run and say, “Aha, that home run is because he is taking steroids,” but the pattern that you’re seeing of more and bigger is understood to be attributable to steroids. In similar fashion, what we are seeing on Earth today is weather on steroids, weather on climate steroids. We are seeing more, longer-lasting heat waves, more intense storms, more droughts, and more floods. Those

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patterns are what we expect with climate change. For many people, that analogy is very helpful.25

Unfortunately, academics are not often the best storytellers. We are trained to write and speak in prose that has been described as “turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand.”26 For many, bad writing seems a deliberate choice, and we seem to take pride in dense articles and long books as if the quality of thinking were measured in the quantity and the density of words. We are often hesitant to write in an active voice, without jargon and excessive footnotes, and so we suffer “the death by a thousand qualifications that undermines any attempt to state a clear, precise thesis.”27 But it doesn’t have to be this way. Traditional journalism is in serious decline today, and science journalism in particular has been a major casualty. This creates an opportunity for scholars to step into the breach, but communicating with the public about science requires encouragement and training.28 Best-selling writer Malcolm Gladwell described his craft once as digging through the academic literature and liberating its ideas from academic obscurity.29 The question for academic scholars is why wait for someone like Gladwell (a writer, thinker, and storyteller I admire) to do that work for us? Shouldn’t we liberate our own work and present it in a form that can be appreciated by diverse audiences, not just small groups of academics?30

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3. A void the “Kn owle dge Def icit Model”

We as academics are good at research and then teaching the students who pay tuition to attend our classes. But we are not as good at teaching in broader domains that require a different approach and mindset. When we go out into the public, it is often as researchers, not as teachers. In my hometown of Ann Arbor, I’ve heard many of the townspeople express hesitation at inviting an academic to a dinner party for fear of being lectured at. I cringe when I hear an academic talking to a lay audience and using overbearing prefaces such as “the literature says,” “the data show,” or “based on my years of experience” as these phrases tend to silence engagement with those who are not familiar with academic literature. Arizona State University President Michael Crow feels that we in academia “are increasingly filled with hubris, filled with arrogance, cut off from the general public and unable to find an appropriate tone with which to communicate.”31 Jane Lubchenco warns that this must change, that we cannot address a “post-truth world” from lofty perches; we must be more integrated into society.32 Rather than telling people only what we think they need to hear, we would do well to consider how they want to hear it. Instead of fulfilling the adage that “the academic is the one who would rather be right than helpful,” we should think about what we know and how we communicate it as two separate and distinct questions and skillsets.33

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The root of this challenge is to get over the knowledge deficit model, a dominant posture academics take whereby engagement is something that “we” do to “them” for their own good. It is based on the presumption that “if you knew what I knew, you’d think what I think.” Or, as Lubchenco describes it, the audience “is simply an empty vessel that needs filling up with scientific knowledge, and then that audience will do whatever the filler-upper would want them to do.”34 While students may have agreed to this approach when they sign up for classes (though I doubt it works well), the general public has not and typically dislikes it. It is an approach that is rooted in the (often unconscious) assumption of the superiority of the Academy, an assumption that has helped engender much of today’s estrangement between academe and the world outside it. To overcome it, the engaged scholar must recognize the extent to which discourse is inherently a dialogue rather than monologue, a conversation requiring mutual respect and appreciation for the expertise of all sides. In order to succeed, academics need to accept that they do not have a monopoly on knowledge and expertise, and that engagement is a two-way learning process. An agronomist, for example, may possess deep academic knowledge about soil management and crop production. But a farmer who has worked their fields for decades has deep tacit and pragmatic knowledge that should not be dismissed. Bridging the two requires an engagement model that entails reaching out to the community and

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making the effort to first discover what issues matter to them, what they truly need to know, what they already know, and what help they need, so that all can collectively address these issues. University of Massachusetts sociologist Amy Schalet writes that researchers should seek to support the audience’s goals and begin with the question “How can I help you do something you want to do better?”35 This leads to a model of public engagement based on service. 4. Know You r A u di en ce

A model of service means that when it comes to conveying a message to “the public,” you must define your audience, learn about them, refine your message, and then develop a specific strategy to reach them. Very often, when our message fails to get through, we see the problem as the audience, when in fact the problem is us. I once got a comment from a professor that “I would love to explain [my research to the public] but I cannot. I cannot teach my pet hamster differential equations either.” The professor clearly saw the problem with the recipient, but very often the problem is that we do not know how to translate our work into a form that the audience can understand.36 Our jargon and terminology can be a foreign language for public and political audiences,37 and we have to find their language to communicate. If we cannot do this and explain it without jargon, one might ask whether we fully understand our work.

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Science communication coach Nancy Baron summarizes five key points of being a good communicator. First, show your passion—the what, how, and why of what you do. If people are interested in you, they will pay attention, even if they disagree with you. Second, do not underestimate the power of being personal. Rather than sticking to the purely objective rationale for a given recommendation, finding, or message, also provide your personal motivations. Third, find the right stories to make your points and tell them well. Academics must become more adept at storytelling, communicating not just knowledge but also history and context as well as the personal and persuasive aspects surrounding their research. Fourth, be a leader. Those who lead the herd can get people to pay attention. Fifth, find a community of support who will help you to improve.38 In the end, the challenge is to gain the trust and respect of those with whom you are trying to engage39 and showing more of your personal motivation and passion for what you are communicating.40 And of course, an important part of being a communicator lies in the choice of tools available to communicate your message—traditional tools like mass media (publications, TV, and radio broadcasts), public lectures in schools and communities, art and literature, social media (including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), podcasts, webcasts, and performance art. Too often, however, scholars put the tools before the message. Social media makes this especially easy and prevalent—research groups often

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create Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, and blogs without a clear audience in mind or message to convey. 5. Rely on So lid Research

In considering what it means to be an engaged scholar, the science of science communication has an important role to play. For each of the traits of a good communicator there is research to help you do it better, all geared around trying to understand how your information is delivered and how it is received. When you say climate change, genetically modified foods, gun violence, or social equity, what do you mean, what do people hear, and are they the same thing? When you say uncertainty, error, attribution, or statistical significance, does your audience understand what you mean? In each case, the challenge is to present your information in a way that it is heard accurately and not in a threatening way. For example, one challenge associated with communicating scientific information to public audiences is that people have a more limited capacity to pay attention to scientific presentations than we might expect from attendees at one of our academic seminars. A second challenge is that people in politicized environments often make different choices about whom to believe than they do in other settings. Attention research clarifies when, and to what type of stimuli, people do (and do not) pay attention. Source credibility research clarifies the conditions under which an audience will believe scientists’ descriptions of phe-

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nomena rather than the descriptions from less valid sources.41 Research on motivated reasoning reveals that people use cognitive filters when assessing the validity of scientific information, interpreting it through prior ideological preferences, personal experiences, and knowledge.42 People are likely to reject conclusions that challenge their prior declared beliefs and accept conclusions that confirm them. Research in cultural cognition explains that people tend to develop worldviews that are consistent with the values held by others within their referent groups, and they will generally endorse positions that most directly reinforce their connections with those with whom they identify—their tribe.43 When analyzing highly complex or politically contested scientific concepts about which people have a limited understanding, reasoning may be suffused with emotion. Chris Mooney, a journalist who has written about climate change denial, writes that “our positive and negative feelings about people, things and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds. . . . We’re not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower.”44 New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that people “are skilled at finding reasons to support their gut feelings.”45 “When it comes to moral judgments, we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.”46

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Such theories and models help science communicators more carefully understand the processes by which audiences hear and interpret information so that we can choose words, references, and arguments carefully to increase the chances of a receptive response. Northeastern University communications professor Matt Nisbet writes that “messages need to be tailored to a specific medium and audience, using carefully researched metaphors, allusions, and examples that trigger a new way of thinking about the personal relevance of [scientific information].”47 Science communicators need to be, in effect, multilingual, speaking the language of the audience being addressed. For example, when I give presentations on climate change to business audiences, I do not speak about carbon loading, radiative forcing, or even corporate social responsibility. Instead, I frame these issues in the terminology that resonates with business communities: cost of capital, operational efficiency, consumer demand, and employee commitment. Others have framed climate change as a “threat multiplier” and a threat to national security48 when addressing military audiences; or as “the biggest global [health] threat of the 21st century” for medical audiences.49 In these ways, the message can be understood and accessed through a preexisting set of concerns which the audience is already prepared to consider.50 This is but a small sampling of the research around science communication. But it offers a sense of the degree to which communication strategies can be scientifically

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informed and guided by prior research. There is a great deal of ongoing work to explore these issues by groups such as the National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquia on “The Science of Science Communication”; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation program in “Public Understanding of Science, Technology & Economics”; the AAAS Leshner Center for Public Engagement with Science & Technology; the Public Communication of Science and Technology Network; the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University; Northwestern University’s Science in Society Program; the University of Massachusetts’ Public Engagement Project; Harvard’s Scholars Strategy Network; the University of Michigan’s Center for Academic Innovation; the University of Wisconsin Life Sciences Communication Department; and more developing at institutions around the country. This research is an aid to better communication. It is not a substitute for the actual art and practice of communication any more than the science of the golf swing or a musical instrument is a replacement for the actual performance. 6. C hang e Y ou r Pu bl i catio n Strateg y

The practice of science communication also signals a shift in your publication strategy that compels some additional work and effort. But such a shift can be additive and synergistic, leading you to develop better research and enjoy

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more fulfilling work that keeps you energized. By the standard model, we do our research, write it up, submit it for review, revise and resubmit it, publish it, and consider ourselves done. Public engagement challenges us to take the work further, finding ways to repackage it and present it in forums and media accessible to a general audience. We can think of a broader portfolio of outlets where we can write multiple types of papers for multiple types of audiences. B-level journals can be used for publishing more empirically based work; practitioner-oriented journals can be used for disseminating work with real-world applications; blogs can be used to test new ideas and expand our thinking. And once we publish a paper, we can then also publish a web essay, podcast or webcast to summarize our research for a more general audience, speak on a radio show to amplify greater exposure, and/or begin our next paper. A revised publication strategy means that public engagement gives our work longer life and wider dissemination. We live in a world where the marketplace of ideas is becoming an increasingly public one. And the choice of outlets and the support they provide can mean that we can devote just a few hours to summarizing our work and making it useful to professional audiences. In return, these activities can make future research better by testing our ideas, improving the questions we ask, and connecting them more centrally to the key concerns of managers in practice.

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Many academics strive for neutrality and avoid getting pulled into political debates, believing that it is not the place for scientists to lose their perceived objectivity or become political. But is that a fair assessment? When I was a brand-new professor, I gave a seminar on my dissertation to a community of business and engineering professors. At the end of the talk, an engineering professor asked if what I had presented was a “good” outcome. I remember feeling flustered at the question, not knowing if I should reveal or even have a subjective opinion on what was supposed to be objective research. I’ll never forget his response, “What’s the problem Andy? I study materials and I have a clear idea of what properties I want to see in my results. That doesn’t mean that I can’t do objective research. It just means that I am human and have a stake in my work. But it doesn’t have to bias my work.” As an article in PLOS Biology stated, “Doing science is not dispassionate. Researchers study topics they find interesting, develop theories they believe in, and publish findings that become part of their identities.”51 Beyond fears of being seen as subjective, some have fears of being seen as political. One of the reasons that researchers at the University of Michigan declined to participate in Marc Edwards’s Flint water crisis work was a concern over alienating the State of Michigan and thus losing their research funding.52 But the only way to avoid

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such a concern is to stay out of the public domain entirely. Engagement is political whether one acknowledges it or not. While many academics believe that their work is politically and socially inert—“the data state x”— any research that indicates people need to change their beliefs or their actions is, by definition, political.53 The engaged scholar cannot expect to control the process by which their work is interpreted. In the new age of social media, your work may be drawn into the spotlight and even distorted with or without your consent. In explaining his choice to write for the public, University of Iowa sociologist Viktor Ray writes, “How can one remain neutral when our very conditions for intellectual work are threatened?” He quotes Audre Lorde—“Your silence will not protect you”—and states that, ultimately, “I see public writing as a natural extension of my academic work. I am committed to public debate about ideas and hope to engage across multiple platforms. Given this commitment, I don’t believe in limiting those debates to the formal gatekeeping of academic disciplines.”54 Others fear engagement because they do not want to put anything into the public domain until they are absolutely sure of the veracity of its conclusions, or, quite simply, they fear being wrong. Some call this the “high degree of proof ” syndrome, the belief that anything less than rock-solid is insufficient to justify public action. But if professors wait for perfect evidence, they will wait forever. It does not really exist. So, when staying silent, public health professor Y. Claire Wang warns, “We also pave

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the way for more celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, people with megaphones to spread sensational misinformation that may have deadly consequences—consequences that are now all too apparent in the recent outbreak of measles, a disease believed to be eradicated as recently as 2000.” She concludes with an apt quote from William Butler Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”55 The inherently political and contentious nature of engagement means that it will be messy. Public debate plays by a different set of rules than academic debate, and those who choose to engage should be prepared for unfamiliar tactics and players. A useful model is that of the “social amplification of risk” where “messages about risk emerge from one part of the system (e.g., scientists), the threat is then amplified by other actors in the system (e.g., activists and politicians) and downplayed by others (e.g., corporate interests), leading over time to changes in mass media coverage, public opinion, consumer markets, and government policy.”56 Then, ultimately, the multiple messages are consumed by the general public, who form opinions that either support or resist policies designed to deal with the issue.57 The secondary and tertiary ripple effects of this process can be quite large. Through it all, scientists lose control of the message they intended their data and models to convey as competing interests use, attack, and distort the message to further their own political goals. Because of this loss of control, some prefer to disengage. A 2015 Pew Research Center/AAAS survey found

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that, while 43 percent of 3,748 scientists surveyed believed it is important for scientists to get coverage for their work in the news media, 79 percent believed that the news media can’t discriminate between well-founded and unreasonable or illegitimate scientific findings.58 Ironically, another study found that 94 percent of journalists want to hear from sources if they feel they were misquoted or misrepresented; 94 percent always or most of the time read the academic articles in question before contacting the scientists for interviews about their research; and 92 percent of journalists are open to scientists calling them if they have information.59 The upshot of this process is that academics should be committed to a protracted and messy engagement in order to make their voices heard. Beyond the messiness of social debate, it can also be hostile. If you are saying something important, you will receive blowback. In fact, if there is no provoked response to your engagement, it might be that your message was not as challenging as you thought. The worst outcome in public engagement is silence and indifference. As the expression goes, “if you’re not offending anyone, you never took a stand” (source unknown, but often attributed to Winston Churchill). Or as actor Paul Newman once said, “If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.” Now, it’s possible that blowback means that your findings need more work or that you presented your ideas inappropriately. Much more likely, though, it means that your ideas have challenged people, and it is quite normal for

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them to have a defensive reaction. You just need to be ready to receive engagement in all its forms, ugly and otherwise,60 and understand the motivations behind it. When corporate lobbyists, government officials, or think tank spokespeople issue statements in response to your work, they are not always trying to engage in an intellectual debate or expand the scope of scientific knowledge. They may be trying to get their position into the open and gain personal or professional benefit. In fairness, the goal of the academic in bringing their science to the public is not entirely different. In a survey of faculty in the United Kingdom, the two most prominent stated reasons for undertaking public engagement were “to effect social change” and “to have an impact on public policy and therefore indirectly on service provision.”61 Whenever you are promoting change, it’s reasonable to expect a countervailing response. When engagement becomes politically based, as when groups like Campus Reform or College Fix seek to silence professors that they see as too liberal, scholars should be ready to emphasize truth rather than opinion. While academics are left-leaning in many fields,62 charges that scientific research is therefore biased do not follow. The scientific method and peer review process is established to remove such biases, and research has shown that the academic environment is one in which conservative professors thrive as much as liberal.63 Finally, there are times when public engagement elicits blowback for which there are limited options for response. Trolls will sometimes attack scientists on a personal level.

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Science communication expert Aaron Huertas points out that they should be seen as bullies that are seeking to get an emotional response from you and that their reach is not as great as it would seem.64 Choosing an effective response depends on your individual temperament. Austan Goolsbee, University of Chicago business professor and former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Barack Obama, responds to those who send him hateful notes, “stating that while he disagrees with their position and is sorry to hear the hostility, he appreciates that they took the time to write. He estimates that about three-quarters of the angry e-mailers will write back with an apology for being rude.”65 Goolsbee also chooses to make appearances on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show where he is often mocked, but feels he is providing a valuable service by reaching the millions of Fox viewers with a respectful alternative perspective. Others may find such hostility not to be worth the effort, especially if they do not possess the same stature and credentials as a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. I know many scholars who prefer a mode of indifference, falling back on the adage that you “never mud-wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.” Or simply, “never come down off the stage or invite someone onto it” as many trolls do not want to engage and, instead, want to exploit your engagement as a way to elevate the platform of their own agenda. Dealing with trolls and harassment can be hard. Scientists, particularly climate scientists, have been the target

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of some harsh treatment66 and hate mail for their public engagement.67 My collection includes: “You are doing the work of Satan,” “Greetings Comrade, why do you want the Marxist destruction of civilization?” and “Why do you expect us peasants will take you and your fellow ‘scientists’ seriously?”68 Others receive far worse, particularly if they are women or minorities. Lisa Nakamura, professor of media and cinema studies at the University of Michigan, studies race and gender in the online gaming industry and describes criticism by “some of the most unkind, uncivil people you can possibly imagine: online 24/7 video game players.”69 Texas Tech atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe began to receive her first hate email after Newt Gingrich publicly dropped her from a book he was editing when he decided to run for president in 2012. Rush Limbaugh subsequently ridiculed her as a “climate babe,” and she began receiving vulgar and violent messages.70 Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, reported receiving a “frenzy of hate” threatening him and his wife after he was interviewed about climate change.71 Perhaps the most well-known attacks were directed at Michael Mann, Penn State climatologist and creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph of increasing global temperatures. Mann described a barrage of intimidation that included death threats, an overwhelming number of Freedom of Information Act requests, subpoenas by Republican Congressman Joe Barton, attempts by thenVirginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to have his

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academic credentials stripped,72 and being listed in a report by Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) along with 16 other climate scientists as having engaged in “potentially criminal behavior.”73 On one occasion he was even sent an envelope with powder in it, requiring the involvement of the FBI.74 Though most will not receive treatment this harsh, such experiences reinforce the importance of developing a supportive network to help you deal with any blowback and prepare measured responses. C O N C LU S I O N : T H E P U R P O S E A N D MEANING FOUND IN ENGAGEMENT

Ultimately, the reasons why academics make the choice to engage in public or political discourse are personal, motivated by their own circumstances, value sets, and beliefs, and driven by their own goals. However, these reasons are born in the desire to enrich the lives of their community. Academic research explains how the world works, how it is changing, what the future likely holds, the different paths we can take to reach multiple futures, and the trade-offs of those different possible paths. The benefits of engaging in the pursuit of these questions and bringing them to the public domain so that they can be implemented in practice have led many to a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their work. The goal of public engagement is collaboration with multiple publics to create new knowledge. Whether it be

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through a conversation with the community or collaborating with national professional associations, engagement ultimately has a beneficial outcome for both the academic and society. For the academic, it can yield better future research questions, a deeper appreciation for the nuanced context in which that research is done, and an expanded network of partners for exploring that context. For society, it can empower people to offer input and guidance on research that can have an impact on their lives, inform their own decision-making with regard to technical, political, and social issues, demystify the ivory tower of the Academy and those who inhabit it, and expand their own networks for seeking assistance with future issues and challenges. In short, the work of the engaged scholar can revitalize both the Academy and society by fostering a tighter and more constructive link of knowledge and understanding between the two.

4   T H E S C H O L A R LY U S E S OF SOCIAL MEDIA

In my years as a doctoral student, we would find articles by looking up keywords in a hardbound copy of the Social Sciences Citation Index, retrieve the journal compendium from the stacks, read and copy the specific article, look through the bibliography for more articles, and then repeat. Today, we type keywords into Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scopus, Microsoft Academic, or some other citation database and review the articles that these search tools find and in the order they present them. Would anyone doubt that the two processes yield different results? And would anyone doubt that the decisions made by search tool algorithms are centrally important to whether people find our work, and therefore determine our academic success? But most academic scholars do not know how these citation searches work, what algorithms they use to select papers they consider relevant for their databases, how they are sorted, and in what order. Further, most scholars do not know how to 76

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actively push their research out to relevant audiences, promoting their work in a way that will be prioritized by those engines. They simply hope that the audience will be pulled to their work.1 An expanding field of research is trying to make sense of this changing landscape of data and tools for increasing research impact.2 Early studies show that articles subject to promotion through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms are more widely accessed than those without social media promotion, and an equally vibrant area of research in search engine optimization (SEO) is exploring how to increase the rate of such accessing and the reach of academic scholarship.3 These are just some of the ways that social media is changing how we access, consume, and disseminate scientific research. Social media is even changing how we measure the impact of that work, as many employ search tools to obtain citation counts and h-index results. And yet, as with citation searches, many academics are blind to the inner workings of how that data are developed and how these metrics are calculated. For example, many do not know that, of the four most commonly used tools that calculate the h-index—Scopus, Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate—there is no clear sense of which is the most reliable or accurate, as each engine depends on separate databases and produces scores that can vary widely.4 Social media and the web are perhaps the most disruptive tools in society today, fundamentally changing many

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aspects of our world in ways we cannot yet fully comprehend. And academia is not immune to their impact. As SUNY professor of communication arts Neil Postman wrote, technology can fundamentally transform our culture: “In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.”5 L. M. Sacasas, associate director of the Christian Study Center of Gainesville, completed the thought by adding that “likewise, we may say that in the year 2020, fifty years after the internet was invented, we do not have old America plus the internet. We have a different America.”6 For the academic scholar, the web is changing the channels through which science is communicated in our society—who can create it, who can access it, and ultimately what it is. It is democratizing knowledge and changing the nature of our scientific discourse, allowing a much wider array of voices to enter such discussions with varying degrees of validity, and creating what the RAND Corporation called truth decay, the degradation of the quality of public and political discourse, with scientists relegated to the status of mere opinion holders.7 People are turning to online environments for their scientific information, and a wide array of interests have used that medium to communicate their interpretation of science at a speed greater than that of the channels that scientists typically employ.8 Society now has instant access to more news, stories, information, opinion, data, and analysis from more sources and in more varied for-

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mats than ever before, and many people cannot sort rigorous analysis from pseudoscience. Much of this information is highly politicized with an ideological goal that presents firm conclusions which diverge from those arrived at through the scientific method. One social media commentator noted, “The internet doesn’t make us more informed, it just makes us more certain.”9 And the social media echo chamber continues the degradation of public discourse. Politicians and journalists use social media (such as Twitter retweets and Facebook likes) as proxies of public opinion, and the public uses social media as a venue for civic discourse even though both common sense and rigorous research10 show that social media does not always reflect the concerns and interests of the overall public. Between 15 percent11 and 66 percent12 of all tweets come from bots, and what remains is dominated by a minority of loud and vocal people.13 The hostile and sensational tone of the content that this medium produces affects our thinking and behavior in some negative ways. Social media facilitates a mob mentality14 that encourages antisocial behavior through its detachment and anonymity.15 Social media outrage, cancel culture, and “twitter shaming”16 increasingly drive our social discourse. The overriding mode combines rage, incivility, and zealotry, often based on incomplete or incorrect information. There are certainly some sound reasons for avoiding social media.17 But social media and the web are also tools that can and do create positive outcomes. For example, minority

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and marginalized voices can more easily enter the public discourse. The hope of the web’s creators still exists—the potential for a virtual commons through which a greater number of people can obtain valuable information and education. Some studies show that social media appears to be reducing education gaps by helping online users gain comparatively more knowledge about science.18 And this is where academia can begin to think of social media as a constructive tool to bring their scientifically derived content to the public in a way that creates a social good by improving the quality of our public discourse. SOCIAL MEDIA AS AN ACADEMIC TOOL

Social media is changing how scholars perform their tasks of teaching, research, and outreach in ways that we have only just begun to comprehend.19 It is unavoidable and therefore must be embraced. For our teaching, social media allows an expansion of the notion of the classroom, allowing us to bring education to a much larger array of students. But it also challenges the content we teach, since students now carry access to the world’s information on their phones, reducing the need to simply teach facts. Now teaching must emphasize how to become discerning consumers of online content, being able to distinguish rigorous and objective research from content that may have a political agenda and bias, or that represents shoddy or unreliable

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methodology, data, and review.20 For our research, social media allows an expanded set of tools and domains for data gathering, literature review, and information dissemination. Indeed, studies find that some academics use social media to post content related to their work, discover related peers, track metrics, find recommended research articles, and participate in discussions on research-related issues.21 For our engagement, social media allows conversations to take place in virtual space, on comment sections of blogs, news sites, and online forums. Overall, social media offers new channels and tools and requires a new set of skills for the engaged scholar to play a larger role in educating and informing public discourse. In fact, development of new skills may be unavoidable. The impact of social media on academia may be as disruptive as CDs and on-demand video were for the entertainment industry. As MP3 audio replaced CDs between 1999 and 2009, the music industry lost 50 percent of its sales. As American households turned to on-demand services between 2014 and 2019, roughly 16 million canceled their cable subscriptions. Carnegie Mellon professor of information technology Michael Smith warns: Like those entertainment executives, many of us in higher education dismiss the threats that digital technologies pose to the way we work. We diminish online-learning and credentialing platforms such as Khan Academy, Kaggle, and edX as poor substitutes for the “real thing.” We can’t imagine that “our” students would ever want to take a DIY

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approach to their education instead of paying us for the privilege of learning in our hallowed halls. We can’t imagine “our” employers hiring someone who doesn’t have one of our respected degrees.22

While some within the Academy are beginning to embrace the new digital world,23 many scholars seem unaware, indifferent, or hostile to its influence and resist its inevitability. In many ways, this response has parallels to that of the Catholic Church in the wake of the invention of the printing press and its role in hastening the Protestant Reformation.24 This comparison offers a compelling provocation for the scientific community to come to grips with the pervasive changes we are now living through and ignore at our peril. AC A D E M I C R E S I S TA N C E TO T H E S O C I A L M E D I A R E VO LU T I O N

The printing press was developed by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century and was transformative, making books far cheaper and easier to produce, and therefore more plentiful. Before its invention, a monk might be able to copy four or five pages a day. But an early printing press could produce as many as 3,600 pages per day.25 Fifty years later, Martin Luther leveraged the printing press to bring about the Reformation, whereas others who previously lacked the technology could not. Building on his 95 theses, hundreds of thousands of his pamphlets were printed, offering interpretations of the Bible

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that differed from those of the Catholic Church.26 Others printed their own pamphlets, offering even more interpretations (of varying quality) on what the Bible can and did say. These pamphlets were consumed by an interested public who could now access the Bible directly, since it was one of the first books printed. In response, the Catholic Church argued that the written word was reserved for “God’s chosen priests” and not for regular people and sought to put the genie back in the bottle by shutting down printing presses, labeling the purveyors of alternative views as heretical, and publishing their own pamphlets.27 As we all now know, it didn’t work. The world changed in ways that were both monumental and unstoppable. The Catholic Church is now one of many authorities on the Bible, as there are now a variety of accepted approaches to interpreting scripture that build off various traditions, often with interchange and collaboration among them. It would be reasonable to expect the same fate for today’s notions of science, as the arrival of the World Wide Web shows many parallels to the emergence of the printing press. Since the mid-to-late 1990s, the web has grown in distribution and come into common usage.28 One outcome is easier access to scientific information from a wider variety of sources. And, just as happened to the Catholic Church, the Academy and scientists are being displaced into the ranks of but one arbiter of scientific knowledge among many in the public’s eye. Though competing and questionable scientific findings are not

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entirely new—notably on the link between cigarettes and cancer in the 1960s29—the web now makes it possible for the general public to mine scientific information on a completely different scale, drawing their own conclusions and relying on others’ widely varying interpretations. Ask any doctor today what it is like to offer a diagnosis with a proposed treatment plan and have the patient respond with their own web-based diagnosis.30 Ask a parent who chooses not to vaccinate their child for fear of autism or someone who denies the science of climate change, and they can present a string of web-based “scientific studies” to defend their position. The proliferation of alternative science (of varying quality) through media outlets and pseudoscientific journals leaves many within academia discouraged and demoralized. The Academy has, in effect, entered its own period of “reformation” with its authority in flux. Just as the Protestant Reformation was anchored in some legitimate criticisms of the Catholic Church, this reformation is anchored in some legitimate criticisms of academia—rising tuition, perceptions of a liberal bias,31 charges that some scientific research cannot be reproduced and thus verified,32 and questions of the social value of much academic research.33 Yet many scientists are responding to this reformation’s challenge by trying to question the validity or credentials of other voices or dismissing misinformed people. Research shows that many scientists do not see it as their role to educate the public34 and can be dismissive of both

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those who do and the channels with which they do it.35 One survey shows that nearly 40 percent of academics vow never to use Twitter or Facebook for academic purposes36 despite overwhelming evidence of the rising influence and power of such social media platforms. Just like the Catholic Church’s failed response to the Reformation, this resistant and defiant response won’t work either. R E A S O N S TO TA K E TO T H E W E B

In 2006, National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone argued that “scientists themselves must do a better job of communicating directly to the public,” by taking advantage of “new, non-traditional outlets” on the internet.37 Since then, others have been making the same appeal with greater urgency. In 2011, for example, National Institutes of Health researcher Francesco Marincola and strategic communications executive Laura Van Eperen proclaimed that the range of social media platforms that scientists are using is relatively vast and . . . the future of social media is unknown, a combination of educated speculation and persuasive fact points to the industry’s continual growth and influence. . . . The ability to communicate to the masses via social media is critical to the distribution of scientific information amongst professionals in the field and to the general population.38

Many are finding that, if harnessed correctly, social media provides both personal and professional value. A 2014 survey in Nature found that 68 percent of scholars

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used social media to “maintain a profile in case someone wanted to get in touch” and that the top five reasons why they visited social media sites were to: (1) follow discussions, (2) post (work) content, (3) discover peers, (4) discover recommended papers, and (5) comment on research.39 A 2015 Pew Research Center/AAAS survey of 3,748 scientists found that 47 percent used social media to talk about science, and 24 percent wrote blogs.40 And by 2017, a follow-up survey in Nature found that over 95 percent of respondents said they used some form of social media or scholarly collaboration networks (SCN) for professional purposes, 75 percent said that they used those networks for “discovering and/or reading scientific content,” and 50 percent said they accessed Facebook on a daily basis.41 Twitter and Facebook emerge as the most reported sites for sharing scientific content compared to other social media platforms. If properly used, another study found, Twitter makes it possible for scholars to keep track of cutting-edge research, to share their expertise directly with policymakers and journalists, and to get feedback from expert peers as they work on their own research projects.42 Jeffrey Flier, dean of the Harvard Medical School, lists three reasons why he uses Twitter: First, I find tweeting an enjoyable activity, and in a job where too many meetings intersect with often intractable problems, this isn’t to be underestimated. Second, by following interesting people who make thoughtful comments and link to interesting articles, I learn a great deal that might otherwise pass me by. Third, as my followers increased over

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several years from zero to 4,700, (still modest as compared with @Pontifex, @justinbieber or @barackobama), I have a new way of communicating with interesting folks outside my normal circle, some of whom have become valuable Twitter friends or actual friends. Among my followers are medical educators, scientists, health reporters and other journalists, economists, entrepreneurs, policy wonks, writers, aspiring medical students, and many others. The ideas that I share with them have become a valuable part of my intellectual life.

But, he warns, You are entering the Wild West of social media. You have no control over who your followers will be, what they will think of your tweets and links, or what they will say about them or to whom they will say it. So you must be careful [as] your commentary is public. Although my brief Twitter bio identifies me as dean of Harvard Medical School, it says “tweets are my own,” indicating that these are my personal thoughts and should not be confused with official school policy.43

The courts are not yet clear on the distinction between when professors are using social media in their official capacities and when they are speaking as private citizens. Experts warn academics to be careful with what you say and where you say it, when to use your affiliation and when not to, and when to use your own equipment and time and when not to.44 Some have paid a price for not heeding these warnings. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign revoked a faculty job offer to professor of English Steven Salaita in 2014 after he made controversial Twitter posts

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about Israel.45 The Kansas Board of Regents has adopted policies defining when professors can be fired for “improper use of social media.” But others feel that such rules infringe on academic freedom and the basic right to freedom of speech.46 This is an issue that will take some time to resolve. In the meantime, evidence is growing that social media can raise an author’s profile, increase impact and even elevate citation counts. Though some studies have found no clear relationship between social media activity and citations,47 no studies have found a negative effect, and a growing body of evidence is finding that social media platforms increase exposure for academic research within the Academy.48 One study found a strong positive relationship between the number of times an article was tweeted and its number of citations, and that Twitter activity was a more important predictor of citation rates than a five-year journal impact factor, noting that the highest-impact journals were not necessarily the most discussed online and articles in journals with lower impact factors were able to generate considerable Twitter activity and become heavily cited.49 Looking at more granularity of this phenomena, one study found that the number of tweets for an article predicted high citations within the first three  days of article publication with 93 percent specificity, but noted that such attention began to atrophy thereafter.50 Another study found that who tweets or retweets about the paper leads to higher Twitter activity, as papers that were shared on the Twitter accounts of the

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editors and editorial board members of the publishing journals received more page visits than those papers tweeted only by the journal account.51 Looking beyond the Academy, some studies have found that being mentioned on Twitter increases opportunities for journalists52 and nonscientists53 to find a scholar’s work, increasing their exposure and engagement impact. In summary, whether social media can directly lead to increased citations “is not at all an easy hypothesis to test. Notably, the biggest confounding factor is if social media activity (i) increases citations directly or (ii) if it is a reflection of the underlying quality of the article, which would have achieved high citations regardless.”54 As such, social media should not be seen as a replacement for quality research content or a way to gain attention for poor quality research (though that can happen). Instead, it should be seen as a catalyst for increasing exposure for good content where attention represents a proxy measure for that quality. This notion is beginning to grow within academic communities, as some schools have begun to review social media accounts in hiring decisions. According to the Manifest 2020 Personal Branding survey, “About 90 percent of all employers look at potential employees’ social media profiles and 79 percent have rejected a candidate based on what they found.”55 Academia is following a similar trend, and one can ignore social media at their peril. One University of Michigan student reported that he was asked for his social media accounts in the

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interview process so that the school could evaluate what he was tweeting, who he was following, and who was following him. As a result, it is increasingly important to develop your social profile for professional purposes, a reality that many older scholars may find troubling. Lisa Nakamura, director of the digital studies department at the University of Michigan, warns that “if you don’t have your hand on the wheel of your own public image and how your research comes across, others will do it for you” through Twitter, Facebook, and comment boards, which provide an anonymous means of criticizing, threatening, and otherwise harassing scientists. And, it is worth adding, you may not like the persona they create. Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, concurs: “If you are out there, this will happen to you and there is no way to avoid it. Opponents would try to make you the issue. In the messiness of public discourse, academics must be able to keep the focus on the issues at hand.”56 In short, social media is becoming a part of professional development whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. It is best to become familiar with how it works and what it can do. U N D E R S TA N D I N G T H E S O C I A L M E D I A LANDSCAPE

Steve Walls, head of strategy at the marketing and advertising firm Moon Rabbit, notes that academic scholars know how to publish papers, but “a journal publication

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gives your idea legitimacy, not attention. You have to go out and create that attention.”57 Where journals have a limited audience and a slow diffusion rate, social media can accelerate the path to influence. There are limits to what an academic might do to shape the rate or scope of that influence, but every academic should know how the social media landscape works and what impact it may have on your career. What follows is a very simple overview for working social media into your academic and public engagement portfolio. It covers paper publication through dissemination, impact measurement, and active attention management under these categories: unique identifiers, preprint servers, scholarly collaboration networks, social media platforms, research-based media platforms, professional web pages, and citation search tools. Finally, it covers two growing areas of research and practice: search engine optimization (SEO) and alternative metrics. 1. U nique Id en tifi ers

In order to have better control of the ever-growing volume of publications, the publishing industry in the last two decades has started to use unique identifiers to keep track of both an author’s work (and the publisher’s profits) and the authors themselves. Works. Akin to patent numbers, publishers assign a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) number, a unique URL string of numbers, letters, and characters to an article, book, or other object so that it can be located online. The

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DOI URL is “persistent,” meaning that once it is assigned it will never change regardless of where the material is published or hosted, whether in the academic literature or social media sites.58 A DOI number can be registered only by a publisher, usually with the organization CrossRef. Many, but not all, other indexes and platforms make use of CrossRef DOI numbers as one of several ways to identify and index scholarly literature, avoiding broken links and keeping track of various digital versions of the same paper.59 Author. A second tool is the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) number. Like a social security number, each unique 16-digit ORCID number identifies an author and connects authors to their intellectual property. The ORCID’s purpose is not so much to promote authors and their publications, but to ensure that they and their work are correctly identified, cited, and retrieved. Since authors do not always uniformly write or spell their names (e.g., Andrew Hoffman, Andrew J. Hoffman, A. J. Hoffman), the use of ORCID numbers prevents confusion and identifies the correct author. Some journals now request your ORCID number when they publish your paper.60 You can (and should) register for an ORCID number at https://orcid.org/register. 2. P rep rint Servers

Many scholars are frustrated by the long lead time between paper development and publication. Further,

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many funding bodies require that researchers ensure an open access version of their work be made available. To address these challenges, many scholars turn to a preprint server or institutional working paper repository at sites such as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Center for Economic Policy Research, EconPapers, and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) as both a starting point in the research process and as a place to communicate findings at an early stage, prior to publication in academic journals. The first three are focused on the field of economics, while SSRN is useful for the dissemination of early-stage research in the social sciences, applied sciences, health sciences, humanities, life sciences, and physical sciences. SSRN provides a home page for every author with publications indexed in the eLibrary. There is no cost to create a home page, and one can update or correct their page at any time or access the site of any author by clicking their name on posted papers. Scholars can upload their own papers to the site (and then others can download them for free) or upload only abstracts and citations. One study found that scholars posted their articles on SSRN before printing to obtain early and fast dissemination of their work.61 Another study found that Twitter played an enormous role in supporting the uptake of preprints by exposing the content to others.62 In fact, Malcolm Gladwell has publicly extolled the virtues of SSRN as a site where he finds academic research to inform his podcasts, articles, and books.63

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The value, reputation, purpose, and standing of preprints differ by discipline. For example, preprints are highly regarded by the communities in physics, mathematics, and computer science, while they are considered mostly as works in progress by those in the social sciences and humanities.64 Not all journals allow articles to be published if they were previously a preprint, so it is best to check journal policy or consult the publishing compliance service.65 3. S cholarly Col l aborati on Networ ks

Once papers are published, there is a widening array of scholarly collaboration networks (SCNs) for disseminating this work (also called social collaboration networks or online reference managers). Academia.edu (147 million users as of 2020), ResearchGate (19 million users as of 2020), and Mendeley (8 million users as of 2018) are the three largest, and they are designed to help scholars gain exposure for scholarly work, share it, and find others working on similar topics. Other platforms include citation managers like Endnote and Zotero to help organize references and build bibliographies.66 Another platform called CiteULike stored and shared only academic references and had 3.5 million citations in its database, but it went offline in 2019. The most commonly cited barrier by scholars to accessing these SCNs is cost, but other barriers include lack of awareness of available resources; a burdensome purchas-

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ing procedure; VAT on digital publications; format and IT problems; lack of library membership; and conflict between the author’s or publisher’s rights and the desired use of the content.67 The popularity of these sites is dynamic, and each is gaining mixed reviews. While some scholars find value in having a central repository for their work and value the analytics that they provide, others feel that they are too marketing-oriented and send too much spam, wonder how many users are actually active, fear that these outlets will sell their personal data, complain of the amount of work to create profiles, have trouble deciding which platform to use, and worry about the illegal uploading of copyrighted material. Indeed, ResearchGate has been accused of acquiring large volumes of its articles each month (some estimate as high as 40 percent of its content) in violation of agreements between journals and authors, prompting takedown notices and lawsuits.68 Nevertheless, the sites are gaining activity and obtaining funding to find the right formula to increase productive engagement.69 4. S ocial Med ia Pla tf or ms

There are hundreds of social media platforms from which an academic can push research to the general public. Andy Miah, chair in science communication and future media at the University of Salford, has created a publicly available Google Doc that lists over 250.70 So, any attempt

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to summarize the domain of social media platforms must acknowledge that this domain is enormous and constantly changing. But seven social media platforms that have emerged as prominent right now for academics are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram, and TikTok, and each can play a role in developing an online presence for academic research and ideas (though legal issues with the US government in 2020 may threaten TikTok). Facebook is a social networking website, owned by Facebook Inc., a publicly traded company, that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages, and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. While many academics have a personal Facebook page and some choose to use their personal page for professional purposes, Facebook allows the option to set up a page as a business, a public figure, or a cause/community. So Facebook can be used as a homepage for a paper or idea on which to build what is called “owned media” and cultivate a following. Just as some scholars create a separate Facebook account for their professional persona, they can create Facebook pages for conferences, associations, departments, and books so that people can follow them and read updates on speaking engagements, awards, and other news. Facebook has two primary strengths for the academic: reach and frequency. There are a lot of people on the platform, and many visit it at least daily.

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Twitter is a publicly traded microblogging and social networking service on which registered users post “tweets” of a maximum of 280 characters (the average length is 33 characters), and other users can interact with the tweet by “liking,” “retweeting,” or responding. Unregistered users can only read them. So, if you are not yet on Twitter, at least check to see if your handle name is available (e.g., @ DoeJane or @JohnSmith), and if it is, it would be wise to claim it before it is taken by someone else. It costs nothing, and it could be your platform for the rest of your career. This is where scholars can share connections to their research, blogs, or other content, and conversations can begin about this work. Some conversations will be helpful to advancing scholarly ideas and accessing additional research. And some conversations may be critical of your work, and you may want to be aware even if you don’t participate. Many conferences post hashtags where key points are being discussed and shared with the wider community, and many also post author handles to allow specific comments or quotes to be posted with attribution, creating instant feedback of what people in the audience found to be of value. For the engaged scholar, Twitter is less about engaging a broad audience and more about catching the attention of specific audiences, whether they be journalists, bloggers, peers, or influencers who can shine a spotlight on your scholarly ideas or papers. Steve Walls suggests that you

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think of Twitter not as the buffet but as the signposts leading you to the buffet. You should be specific to post links directly to content so that people do not stop at the short tweet but go to the deeper content. And if you pin a tweet to your profile, you can be found by search tools as well as by people. Finally, if you open up your Twitter inbox, you can respond to messages directly from people who found your tweet interesting.71

LinkedIn is a business and employment-oriented online service owned by Microsoft that operates via websites and mobile apps. It is the most professional of the social media platforms for finding colleagues and learning of their work and background. User names and their employers are posted on profiles, and the lack of anonymity changes the kind of discourse that takes place, tending to be less hostile and critical. For many academics, this site can feel more like a safe space. Another advantage of LinkedIn is that whenever an article is posted to the platform all of the user’s connections are notified. And, while basic, the LinkedIn analytics offer data on what’s getting traction and what isn’t. Creating a LinkedIn account is free. Pinterest is an image-sharing and social media website owned by billionaire Ben Silbermann. It is designed to enable saving and discovery of information using images and, on a smaller scale, GIFs and videos. It is largely used to drive people to bookmark and to buy things. But it’s also a platform where people are open to new ideas, scrolling to find things of interest to them. So, scholars who can

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communicate their ideas through images can engage with a Pinterest audience. “But ultimately,” remarks Walls, “this is more suited to helping people with very specific hobbies find hints and tips than to generating attention for the written word.”72 Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website owned by Advance Publications. It is a powerful issue-based platform for the exchange of ideas. It works by setting up or subscribing to one of more than 138,000 communities (sub-reddits) and publishing content there. Other Reddit users comment, discuss, and eventually vote on that content. The votes push the most-liked content to the top of the page and the least-liked to the bottom. Reddit gets 184 million page views a month and is ranked the seventh most popular site in the United States.73 The engagement levels on Reddit are impressive. At 15 minutes a day and nearly 10 page views a day per visitor, Reddit has more activity than the other top online sites (Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon). Reddit sees 58 million daily votes, 2.8 million comments a day, and 370,000 daily submissions, making it the site with the highest engagement. Reddit is most famous as a meme generator and for AMA (Ask Me Anything) interviews where people find a community related to a specific topic, schedule the AMA, and interact with the audience that attends. Barack Obama has done one AMA; Bill Gates did six on the topics of philanthropy and technology. While these were successful, some AMAs have gone poorly, so it is best to get

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acquainted with the rules and norms. Name brands like REI and Pilot Pens have had public relations problems due to bad Reddit experiences, and Woody Harrelson was cited as one of the biggest Reddit AMA disasters after he hosted an AMA to promote his film Rampart. The crowd did not appreciate his limiting question topics, flippant style, and overall tone that signaled a selfpromotional goal.74 Instagram is a photo- and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc., that has overtaken Twitter in popularity, with over 600 million more users. It can be used to share visual content with the public, engage students, or showcase academic departments or groups to attract students or staff. Daniel Kempf, senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of Liverpool, posts imagery of medieval monsters to capture the public’s attention. Vikas Shah, professor of clinical radiology at the University of Leicester, posts genuine x-rays to test radiology students (both his and any general radiology students), challenging them to diagnose the patient based on what they see. The College of Arts and Law at the University of Birmingham used Instagram’s vertical video feature, IGTV, to share an immersive tour of their campus art gallery while the first-year tour guide answered questions about her time studying at Birmingham.75 TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, based in Beijing. It has a very young audience and works by setting that audience a challenge to create content of their own. Participants on

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TikTok tend to be engaged and positive, and they generate very large engagement numbers. Many think of TikTok as a flipped classroom. If a user has a cause, an issue, or a challenge that they want young people to take up, to understand, and to make their own, this platform is a great way to get them to do it. Andy Miah writes that “there are some great young people sharing scientific insights and teachers sharing experiments on the platform. Moreover, its highly sophisticated, in-built editing tools make it a lot easier to be more imaginative with video.”76 But, as of 2020, TikTok has been locked in a battle with the US government, which has called the Chinese-owned app a security risk to American users and has filed an executive order for TikTok to either sell its U.S. operations or halt transactions in the United States.77 5. Research- Ba sed Medi a Pl atforms

Online outlets that allow academic scholars more control and space to bring their work to broader audiences are proliferating. Each is similar in that they create a venue for scholars to write short essays (750-1,000 words) that either are based on specific research projects or offer expert commentary on current events. Some allow more undeveloped ideas that give the scholar access to a virtual common room where they can get quick feedback to finetune and develop their ideas.78 Beyond that, they have different parameters and audiences. The Conversation79 is one of the largest, with editions in Africa, Australia,

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Canada (French and English), France, Indonesia, New Zealand, Spain, United States, United Kingdom, and “Global Perspectives.” Only scholars affiliated with a university may submit a pitch that summarizes the proposed work. If it is accepted, the platform provides editorial assistance to polish it, formats it into a clean and attractive layout with graphics, and publishes it under a creative common license that allows other news sources to repost it and give it further visibility. The Monkey Cage 80 is more specifically focused on academic scholars in the political sciences and, because it is hosted by the Washington Post, is available only to subscribers. The Ideas Roadshow 81 conducts long-format video interviews with scholars and other experts and offers the results as paid content in both video and print formats. Footnote 82 and Solutions 83 are online publications focused on solving ecological, social, and economic problems, with Solutions describing itself as “Nature meets the New Yorker.” Medium 84 is in a category that some call “social journalism,” hosting essays by both amateur and professional writers. Conditionally Accepted 85 is a site hosted by Inside Higher Education that posts “news, information, personal stories, and resources for scholars who are, at best, conditionally accepted in academe.” This list is by no means complete, but what these sites represent is a growing venue genre that helps the academic community amplify the impact of their research by translating it into accessible, engaging formats and sharing it with mainstream audiences.

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6. P rofession al Web Pages

People will find you, your papers, and all your scholarly activities on your professional web page. One survey found that 80 percent of professional employers believe that a personal website is important when evaluating job candidates.86 This is even more true for academics, where a professional web page becomes the central and careerlong repository for the scholar’s record, output, accomplishments, and professional narrative. While many schools create faculty web pages, many people find them insufficient for a more comprehensive, personal, and engaging format. Those who do not yet have a website may want to see if their names are available for use (e.g., JohnSmith.com or JaneDoe.net) and, if so, buy the domain name now before it is taken forever. It is inexpensive, and the site can be your signature platform for the rest of your career. You can build the site yourself, but if you wish to take full advantage of the latest techniques in graphic design and search engine optimization, it would be best to hire a web professional to assure that your publications are visible to web crawlers from the various search tools including Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic.87 7. C itat ion Search Tool s

As of June 2020, there were over 1.7 billion websites, of which 200 million were active.88 As a result, search tools are critically necessary for finding content in this massive

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landscape. In the 1990s, Archie was the first search tool that scanned file transfer protocol (FTP) files, and Veronica was the first text-based search tool.89 Today, they have become more sophisticated. Some (like Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and PsycInfo) are more targeted and include only selected journal articles submitted directly by the publisher. These platforms have their own selection and ranking criteria, and most publicly disclose both their list of journals and how new journals can get included. Other search tools (notably Google Scholar) sweep web pages and display the results, sorted based on algorithms for determining relevance. While there are some humanbased search tools (also called open directory systems), the major ones such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo use a spider (also called a bot or a crawler), a program that repeatedly crawls (or surfs) the web, link by link, and records new and updated pages and defunct links to gather potentially matching keywords included in the search query and collects the content (images, position of relevant keywords, backlinks, and other data) of each of these pages to a make a copy of them for further processing.90 The best-known citation search tools are Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Two more recent entrants include Microsoft Academic, launched in 2016, and Dimensions, launched in 2018. PubMed is used to a great extent by medical researchers. Web of Science is the best known among academics. It is updated weekly, has excellent search limits by discipline, and its citation analysis goes back farther than most others. But it has

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less coverage of arts, humanities, and social sciences. Scholars can create a ResearcherID with Web of Science which can be linked to your ORCID number and facilitates citation metrics and publication tracking using Web of Science tools.91 Compared to other tools, Scopus has better coverage of open access journals, foreign language arts, humanities, and social sciences. But one drawback is that it cannot search by date earlier than 1960. Google Scholar is an excellent resource for finding cited references and is also good at finding more obscure references. Some criticisms are that it has too much irrelevant content in search results, offers few options for sorting results, and does not share the details of its operating algorithm.92 Scholars can create a Google Scholar profile where they and other academics can find relevant work and gather data about productivity and scholarly impact (with measures such as citation counts and h-index). Microsoft Academic claims that it differs from “traditional” search tools because it does not rely on keyword search but rather on “intelligent reading.” Some preliminary analysis suggests that this search tool is quite robust, offering similar coverage as Google Scholar, with both offering more rigorous results than Web of Science and Scopus.93 Dimensions claims to have created “a database that offers the most comprehensive collection of linked data in a single platform; from grants, publications, datasets and clinical trials to patents and policy documents,” mapping the entire research lifecycle from funding through output to impact.94

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8. S earch En gi ne Opti mizati on

With the nearly two trillion keyword searches performed each year, over 94 percent of people read only the first page of search results, and if they do not find what they are looking for, they do another keyword search. Almost 63 percent of people look only at the top three results of the search, which is known as the “golden triangle.”95 Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy for landing a listing in these very competitive search environments by “editing a website’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines.”96 Similar terms like search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine advertising (SEA) involve SEO but include various paid advertising options and will not be covered here. There are two categories of SEO. “Black hat” SEO seeks to game the system by finding loopholes and weaknesses in the search engine’s ranking algorithms. It is considered by many to be deceptive and results in less steady and stable growth in web traffic.97 Black hat techniques include: using hidden texts or links that have the same color as that of the background; stuffing a webpage with a large number of target keywords in the hope of deceiving the search engine; creating a “link farm” of as many websites as possible, where all the websites contain hyperlinks to the target website, and a technique called “cloaking,” where different information is provided to the search engine than to the user.98

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“White hat” SEO is considered an authentic, audience-directed strategy for gaining higher ranking in search results and follows search tool algorithms. These strategies are most commonly used for specific websites, particularly those of commercial retailers, but many academic institutions, centers, and individual scholars turn to them to drive users to their content. In either case, understanding specifically what search tools do and how they work is not always easy, making this a challenging and growing field of research and practice. The four citation search tools listed previously present their results based on different factors. One study found “citation counts are probably the main factor employed by Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic in their ranking algorithms” but found no evidence that citations are taken into account in Scopus. With Web of Science, the study found conflicting results that it weighted results either according to the position and frequency of keywords or based on citations received.99 The Web of Science reveals the list of journals that it considers important and also ranks and compares them in its “Journal Citation Reports.” Google Scholar offers publication ranking lists but does not provide a comprehensive list of journals covered. It is driven by proprietary search robots and algorithms, and concrete information about how it selects its material and manages its search results is limited. But based on the results of various studies, the Google Scholar algorithm appears to weight for citation counts and recency, so well-cited articles get more citations

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(which some link to the “Matthew Effect” where “the rich get richer”) and new articles have a window of opportunity. Also, search terms in the title score more heavily than the terms in the text, a DOI number increases the likelihood of its being found by web crawlers, and it helps if the article is structured like an academic article and is posted on a website that the platform recognizes. The journal impact factor seems to play a smaller role than the journal name (e.g., Nature does well), and the author citation score is included in the algorithm.100 One problem for SEO with Google Scholar is that the search tool is continually shifting its algorithms in an attempt to deliver higher quality content based not just on how many times a specific search term is used or paper is cited, but whether the content is relevant at a much deeper level. In fact, Google is exploring the use of artificial intelligence to improve its search functions,101 but its preference for algorithms over humans means that its indexing software is far from perfect and open to manipulation by people trying to game their citation counts.102 For example, the most cited author on Google Scholar in 2016 was “et al.”103 so there are still some bugs to be worked out. Within the white hat category, techniques for SEO fall into two methods. Off-page search engine optimization consists of those elements that are not in direct control of the developer, mainly promotions outside the website, promotions on social platforms, web content sharing, and blog commenting. Overall, the greater the number of such backlinks, the greater the page ranking in search

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results.104 However, most search engines emphasize the quality of inbound links over their sheer quantity, so the authority of the linking sources and the topical relevance of the linked sites are important.105 On-page search engine optimization utilizes techniques that are within the developer’s control for drawing attention to web content, including code and content such as texts, images, headings, links, etc. This is the most important area, as it lays the foundations for all SEO work, and it centers on the careful use of keywords that are both relevant to the theme of the website and are similar to keywords being searched on the web. In fact, keyword choice and placement are the most important decision factors in the ranking of a website in search results.106 Web designers carefully consider keywords in the title tag, description meta tag, and headings tag so that search algorithms can know what the website is about. They also add text files that attract and guide crawlers to the sections of the website that are accessible to them and create optimized URLs, page names, and subdirectories that are meaningful and memorable so that third-party users can provide backlinks to the website. Finally, videos are a powerful tool for capturing attention as search engines weight videos more highly. There is a growing field of professionals to help perfect these SEO techniques. But Chas Cooper, CEO and founder of Rising Star Reviews, warns that you can go too far in worrying about search engine optimization. His advice is to concentrate on writing great content, but he does offer two simple tips:

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(1) Know what search term you want to show up for, look at the competing content already showing up for that term, and write a new piece of content that’s significantly better from the point of view of the audience that’s searching that term. (2) Include that target search term in the page title, H1 heading, and early in the first paragraph. . . . All the other on-page optimizations that many content marketers fret over are optional at best. If you take these two steps—and your web team does a great job on technical SEO—you’ll rank.107 9. A lt ernative Metri cs

The final domain of interest is “alternative metrics” or “alt metrics” for gauging public engagement. Where metrics like the number of publications, citation counts, and h-index quantify impact in the scholarly community, there is growing attention to means for quantifying impact in broader communities. These metrics typically consider data such as views and downloads from online repositories and databases, sharing activity through social media (such as Facebook and Twitter), citations and discussions in blogs and wikis, social bookmarking (such as Zotero and CiteULike), mentions and comment counts (such as on Reddit and YouTube), and holdings in library collections.108 Three metrics have emerged most visibly in this domain and others are sure to follow. Altmetric creates a numerical score for the impact of an individual scholarly article by linking its DOI number to data from sources like Twitter, Facebook, traditional

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media, blogs, and scholarly collaboration networks such as Mendeley and CiteULike.109 Many publishers have begun to embed the Altmetric “Donut” badges into their journal article and book pages to show the Altmetric score for individual items from within the publisher platform. PlumX Metrics creates a similar type of score for articles, conference proceedings, book chapters, and other scholarly output based on five separate categories: citations (such as citation indexes, patent citations, clinical citations, and policy citations), usage (such as clicks, downloads, views, library holdings, and video plays), captures (such as bookmarks, code forks, favorites, readers, and watchers), mentions (such as blog posts, comments, reviews, Wikipedia references, and news media), and social media (such as shares, likes, comments, and tweets).110 ImpactStory creates a similar score, but at the level of the individual scholar by tracking available alt metrics and traditional metrics for scholarly works.111 Creating an ImpactStory profile is easy and can be done at http://impactstory.org/signup. All of these metrics are still being developed and, like the scholarly collaboration networks, have solid backing in the search for a more accurate quantitative metric that can be used by academics to measure their impact beyond the Academy. Altmetric is supported by Taylor and Francis, LSE, and John Wiley & Sons; ImpactStory is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation; and PlumX Metrics is owned by Elsevier.

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C O N C LU S I O N : M A S T E R S O C I A L M E D I A BEFORE IT MASTERS US

Some academics find social media promotion and the task of pushing research out into broader communities to be distasteful, self-promoting, or vain. One irate scholar wrote, “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer. We should not have to parade ourselves on social media to please our employers or be considered enthusiastic.”112 But using social media as an academic tool need not be about attention-grabbing. Instead, it is about bringing your work to a broader audience, to the public, lawmakers, business executives, and others who can use it. Think of this as a public service. Your social media activity can be more akin to curating content for a larger classroom. There is no need to tweet to be liked or to broadcast trivial points about your life. Think of it in the same way you might think of giving a research seminar at another university. Both are about disseminating your work—it’s just a difference of audience and channel. Social media is a tool that is still growing, and its impact on society and the academic world is still unmeasured. That said, its importance cannot be denied, and its presence is here to stay. It allows a new cadre of engaged scholars to have more real-world impact with their work. It creates an opportunity to revitalize the Academy by connecting it more deeply with the society and world it studies.

5  ENGAGEMENT AND THE ARC OF YOUR CAREER

In 2018, I met A. R. Elangovan, professor of management at the University of Victoria. In a chance encounter during my sabbatical, we realized very quickly that we were kindred spirits who saw what was happening to the role of academia in modern society in the same way. We both felt an unease that “academia had drifted away from its primary role as the intellectual conscience of society—a place where we can gather with curiosity and passion to search skillfully for answers to questions that will point us towards better and more enlightened ways of living.”1 And we both saw the same drift in commonly accepted notions of scholarly identities and purpose. With that realization came the spark to coauthor a paper called “The pursuit of success in academia: Plato’s ghost asks ‘What then?’”2 Though it will not be highly cited and will not rank highly by the standard metrics of our field, it is an article that I cherish because it says something that I feel is profoundly important. And because of that, it touched people, 113

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many of whom reached out by email, phone, and in person to thank us for writing it. That does not happen often, and it is something special. The article used a poem by W. B. Yeats called “What Then?” to ask scholars at various stages of their career why they chose to be an academic, to what do they devote their energies, whether those energies are aligned with their deepest intent, and what they can do to realign them if misaligned. Yeats’s poem juxtaposes the earthly accomplishments to “grow a famous man” with the higher ideals of Plato (a repeated feature in Yeats’s work) whose ghost mocks the vanity of worldly endeavors from beyond the grave. We felt that each of the four stanzas aligned with the four stages of the academic career—doctoral student, junior professor, senior professor, and professor emeritus—and wanted to use them to encourage the higher ideals of the academic pursuit. What Then? William Butler Yeats (1938) His chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; “What then” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?” Everything he wrote was read, After certain years he won Sufficient money for his need, Friends that have been friends indeed; “What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”

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All his happier dreams came true— A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, Poets and Wits about him drew; “What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?” “The work is done,” grown old he thought, “According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought”; But louder sang that ghost, “What then?”

The first stanza speaks to the doctoral student and the quest for acceptance. Students are excited to begin their pursuit of knowledge as a lifelong career but feel the constant fear that they will not measure up to the expectations of the world they are entering. They take their courses, write their papers, pass their preliminary examination, defend their dissertation, and accept their first academic post. However, we observe that the spirit of doctoral education seems to have drifted from questions over who we are as scholars and why we want to pursue this kind of life to questions of what we intend to study and how we intend to gain the acceptance of others. It is a shift in emphasis away from that of a lifelong vocation and toward the objective of “successful publication” for gaining a job. The creative art of inquiry is being replaced by the tactical science of attaining the metrics of academic progress. And Plato’s ghost asks, “What then?” The second stanza speaks to the junior professor and the quest for accolades. The life of the junior scholar is often

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distilled down to a single goal: tenure. The pursuit of A-level publications becomes an obsession, one that all too often diminishes the creative quality of academic work. It pushes the scholar toward the strategic pursuit of maximizing output by publishing small nuggets (the “minimum publishable unit”) or publishing in groups, dividing work so that the same amount of effort can produce more “pubs.” The overwhelming stress from the “publish or perish” ethos pushes us to distort, if not abandon, the kind of scholar we want to be and forces us to fit our identity into a predetermined mold. And Plato’s ghost asks, “What then?” The third stanza speaks to the senior professor and the quest for status. The life of the senior scholar all too often becomes one of continuity, pursuing and perpetuating the same metrics by which their career was deemed worthy of elevated status. Some senior professors continue to add more A-level publications to their already impressive list because that is how they have been enculturated. As such, we become complacent. We enjoy the luxury of having mastered the game successfully, so there is not much appetite for breaking from what we know and learning newer and better ways of knowing and doing. And Plato’s ghost asks, “What then?” The fourth and final stanza speaks to the professor emeritus and the quest for validation. For many, the life of an emeritus professor is a confused and conflicted time, a period of self-examination that may include questions over the quality of their work and the communities to

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which it was directed. The adage “you are only as relevant as your last publication” may become painfully clear as academic standing atrophies quickly. It is not uncommon at this stage to feel forgotten by, and even angry at, the same communities that once feted us, for it seems like a lifetime of work has been either reduced to a few summary contributions or quietly ignored with no one seeming able to see the coherent message we believe lies within it. And it may be that it is in this phase that Plato’s question finally hits its mark. Will the measures and metrics of success that lead us through our careers give us a true sense of meaning and purpose? Was it a work-life meaningfully lived? In the end, Plato’s ghost is asking us if academia has lost its way. And a good place to start to remedy this situation is to take a hard, critical look at our own career paths and what we consider as the sacred rites of passage. What happens if you spend the better part of your working life fighting to climb the career ladder, succeed with hard work and sacrifice to get to the top, and then discover you have scaled the wrong wall? Perhaps we should pause once in a while to check if our ladders are against the right wall by listening to Plato’s ghost asking “What then?” The answer may challenge us to think of our career in terms of its long arc and at each stage to recalibrate to remain true to our sense of scholarly identity and calling. If your calling is to make a difference in the world around you through your scholarly pursuits, then you must work public engagement into each stage of your academic life in new and expanding ways.

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As a doctoral student, we need to ask foundational questions about what kind of academic scholar we want to be and what kinds of issues we wish to devote our lives to addressing. This must be a process of deep discernment, since the choice of a dissertation topic is highly consequential, setting the course that will guide much of our career and ultimately decide if our work will contribute to society. As a junior faculty member, we need to wrestle with the tensions of satisfying the metrics by which we are judged and the personal direction we originally set out to follow, asking how to remain true to ourselves while also satisfying the gatekeepers of the institution. With an open mind to the possibilities of this question, we can disarm the terrifying grip that the ultimate tenure decision can hold over us, allowing us a powerful ambivalence to follow our own path of engaging with the real problems of the world. It can help us avoid the fate of becoming the cormorant that Herbert Shepard warned us about in Chapter 2. As senior faculty, we have a responsibility to act with courage in terms of the kinds of research questions we pose, the projects we undertake, the audiences we seek to reach, and the kind of work culture and school policies we create or shape. As the primary decision-makers in the schools at which we work, we have the obligation to craft, articulate, and role-model an ethos that celebrates an engaged and enlightened approach to research and teaching. And we have an obligation to change the institutional “rules of engagement” so as to support young

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scholars coming up the ranks in their efforts to undertake meaningful work with social impact. Finally, as professor emeriti, the onus is on us to embrace our roles as elders of the community and offer wise counsel for the development of our fields, our schools, and the next generation of scholars. The focus ought not to be on adding to our already stellar reputations, but on withdrawing graciously from the center stage while welcoming the next generation to occupy that space and standing by to support them for even greater success. With our lens of hindsight, we can help the next generation of scholars to take stock of the true measures of academic impact and remain true to their calling as a scholar. The fervent hope here is that the confident and the courageous will be inspired to look beyond the standard metrics of academic success and chart a course that is true to their calling and the essence, purpose, and potential of academia to use its vast research capability to make a positive and practical difference in the world. This is a challenge for both the individual scholar and the institutions and culture of academia. C H A N G I N G T H E C U LT U R E O F A C A D E M I A

Everything leading up to this point takes us to the ultimate goal of changing the cultural rules, norms, and beliefs of academia and more specifically changing what it values, how it measures success, and in what domains it seeks to have impact. One problem with changing the

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metrics of academic success is that it must be done at the institutional level. This is an issue of the entire system, not easily tackled by one school alone. Academia is a competitive market, where faculty members act as free agents. If one school were to establish idiosyncratic measures for academic advancement in ways that were at variance with those at other schools, a junior faculty member would be ill-advised to follow them unless guaranteed tenure. For if their tenure packet is denied, they need to have a saleable publication record on the open market. And if the pursuit of a different set of metrics diminished that record, they will have done serious damage to their career and future within academia. The risk of a résumé that is not valued by the broader market is very real. The challenge for change within academia goes beyond tenure criteria and must include all aspects of the field: doctoral training, faculty hiring, journal review, promotion and tenure criteria, school rankings, accreditation, and more. Yet as these changes begin, spread, and take hold, adoption will diffuse and accelerate, and a new culture will take shape. The pressures for such a shift have been building for years, and the Covid-19 pandemic, with its attendant transformative demands, may accelerate the process by which universities see merit in becoming more engaged with the society of which they are a part. Diana Brazzell, cofounder and executive editor of the online journal Footnote, writes that “prioritizing and investing in engaged scholarship can help universities enhance their reputations, differentiate themselves from

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other institutions, inspire and engage students and faculty, secure support from funders and policy makers, invigorate alumni investment, and better prepare students to apply their knowledge after graduation.”3 And more directly, it can help them recruit the best and brightest from the next generation of scholars who, in increasing numbers, want to make a difference in society through their work. Baruch Fischhoff, Carnegie Mellon University professor of engineering and public policy, warned that “the intellectual health of our disciplines” depends on supporting public engagement in young and aspiring faculty.4 Years ago, it was not uncommon for a professor to quit a doctoral student’s committee if the student decided not to pursue a career in academia. Though this still happens today, it is far less common, suggesting a shift in academic norms is underway. Every university is shifting at its own pace. The National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement has created the EDGE self-assessment matrix tool to help institutions assess their progression along a four-stage continuum: Embryonic, Developing, Gripping, and Embedding.5 A university in the final stage of Embedding may be described along three dimensions. The first is Purpose with public engagement prioritized in its official mission, with champions assigned and success indicators identified. The second is Process with a strategic plan developed, formal responsibility or oversight created, and resources available to assist the embedding of public engagement through supported networks, professional development, and training. The third

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is People where all members of the community “have the opportunity to get involved in public engagement, either informally or as part of their formal duties, and are encouraged and supported to do so.” Many land-grant schools6 with extension programs, such as Purdue University and the University of Illinois, have long included engagement in their mission and criteria for advancement. For them, engagement is almost synonymous with extension, particularly for those in colleges of agriculture and veterinary science. In fact, Purdue’s motto is “Engage with Us.”7 Putting these aspirations into practice on a larger scale, we can see innovations and experiments that are taking place in multiple areas of the academic environment. For example, we can see innovations taking place in the training of faculty. The Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan recently initiated the Public Engagement Faculty Fellowship program to help prepare young scholars from units across the campus for engagement.8 We can also see innovations in the training of doctoral students, often through programs that they have designed themselves. One example is the Communicating Science (ComSciCon) workshop series at Harvard University, organized by and for graduate students to develop science communication skills for sharing the results from research in their field to broad and diverse audiences.9 Another is the Researchers Expanding LayAudience Teaching and Engagement program (RELATE) at the University of Michigan which was started by a

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group of graduate students to help “early career researchers develop stronger communication skills” while “actively facilitating a dialogue between researchers and different public communities.”10 University press offices are increasingly developing programs in media training to help faculty members overcome a deep ambivalence that many hold toward journalists. The University of Illinois Office of Public Affairs offers both customized media training for individuals and class-based training for teams, covering topics like: how the media works and what makes the news; how to respond to media inquiries; interview tips; how to craft key messages and communicate them effectively; key aspects to radio and TV interviews; and steps to take after the interview.11 Beyond the individual institution, a growing array of formal training platforms is becoming available. For example, the Earth Leadership Program at Stanford University (formerly the Leopold Leadership Program) provides resources and training for mid-level academics covering topics such as building and leading teams, working with Congress, and communicating with print and social media.12 Its sister program, COMPASS, provides training, individual coaching, and networking opportunities to help academics participate more effectively in public discourse about the environment.13 Other training programs include the AAAS Communicating Science workshops14 and the Union of Concerned Scientists Science Network Workshop Series.15

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More universities are hiring professional staff to aid academics in their engagement pursuits. Some are hiring technical writers, science translators, and communication coaches to help faculty with the preparation of media releases and the writing of editorials or web essays to increase the visibility of their work. Boston University hired acting coaches to help its faculty to become better storytellers.16 Purdue University’s Office of Engagement17 and the College of Agriculture’s Communications Office have personnel dedicated to working with faculty and staff to edit and lay out extension publications, write news stories, and provide media training. And new professions are emerging, such as “knowledge broker” to facilitate two-way or multiway exchanges of information. “A knowledge broker . . . sits in between knowledge producers, [such as] scientists . . . and those who use knowledge, such as policymakers, the general public, or people working in the health domain. Knowledge brokers try to bridge the gap that can exist between those two worlds and build connections.”18 Changes in performance metrics and review are taking place at various institutions. The American Sociological Association produced a report assessing how tenure and promotion committees might consider researchers’ involvement in public communication and social media, noting that “public engagement can be beneficial by providing new forums for sharing knowledge, increasing the visibility and relevance of research with the public, offering additional justification for public funding, and help-

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ing to democratize the contributions of researchers to public debate.”19 The Mayo Clinic’s Academic Appointments and Promotions Committee announced in 2016 that it would include social media and digital activities in its criteria for academic advancement.20 The Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan amended its annual review criteria by adding a fourth category of “practice” to the standard three criteria of research, teaching, and service, with the goal of capturing impact on problems that have real value to the practice of business. Some schools have begun to allow professors to write statements of impact evidence for their promotion and tenure packet, including testimonials linking their work to subsequent change. To prove that impact, some are asking letter writers to comment on public engagement while others are allowing letter writers from outside academia to speak on the candidate’s behalf.21 And then, the committee that evaluates those letters may include peers who have also conducted public engagement, and not just peers who are only aware of scholarly merit. Ultimately, schools are wrestling with the question of whether a faculty member whose engagement outweighs their publication record can be tenured. Actual metrics for public engagement remain a challenge to define. In a survey of United Kingdom faculty on public engagement, 53 percent gave no response to the question about what criteria they used to measure successful activity. Another 22 percent of the responses were variants of “none” or “no criteria.” Overall, the study suggested

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that one of the key areas for the higher education sector is to develop measures of quality for public engagement.22 An interesting finding was that some do not want precise criteria, reporting that engagement is something they do voluntarily and during personal time. A lack of criteria allows them to retain control over their activity, and they fear that could be undermined if explicit formal evaluation were demanded.23 The University of Minnesota revised its promotion and tenure guidelines in 2007 to include public engagement and allows each department to define it for themselves. For departments that need assistance in reviewing faculty, the school’s Office of Public Engagement established a Review Committee on Community-Engaged Scholarship. The university also established the President’s Community-Engaged Scholar Award.24 The University of Illinois added public engagement criteria to its promotion and tenure process in 2009, including guidelines for solicitation of letters that evaluate a candidate’s interdisciplinary or translational research activities.25 The University of Nebraska amended its annual evaluation forms to include several types and categories of public engagement, with metrics that include the number of hours, quantified products (such as publications), and events attended or organized. Some schools are considering new measures of impact and new categories of information to measure the quality of impact beyond academic communities. Based on studies

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that have found that Altmetric scores can predict later citation counts,26 some schools are considering a combination of both Altmetric scores (or PlumX Metrics scores) and standard journal impact measures (while also recognizing concerns that such scores could be subject to manipulation27 by purchasing social media posts or using bots to boost social media activity).28 To improve public access to scientific research, some schools are challenging the paywalls and the increasing privatization that block access to publications that are often paid for by taxpayer money. In 2019, the University of California canceled its subscription to Elsevier, and several German and Swedish universities followed suit. Some Canadian universities are considering a similar move as the cumulative costs for such subscriptions are estimated at more than $300 million per year.29 There are efforts underway to change the top academic journals and make their research questions more topically relevant. In the field of management, an effort called the Responsible Research in Business & Management network (RRBM) is encouraging academic scholars, deans, accreditation bodies, and in particular journal editors to promote business research that serves the public good, notably through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The network is also developing a community of scholars who make “I will” statements to further the development of academic research that serves a social good, holding conferences on the practice of “responsible

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research,” and working with individual schools to develop better practices to support its aims.30 This book was inspired in part by my own “I will” statement. There are even changes in the accreditation process to value public engagement. For example, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) is changing its accreditation criteria to include societal impact of business school teaching, research, and outreach. The overarching objective is to promote the idea that business schools should have a positive impact on society and that business itself can become a force for good. What both RRBM and AACSB are doing is, in effect, trying to push academic research in the field of management out of Bohr’s Quadrant and into Pasteur’s Quadrant.31 Organizations are forming to help scholars find communities that need their expertise. The Scholars Strategy Network is an organization of university-based scholars who are committed to using research to improve policy and strengthen democracy. It does this by connecting scholars with civic leaders and policymakers to help solve challenging policy problems. The Scholars Strategy Network also provides a workshop, Training Researchers to Inform Policy, to empower scholars to become powerful players in policy debates by providing the tools to map the policy landscape and build relationships with the leaders who work on the issues they study.32 One obstacle that has yet to be overcome is the influence of the rankings in focusing specifically on academic

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publications as measures of scholarly impact outside the classroom. Ranking tends to place schools in a “commodity trap,” homogenizing academic research and education content, stifling innovation, and providing wildly misleading scorecards that synthesize the quality of an educational experience into a preposterous single number.33 Deans are naturally conservative about taking steps that may cause a drop in their school’s rankings as that affects the quality of student applicants, faculty recruits, donor interest, recruiter participation, and much more. Overall, these are all pieces of the changing mosaic of academic research. As more experiments take hold, more adoption will accelerate the broad cultural change within the institutions of academia. Or, conversely, these experiments could remain local in scale and scope, and engagement remains the choice of the individual scholar. The future lies in the movement of scholars who wish to make a difference in the world beyond the Academy and of the academic administrators who want to create the conditions and support structures to help them do it. C O N C LU S I O N : T H E AC A D E M I C S C H O L A R I N TO DAY ’ S W O R L D

The goal of this book is to challenge scholars to reexamine why they joined the Academy and to recognize the ways in which the Academy’s standard metrics of “impact” may distract them from the real work that they are called to do. The vision of this book is to enact the

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life of the academic as a calling, one where the creative, curious, and skilled search for answers meets the pressing needs of society in order to improve both. To examine this idea of a calling, each scholar must think about their career in terms of both its extrinsic rewards and its intrinsic meaning and purpose. In many cases, the focus purely on the extrinsic rewards dominates attention and vision. Instead, if scholars can adopt a degree of ambivalence about the standard notions of academic success, they may find that their life as a scholar will take them where they need to go, even if that means challenging the rules of academia or leaving academia for a nonprofit, think tank, corporation, government agency, or elsewhere. In many ways, this book is a provocation for scholars to give careful thought to what kind of scholar they want to be and not just adopt the mode presented to them. Repeating the words of Herbert Shepard, don’t be a cormorant. There is a tremendous need for more academics to adopt the role of engaged scholar. Most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the extent to which scientific conclusions can be ignored, rejected, and attacked. Many within American society in particular, including elected leaders, have challenged the reality of the pandemic, its lethality, and even the quantitative reports of the numbers infected. This science denial is a continuation of the erosion of public trust in scientific institutions, whether that is people who choose not to vaccinate their children for fear of autism or refuse to believe that

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climate change is real and human-caused—both in direct contradiction to the conclusions of scientific research. This willful ignorance has real implications for the lives of Americans and, when it leads to decisions like withdrawing funding from the World Health Organization or pulling out of the Paris Accord on climate change, has real implications for the people of the world. University scholars can use their scientific research to counter the onslaught of myths, misinformation, and deliberate deception that is infecting the quality of public and political discourse in the United States and the world. The time is right for this transition. We are in an existential crisis that compels people to see the great need in society for a shift in the norms of academia. The RAND Corporation warns that “the challenge posed by Truth Decay is great, but the stakes are too high to permit inaction.”34 With that as a description of the context within which academia now finds itself, the pursuit of an academic career can be a rewarding opportunity to play a critical and vital role in our society. We cannot develop a scientifically literate electorate, or indeed a sound democracy, without the voice of academic scholars and scientists to introduce the results and implications of our work to the decision-making process. The call for public engagement is an urgent call to reexamine the core purpose of research in higher education.35 It is a call to reexamine what we do, how we do it, and for what audiences. It is part of the “scientists’ social contract,”36 born out of a need within society for our expertise

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and an obligation that academics have to provide a service to the community, to give value in exchange for the public funding, government grants, and general tuition we receive, and an account of what that money is being used for. The Mayo Clinic nicely outlined the ultimate goal: The moral and societal duty of an academic healthcare provider is to advance science, improve the care of his/her patients and share knowledge. A very important part of this role requires physicians to participate in public debate, responsibly influence opinion and help our patients navigate the complexities of healthcare. As Clinician Educators our job is not to create knowledge obscura, trapped in ivory towers and only accessible to the enlightened; the knowledge we create and manage needs to impact our communities.37

While this statement is aimed at healthcare providers, it applies to all in the scholarly and scientific endeavor and reminds us that the ultimate value of our work is its service to society. In the end, beyond a sense of duty, a satisfying and meaningful career will be measured more in the ways we have impacted how people think and act and less on citation counts, h-index, and top-tier journal articles. When one comes to the end of an academic life, these metrics will not engender the satisfaction of a successful career. Instead, that satisfaction will come from having made a difference in leaving the world at least a little better for having been here. The generational shift is already underway for bringing this notion into greater clarity. And with that shift will

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come a return to the notion of the Academy as a special and honored place in society, not above it or separate from it, but part of it. In that vision, “a university . . . is a place where learning and scholarship are revered, not primarily for what they contribute to personal or social wellbeing but for the vision of humanity that they symbolize, sustain, and pass on.”38 Those of us who are privileged enough to live the life of an academic possess a privileged opportunity to contribute to the world around us. As President John F. Kennedy said, “For of those to whom much is given, much is required.”

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank a host of people who helped me write this book in ways both big and small. Anne Tsui and the entire community of the Responsible Research in Business & Management (RRBM) network provided support and encouragement for my work on this book. Thanks also go to my University of Michigan collaborators on the 2015 Michigan Meeting on Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse: Mark Barteau, Gregg Crane, Paul Edwards, Lianne Lefsrud, Andrew Maynard, Shelie Miller, Joy Rohde, Don Scavia, and David Uhlmann (some have moved on to other universities since that conference, and they are missed). Thanks as well to a great group of doctoral students who also helped with the Michigan Meeting and are now happily pursuing their own careers: Kirsti Ashworth, Chase Dwelle, Peter Goldberg, Andy Henderson, Louis Merlin, Yulia Muzyrya, Norma-Jean Simon, Veronica Taylor, Corinne Weisheit, and Sarah Wilson. ­Danguole Kviklys and Rebecca Welzenbach of 135

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the University of Michigan Library Services and Steve Walls, head of strategy at Moon Rabbit, were instrumental in developing my arguments in Chapter 4, helping me to better understand the world of social media. A. R. Elangovan at the University of Victoria was an inspiration for my thinking in Chapter 5. Andrew Furco at the University of Minnesota, MaryJo Banasik and Colleen Conway at the University of Michigan, Natalie Carroll at Purdue, and Sarah Christensen at the University of Illinois gave generous guidance on their schools’ efforts in public engagement, which also helped in Chapter 5. Finally, I would like to thank: Alex Cruden for his keen eye in editing this manuscript; Hilary Hendricks for providing extensive feedback and enthusiastic encouragement; Elyse Aurbach at the University of Michigan Office of Academic Innovation and the PhD students and postdoc panels she organized for me to talk about academic engagement; Steve Catalano, my editor at Stanford University Press, for always being supportive of my work; the two anonymous reviewers for Stanford University Press; and Joanne Will, my partner and source of support in work and life, especially while Covid-19 changed the world around us.

NOTES

P R E FA C E

1.  J. Lubchenco, “Entering the century of the environment: A new social contract for science,” Science 279(5350):491-497, 1998; J. Lubchenco, “Delivering on science’s social contract,” Michigan Journal of Sustainability 5(1), 2017. 2.  J. Kavanagh and M. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018). 3.  R. Cherwitz, “Toward entrepreneurial universities for the 21st century,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, March 5, 2012. 4.  D. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). 5.  A. Hoffman, K. Ashworth, C. Dwelle, P. Goldberg, A. Henderson, L. Merlin, Y. Muzyrya, N. Simon, V. Taylor, C. Weisheit, and S. Wilson, Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse: Proceedings of the Michigan Meeting (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2015), 46. 6.  G. Kolata, “Scientific articles accepted (personal checks, too),” New York Times, April 7, 2013. 137

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7.  J. Meyer, P. Frumhoff, S. Hamburg, and C. de la Rosa, “Above the din but in the fray: Environmental scientists as effective advocates,” Frontiers in Ecology and Environment, 8: 299–305, 2010.

CHAPTER 1

1.  A. Hoffman, “Academia’s emerging crisis of relevance and the consequent role of the engaged scholar,” Journal of Change Management, 16(2): 77–96, 2016. 2.  N. Kristof, “Professors, we need you!” New York Times, February 15, 2014. 3.  C. Funk, L. Rainie, and D. Page, Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society, Pew Research Center, January 29, 2015. 4.  D. Maron, “Fact or fiction? Vaccines are dangerous,” Scientific American, March 6, 2015. 5.  A. Hoffman, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 6.  C. Funk, L. Rainie, and D. Page, Americans, Politics and Science Issues, Pew Research Center, July 1, 2015. 7.  California Academy of Sciences, “American adults flunk basic science,” 2009, http://www.calacademy.org/newsroom/ releases/2009/scientific_literacy.php. 8.  National Science Foundation, “Science and technology: Public attitudes and understanding,” Science and Engineering Indi­ cators 2004, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind04/c7/c7h.htm. 9.  L. Leif, “Science, meet journalism. You two should talk,” Wilson Quarterly, January 14, 2015. 10.  J. Achenbach, “Why do many reasonable people doubt science?” National Geographic, March 2015. 11.  G. Kolata, “Scientific articles accepted (personal checks, too),” New York Times, April 7, 2013.

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12.  K. Bennett and E. Perez, “Top U.S. coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci forced to beef up security as death threats increase,” CTV News, April 2, 2020. 13.  D. Kahan, “Fixing the communications failure,” Nature, 463 (21): 296–297, 2010. 14.  A. McCright and R. Dunlap, “The politicization of climate change and polarization in the American public’s views of global warming, 2001–2010,” Sociological Quarterly, 52: 155–194, 2011. 15.  N. Oreskes and E. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). 16.  J. Kavanagh and M. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018). 17.  Achenbach, “Why do many reasonable people doubt science?” 18.  J. Besley and M. Nisbet, “How scientists view the public, the media and the political process,” Public Understanding of Science, 22(6): 644–659, 2013. 19.  B. Forscher, “Chaos in the brickyard,” Science, 339, October 18, 1963. 20.  A. Hoffman, “Isolated scholars: Making bricks, not shaping policy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 2015. 21.  A. Hoffman, “Reconsidering the role of the practicaltheorist: On (re)connecting theory to practice in organizational theory,” Strategic Organization, 2(2): 213–222, 2004. 22.  R. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 154. 23.  Kristof, “Professors, we need you!” 24.  Kavanagh and Rich, Truth Decay. 25.  C. Funk and B. Kennedy, “Public confidence in scientists has remained stable for decades,” Pew Research Center FactTank, March 22, 2019.

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26.  C. Funk, M. Hefferon, B. Kennedy, and B. Johnson, Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts (Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2019). 27.  Ipsos MORI, Veracity Index 2017, November 2017. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/ 2017-11/trust-in-professions-veracity-index-2017-slides.pdf. 28.  Funk et al., Trust and Mistrust in Americans’ Views of Scientific Experts. 29.  K. Parker, “The growing partisan divide in views of higher education,” Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends, August 19, 2019. 30.  Funk, Rainie, and Page, Public and Scientists’ Views on Science and Society. 31.  L. Konkel, “Why more scientists are speaking out on contentious issues,” National Geographic, June 10, 2015. 32.  A. Hoffman, K. Ashworth, C. Dwelle, P. Goldberg, A. Henderson, L. Merlin, Y. Muzyrya, N. Simon, V. Taylor, C. Weisheit, and S. Wilson, Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse: Proceedings of the Michigan Meeting (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2015), 73. 33.  M. Burawoy, “For public sociology,” American Sociological Review, 70: 4–28, 2005. 34. B. Checkoway, “Strengthening the scholarship of engagement in higher education,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 17(4): 7–21, 2013. 35.  J. Lubchenco, “Entering the century of the environment: A new social contract for science,” Science, 279(5350): 491-497, 1998; J. Lubchenco, “Delivering on science’s social contract,” Michigan Journal of Sustainability, 5(1), 2017. 36. S. Merchant, “Higher ed leaders consider compact between universities, society,” University of Michigan Record, June 26, 2017.

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37.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse. 38.  M. Crow and W. Dabars, Designing the New American University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). 39.  R. C. Atkinson and W.A. Blanpied, “Research universities: Core of the US science and technology system,” Technology in Society, 30(1): 30–48, 2008. 40.  V. Bush, Science—The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1945). 41.  R. Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma (New Brunswick, NJ: Basic Books/Transaction Publishers, 1971/1997). 42.  D. Kleinman, Politics on the Endless Frontier: Postwar Research Policy in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 43. Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, 72. 44.  D. Sarewitz, “Saving science,” The New Atlantis, Spring/ Summer: 4-40, 2016. 45. Nisbet, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, 73. 46.  Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and LandGrant Universities, Returning to Our Roots: The Student Experience (Washington DC: National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, 1997), 21. 47.  US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Unlocking Our Future: Towards a National Science Policy (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 1998), 5. 48.  D. Sarewitz, Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology and the Politics of Progress (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996). 49.  J. Burke, ed., Fixing the Fragmented University: Decentralization with Direction (Bolton, MA: Anker, 2007). 50.  Sarewitz, “Saving science,” 40.

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51.  D. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). 52. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant, 73. 53.  F. Vermeulen, “On rigor and relevance: Fostering dialectic progress in management research,” Academy of Management Journal, 48(6): 978–982, 2005. 54.  R. Pielke, The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 116. 55.  D. Goldston, “Getting it across,” Nature, 454: 16, 2008. 56. Pielke, The Honest Broker. 57.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 70. 58.  Crow and Dabars, Designing the New American University. 59. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, x. 60.  American Public Media, On Being: Obama’s Theologian: David Brooks and E. J. Dionne on Reinhold Niebuhr and the American Present, 2009, https://onbeing.org/programs/davidbrooks-and-e-j-dionne-obamas-theologian-reinhold-niebuhrand-the-american-present/. 61.  N. Pidgeon and B. Fischhoff, “The role of social and decision sciences in communicating uncertain climate risks,” Nature Climate Change, 1(1): 35–41, 2011. 62.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 27.

CHAPTER 2

1.  The h-index is named for UC San Diego physicist Jorge Hirsch and is a measure of a scholar’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index can also be used to measure the impact of a

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scholarly journal group of scientists, department, university, or country. 2.  H. Shepard, “On realization of human potential: A path with a heart.” In M. Arthur, L. Bailyn, D. Levinson, and H. Shepard (eds.), Working with Careers (New York: Center for Research on Careers, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, 1984), 25–46. 3.  J. Rothman, “Why is academic writing so academic?” New Yorker, February 20, 2014. 4.  K. Kozlowski, “UM declined to team with lead expert in Flint,” Detroit News, February 18, 2016. 5.  S. Kerr, “On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B,” Academy of Management Executive, 9(1): 7–14, 1995. 6.  L. Ormans, “50 journals used in FT research rank,” Financial Times, September 12, 2016. 7.  D. Meyerson, Tempered Radicals: How Everyday Leaders Inspire Change at Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). 8.  I. Sample, “Nobel winner declares boycott of top science journals,” The Guardian, December 9, 2013. 9.  R. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 156. 10.  A. Biswas and J. Kirchherr, “Prof, no one is reading you,” Straits Times, April 11, 2015. 11.  D. Hambrick, “The theory fetish: Too much of a good thing?” Bloomberg, January 13, 2008. 12.  M. Cuthill, É. O’Shea, B. Wilson, and P. Viljoen, “Universities and the public good: A review of knowledge exchange policy and related university practice in Australia,” Australian Universities Review, 56(2): 36-46, 2014. 13.  A. Van de Ven, Engaged Scholarship: A Guide for Organizational and Social Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6.

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14.  A. Hoffman, “In praise of ‘B’ journals: Academic publishing is becoming more about establishing a pecking order and less about pursuing knowledge,” Inside Higher Education, March 27, 2017. 15. B. Keiser, “Trends in scholarly publishing,” Online Searcher, 43(2): 22–27, 2019. 16.  R. Eveleth, “Academics write papers arguing over how many people read (and cite) their papers,” Smithsonian, March 25, 2014. 17.  P. Thomson and I. Mewbur, “Why do academics blog? It’s not for public outreach, research shows,” The Guardian, December 2, 2013. 18.  B. Björk and D. Solomon, “The publishing delay in scholarly peer-reviewed journals,” Journal of Informetrics, 7: 914–923, 2013. 19.  Biswas and Kirchherr, “Prof, no one is reading you.” 20.  M. Bauerlein, M. Gad-el-Hak, W. Grody, B. McKelvey, and S. Trimble, “We must stop the avalanche of low-quality research,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010. 21.  J. Bryne, “Cost of an academic article: $400K,” Poets and Quants, July 16, 2014. 22.  A. Verma, “Impact, not impact factor,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 30, 2015. 23.  K. O’Grady and N. Roos, “Linking academic research with the public and policy makers,” Policy Options, August 1, 2016. 24.  “Not-so-deep impact,” Nature, 435: 1003–1004, June 22, 2005. 25.  E. Garfield, “The history and meaning of the journal impact factor,” Journal of the American Medical Association, January 4, 2006. 26.  D. Remler, “How few papers ever get cited? It’s bad, but not that bad,” Social Science Space, April 28, 2014.

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27.  P. Jacsó, “Five‐year impact factor data in the Journal Citation Reports,” Online Information Review, 33(3): 603–614, 2009. 28.  Biswas and Kirchherr, “Prof, no one is reading you.” 29.  J. Ellison and T. Eatman, Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University (Syracuse, NY: Imagining America, 2008). 30.  X. Liang et al., “Building buzz: (Scientists) communicating science in new media environments,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 91(4): 772-791. 31.  D. Brossard, “New media landscapes and the science information consumer,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110: 14096–14101, 2013. 32.  “Citation averages, 2000–2010, by fields and years,” Times Higher Education, 2010, https://www.timeshighereducation .com/news/citation-averages-2000-2010-by-fields-and-years/ 415643.article. 33.  Royal Society, Factors Affecting Science Communication: A Survey of Scientists and Engineers, 2006, https://royalsociety .org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/publications/2006/ 1111111395.pdf. 34.  M. Goldberg, “Columbia University fired two eminent public intellectuals. Here’s why it matters,” The Nation, March 12, 2014. 35.  S. Martinez-Conde, “Has contemporary academia outgrown the Carl Sagan effect?” Journal of Neuroscience, 36(7): 2077-2082. 36.  R. Gulati, “Tent poles, tribalism and boundary spanning: The rigor-relevance debate in management research,” Academy of Management Journal, 50: 775–782, 2007. 37.  L. Empson, “My affair with the ‘other’: Identity journeys across the research-practice divide,” Journal of Management Inquiry, 22(2): 229–248, 2013.

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38.  P. Jensen, J. Rouquier, P. Kreimer, and Y. Croissant, “Scientists who engage with society perform better academically,” Science and Public Policy, 35: 527–541, 2008. 39.  J. Kotcher, T. Myers, E. Vraga, N. Stenhouse, and E. Maibach, “Does engagement in advocacy hurt the credibility of scientists? Results from a randomized national survey experiment,” Environmental Communication, 11(3): 415–429, 2017. 40.  S. J. Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections on Natural History (New York: Norton, 1991), 11.

CHAPTER 3

1.  D. Eagleman, “Why public dissemination of science matters: A manifesto,” Journal of Neuroscience, 33(30): 12149–12147, 2013. 2.  A. Hoffman, Finding Purpose: Environmental Stewardship as a Personal Calling (Leeds, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 2016). 3.  B. Checkoway, “Strengthening the scholarship of engagement in higher education,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 17(4): 7-22, 2013. 4.  University of Minnesota Office of Public Engagement, https://engagement.umn.edu/about-ope/definition. 5.  University of Illinois, Faculty Guide for Relating Public Service to the Promotion and Tenure Review Process, https://uofi .app.box.com/s/crxc3ccflzgxe5cwiycwc0oreu91th55. 6.  D. Calleson, C. Jordan, and S. Seifer, “Communityengaged scholarship: Is faculty work in communities a true academic enterprise?” Academic Medicine, 80(4): 317–321, 2005. 7.  A. Hoffman, K. Ashworth, C. Dwelle, P. Goldberg, A. Henderson, L. Merlin, Y. Muzyrya, N. Simon, V. Taylor, C. Weisheit, and S. Wilson, Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse: Proceedings of the Michigan Meeting (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2015).

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8.  J. Wai, “Here’s why academics should write for the public,” Elsevier SciTech Connect, December 10, 2015. 9.  E. Suhay, E. Cloyd, E. Heath, and E. Nash, Recommended Practices for Science Communication with Policymakers, https://www.american.edu/spa/scicomm/upload/recommended -practices-booklet_v17-digital.pdf. 10.  S. Fiske and C. Dupree, “Getting trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 16, 2014. 11.  B. Fischhoff, “The sciences of science communication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110: 14033– 14039, 2013. 12.  A. Hoffman, “Academia’s emerging crisis of relevance and the consequent role of the engaged scholar,” Journal of Change Management, 16(2): 77–96, 2016. 13.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 39. 14.  J. Rowley, “The wisdom hierarchy: Representations of the DIKW hierarchy,” Journal of Information Science, 33(2): 163-180. 15.  R. Ackoff, “From data to wisdom,” Journal of Applied Systems Analysis, 16(1): 3–9, 1989. 16.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 39. 17.  N. Baron, “So you want to change the world?” Nature, 540: 517–519, 2016. 18.  J. Joubert, L. Davis, and J. Metcalfe, “Storytelling: The soul of science communication,” Journal of Science Communication, 18(5): 1–5, 2019. 19.  S. El Shafie, “Making science meaningful for broad audiences through stories,” Integrative and Comparative Biology, 58(6): 1213–1223, 2018.

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20.  M. Dahlstrom, “Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111 (Supplement 4): 13614– 13620, 2014. 21.  R. Olson, Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009). 22.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 25. 23.  C. Cormick, “Who doesn’t love a good story?—What neuroscience tells about how we respond to narratives,” Journal of Science Communication, 18(5): Y01, 2019. 24.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 26. 25.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 76. 26.  S. Pinker, “Why academics stink at writing,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2014. 27.  P. Dicken, “You want to write for a popular audience? Really?” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9, 2015. 28.  Y. Barel-Ben David, E. Garty, and A. Baram-Tsabari, “Can scientists fill the science journalism void? Online public engagement with science stories authored by scientists,” PLOS One, 15(1), 2020. 29.  D. Gruber, “The craft of translation: An interview with Malcolm Gladwell,” Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(4): 397-403. 30.  A. Hoffman, “Let’s put Malcolm Gladwell out of business,” Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(4): 410–411, 2006. 31.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 43. 32.  J. Lubchenco, “Environmental science in a post-truth world,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, February 1, 2017. 33.  C. Mooney, “Neil DeGrasse Tyson—Communicating science,” Skeptical Inquirer, April 16, 2014.

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34.  J. Lubchenco, “Delivering on science’s social contract,” Michigan Journal of Sustainability, 5(1), 2017. 35.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse. 36.  E. Kerr, M. Riba, and M. Udow-Philips, “Helping health service researchers and policy makers speak the same language,” Health Services Research, 50(1): 1, 2014. 37.  J. Rothman, “Why is academic writing so academic?” New Yorker, February 20, 2014. 38.  N. Baron, Escape from the Ivory Tower: A Guide to Making Your Science Matter (Washington DC: Island Press, 2010). 39.  S. Fiske and C. Dupree, “Getting trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(Supplement 4): 13593–13597, 2014. 40.  T. Dietz, “Bringing values and deliberation to science communication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110: 14081–14087, 2013. 41.  A. Lupia, “Communicating science in politicized environments,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110: 14048–14054, 2013. 42.  Z. Kunda, “The case for motivated reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin, 108(3): 480–498, 1990. 43.  D. Kahan, “Fixing the communications failure,” Nature, 463(21): 296–297, 2010. 44.  C. Mooney, “The science of why we don’t believe science,” Mother Jones, April 18, 2011. 45.  J. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 64. 46.  American Public Media, On Being: Jonathan Haidt: The Psychology of Self-Righteousness, 2017, https://onbeing.org/ programs/jonathan-haidt-the-psychology-of-self-righteousness -oct2017/

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47. M. Nisbet, “Communicating climate change: Why frames matter for public engagement,” Environment, 51(2): 12–23, 2009. 48. CNA, National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change (Alexandria, VA: CNA Military Advisory Board, 2014). 49.  A. Costello et al., “Managing the health effects of climate change,” The Lancet, 373: 1693–1733, 2009. 50.  A. Hoffman, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 51.  C. Ebersole, J. Axt, and B. Nosek, “Scientists’ reputations are based on getting it right, not being right,” PLOS Biology, 14(5): e1002460, Doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002460, 2016. 52.  K. Kozlowski, “UM declined to team with lead expert in Flint,” Detroit News, February 18, 2016. 53.  A. Hoffman, “Climate science as culture war,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, 10(4): 30–37, 2012. 54.  V. Ray, “Why I write for the public,” Inside Higher Education, May 17, 2019. 55.  Y. Wang, “The dangerous silence of academic researchers,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 23, 2015. 56.  A. Leiserowitz, E. Maibach, C. Roser-Renouf, N. Smith, and E. Dawson, “Climategate, public opinion, and the loss of trust,” American Behavioral Scientist, 57(6): 818–837, 2012. 57.  R. Kasperson, O. Renn, P. Slovic, H. Brown, J. Emel, and R. Goble, “The social amplification of risk: A conceptual framework,” Risk Analysis, 8: 177–187, 1988. 58.  L. Rainie, C. Funk, M. Anderson, and D. Page, How Scientists Engage the Public (Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2015). 59.  K. O’Grady and N. Roos, “Linking academic research with the public and policy-makers,” Policy Options, August 1, 2016.

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60.  T. Feder, “Climate scientists not cowed by relentless climate change deniers,” Physics Today, 65(2): 22, 2012. 61.  A. Grand, G. Davies, R. Holliman, and A. Adams, “Mapping public engagement with research in a UK university,” PLOS One, 10(4): e0121874, 2015. 62.  J. Tierney, “Social scientist sees bias within,” New York Times, February 7, 2011. 63.  S. Jaschik, “Professors and politics: What the research says,” Inside Higher Education, February 27, 2017. 64.  A. Huertas, “Constructively dealing with trolls in science communication,” Medium, April 4, 2016. 65.  S. Apple, “Obama’s stand-up economist,” MIT Technology Review, December 20, 2016. 66.  Feder, “Climate scientists not cowed by relentless climate change deniers.” 67.  B. Dawson, “Texas Tech scientist sees intimidation effort behind barrage of hate mail,” Texas Climate News, January 30, 2012. 68.  R. Wallsgrove, “What can the abolition of slavery teach us about climate change? Local action in the liquefied natural gas controversy,” University of Hawaii Law Review, 35(2): 687720, 2013. 69.  Hoffman et al., Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse, 31. 70.  Dawson, “Texas Tech scientist sees intimidation effort behind barrage of hate mail.” 71.  J. West, “MIT climate scientist’s wife threatened in a ‘frenzy of hate’ and cyberbullying fomented by deniers,” ThinkProgress, January 15, 2012. 72.  R. McKie, “Death threats, intimidation and abuse: climate change scientist Michael E. Mann counts the cost of honesty,” The Guardian, March 3, 2012.

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73. A. McCright and R. Dunlap, “Anti-reflexivity: The American conservative movement’s success in undermining climate science and policy,” Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2–3): 100–133, 2010. 74.  M. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).

CHAPTER 4

1.  S. Klar, Y. Krupnikov, J. Ryan, K. Searles, and Y. Shmargad, “Using social media to promote academic research: Identifying the benefits of Twitter for sharing academic work.” PLOS One, 15(4): e0229446, 2020. 2.  C. Sugimoto and V. Larivière, Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018). 3.  R. Widmer, J. Mandrekar, A. Ward, L. Aase, W. Lanier, F. Timimi, and T. Gerber, “Effect of promotion via social media on access of articles in an academic medical journal: A randomized controlled trial,” Academic Medicine, 94(10): 1546– 1553, 2019. 4.  J. Teixeira da Silva and J. Dobránszki, “Multiple versions of the h-index: cautionary use for formal academic purposes,” Scientometrics, 115: 1107–1113, 2018. 5.  N. Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 18. 6.  L. M. Sacasas, “The analog city and the digital city: How online life breaks the old political order,” New Atlantis, Winter: 3–18, 2020. 7.  J. Kavanagh and M. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).

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8.  D. Brossard, “New media landscapes and the science information consumer,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110: 14096–14101, 2013. 9.  Steve Walls, head of strategy, Moon Rabbit, personal communication, August 16, 2020. 10.  “National politics on Twitter: Small share of U.S. adults produce majority of tweets,” Pew Research Center, October 23, 2019. 11.  Z. Chong, “Up to 48 million Twitter accounts are bots, study says,” C/Net, March 14, 2017. 12.  A. Romano, “Two-thirds of links on Twitter come from bots. The good news? They’re mostly bland,” Vox, April 9, 2018. 13. S. Wojcik and A. Hughes, Sizing Up Twitter Users (Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2019). 14.  B. Wolford, “Mob mentality: The brain suppresses personal moral code when in groups,” Medical Daily, June 14, 2014. 15.  M. Plata, “Is social media making us ruder? Research says a ‘lack of eye contact’ is to blame,” Psychology Today, February 26, 2018. 16.  J. Ronson, “How one stupid tweet blew up Justine Sacco’s life,” New York Times, February 12, 2015. 17.  J. Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018). 18.  M. Cacciatore, D. Scheufele, and E. Corley, “Another (methodological) look at knowledge gaps and the internet’s potential for closing them,” Public Understanding of Science, 23(4): 376–394, 2014. 19.  R. Van Noorden, “Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network,” Nature, 512: 126–129, 2014. 20.  K. Schulten and A. Brown, “Evaluating sources in a ‘post-truth’ world: Ideas for teaching and learning about fake news,” New York Times, January 19, 2017.

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21.  Van Noorden, “Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network.” 22.  M. Smith, “Are universities going the way of CDs and cable TV?” The Atlantic, June 22, 2020. 23.  S. Yeo, M. Cacciatore, D. Brossard, D. Scheufele, and M. Xenos, “Science gone social: Scientists are beginning to embrace social media as a viable means of communicating with public audiences,” The Scientist, October 1, 2014. 24.  A. Hoffman, “Why the web has challenged scientists’ authority–and why they need to adapt,” The Conversation, March 1, 2018. 25.  J. Lyle, “Bringing God’s word to the people,” Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books, October 13, 2017. 26.  A. Siedlecki and P. Brown, “Preachers and printers,” Christian History Magazine, 118: 22-24, 2016. 27.  J. Ahmed, “From Gutenberg to the internet: A comparison of the impact of Gutenberg printing press and the internet as media technologies,” Prezi, April 9, 2013. 28.  M. Bryant, “20 years ago today, the World Wide Web opened to the public,” Insider, August 6, 2011. 29.  N. Oreske and E. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). 30.  R. Dunlap, “Don’t rely on Dr. Google for health information on the wild, wild web,” The Conversation, December 11, 2011. 31.  J. Tierney, “Social scientist sees bias within,” New York Times, February 7, 2011. 32.  “Challenges in irreproducible research,” Nature, October 18, 2018. 33. “How science goes wrong. Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself,” The Economist, October 21, 2013.

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46.  S. Jaschik, “Fireable tweets: Kansas regents adopt policy on when social media use can get faculty fired,” Inside Higher Education, December 19, 2013. 47.  T. Tonia, H. Van Oyen, A. Berger, C. Schindler, and N. Künzli, “If I tweet will you cite? The effect of social media exposure of articles on downloads and citations,” International Journal of Public Health, 61(4): 513–520, 2016. 48.  S. Yeo et al., “Opinion: Tweeting to the top,” The Scientist, July 2, 2013. 49. B. Peoples, S. Midway, D. Sackett, A. Lynch, and P. Cooney, “Twitter predicts citation rates of ecological research,” PLOS One, 11(11): e0166570, 2016. 50.  G. Eysenbach, “Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social impact based on Twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of scientific impact,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4): e123, 2011. 51.  C. Hawkins, M. Hunter, G. Kolenic, and R. Carlos, “Social media and peer-reviewed medical journal readership: A randomized prospective controlled trial.” Journal of the American College of Radiology, 14(5): 596-602, 2017. 52.  X. Liang et al., “Building buzz: (Scientists) communicating science in new media environments,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 91(4): 772–791, 2014. 53.  S. Yeo, M. Cacciatore, D. Brossard, D. Scheufele, and M. Xenos, “Science gone social: Scientists are beginning to embrace social media as a viable means of communicating with public audiences,” The Scientist, October 1, 2014. 54.  R. Ladeiras-Lopes and H. Yvonne Small, “Social media and citations: What do cardiologists need to know?” Cardiovascular Research, 115(11): e115–e117, 2019. 55.  The Manifest, “79% of businesses have rejected a job candidate based on social media content; job seekers should post online carefully,” PR Newswire, April 28, 2020.

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70.  “A to Z of creative media for academia by Professor @ andymiah #AtoZCreativeMedia,” https://docs.google.com/ spreadsheets/d/1ip3NjwTAfEcIds4RpppCTIy4jY1q6qTOCBE IFB_Ul2Q/edit#gid=0. 71.  S. Walls, personal communication, August 16, 2020. 72.  S. Walls, personal communication, August 16, 2020. 73.  J. Hardwick, “Top 100 most visited websites by search traffic (as of 2020),” Ahrefs Blog, May 12, 2020. 74.  B. Csutoras, “How to host a successful Reddit AMA,” SEMrush Blog, May 7, 2018. 75.  S. Fairbanks, “How academics can make an impact on Instagram,” Picklejar Communications, February 19, 2020. 76.  A. Miah, “Are you TikTok ready?” Times Higher Education, November 1, 2019. 77.  M. Isaac, “U.S. appeals injunction against TikTok ban,” New York Times, October 8, 2020. 78.  P. Thomas and I. Mewburn, “Why do academics blog? It’s not for public outreach, research shows,” The Guardian, December 2, 2013. 79.  The Conversation (US), https://theconversation.com/ us. (There are also editions for Africa, Australia, Canada [French and English], Spain, France, Indonesia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and “Global Perspectives.”) 80.  The Monkey Cage, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/monkey-cage/. 81.  Ideas Roadshow, https://www.ideasroadshow.com/. 82.  Footnote, https://footnote.co/about/. 83.  Solutions, https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/about -us/. 84.  Medium, https://medium.com/. 85.  Conditionally Accepted, https://www.insidehighered. com/users/conditionally-accepted. 86.  The Manifest.

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87.  A. Bhuhi, “Google Scholar: Indexation & ranking.” Distilled.net, June 26, 2019. 88.  Internet Live Stats, “Total number of websites,” https:// www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/. 89.  S. Brin and L. Page, “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30(1-7): 107–117, 1998. 90.  J. Killoran, “How to use search engine optimization techniques to increase website visibility,” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 56(1): 50–66, 2013. 91.  E. Eldermire, “Measuring your research impact,” Cornell University, http://guides.library.cornell.edu/c.php?g=32272&p =203387. 92.  R. Welzenbach, “Research impact metrics,” University of Michigan, https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=282982&p =1887442. 93.  A. Harzing and S. Alakangas, “Microsoft Academic is one year old: The Phoenix is ready to leave the nest,” Scientometrics 112: 1887–1894, 2017. 94.  Dimensions, https://www.dimensions.ai/why-dimensions/. 95.  A. Eliason, “23 search engine facts and stats you oughta know,” SEO.com, December 8, 2016. 96.  “SEM Glossary,” http://www.sempo.org/?page=glossary. 97.  D. Sharma, R. Shukla, A. K. Giri, and S. Kumar, “A brief review on Search engine optimization,” 2019 9th International Conference on Cloud Computing, Data Science & Engineering (Confluence), 687–692, 2019. 98.  S. Arora, “How many types of SEO practices exist in the digital world?” Digital Vidya, February 1, 2019. 99.  C. Rovira, L. Codina, F. Guerrero-Solé, and C. Lopezosa, C., “Ranking by relevance and citation counts, a comparative study: Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, WoS and Scopus.” Future Internet, 11: 202-223, 2019.

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100.  G. Notess, “Known item search strategies,” Online Searcher, 40(1): 62–64, 2016. 101.  L. Pophal, “Are you a slave to SEO keywords? Why you should write for readers, not bots,” EContent, April 24, 2019. 102.  P. Davis, “Gaming Google Scholar citations, made simple and easy,” The Scholarly Kitchen, December 12, 2012. 103.  D. Gershgorn, “The most cited scientist on Google Scholar isn’t a person,” Quartz, September 21, 2016. 104.  L. Kumar and N. Kumar, “SEO technique for a website and its effectiveness in the context of Google Search Engine,” International Journal of Computer Science and Engineering (IJCSE), 2: 113–118, 2014. 105.  R. DeJarnette, “Link building for smart webmasters (No dummies here) (SEM 101),” Bing Webmaster Center blog, November 20, 2009. 106.  E. Ochoa, An Analysis of the Application of Selected Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques and Their Effectiveness on Google’s Search Ranking Algorithm (Northridge, CA: California State University, 2012). 107.  Pophal, “Are you a slave to SEO keywords?” 108.  University of Pittsburgh Library, “Altmetrics,” https:// www.library.pitt.edu/altmetrics. 109.  Altmetric, https://www.altmetric.com/. 110.  PlumX Metrics, https://plumanalytics.com/learn/about -metrics/. 111.  ImpactStory, https://profiles.impactstory.org/. 112.  Anonymous academic, “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer,” The Guardian, August 5, 2016.

CHAPTER 5

1.  A. R. Elangovan and A. Hoffman, “Standing on top of the wrong wall,” Business and Management Ink, May 6, 2019.

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2.  A. R. Elangovan and A. Hoffman, “The pursuit of success in academia: Plato’s ghost asks ‘What then?’” Journal of Management Inquiry, doi.org/10.1177/1056492619836729, 2019. 3.  D. Brazzell, “Public engagement and the future of the university,” Inside Higher Education, February 13, 2019. 4.  A. Hoffman, K. Ashworth, C. Dwelle, P. Goldberg, A. Henderson, L. Merlin, Y. Muzyrya, N. Simon, V. Taylor, C. Weisheit, and S. Wilson, Academic Engagement in Public and Political Discourse: Proceedings of the Michigan Meeting (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2015), 17. 5.  National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, EDGE tool, https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk/supportengagement/strategy-and-planning/edge-tool. 6.  Land-grant institutions were designated by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 and were granted federally controlled lands on which to build their campuses. The mission of these institutions was to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering. Most landgrant colleges became large public universities, though some such as Cornell became private schools. 7. Purdue University Agricultural Communications, https://ag.purdue.edu/agcomm/Pages/default.aspx. 8.  E. Aurbach and J. DeVaney, “Public engagement in the time of COVID-19,” Inside Higher Education, April 16, 2020. 9.  ComSciCon, https://comscicon.com/about. 10.  RELATE, https://www.learntorelate.org/. 11.  University of Illinois Office of Public Affairs, “Media Training,” https://publicaffairs.illinois.edu/services/media -training/. 12.  Stanford University Earth Leadership Program, https:// www.earthleadership.org/. 13.  B. Smith et al., “COMPASS: Navigating the rules of scientific engagement,” PLOS Biology, 11(4): e1001552, 2013.

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14. AAAS Communicating Science workshops, https:// www.aaas.org/programs/communicating-science. 15.  UCS Science Network Workshop Series, https://www. ucsusa.org/resources/science-network-workshop-series#. VY1edPlVikp. 16.  T. Jan, “Acting classes give scientists tools to pitch their work,” Boston Globe, October 20, 2015. 17.  Purdue University Office of Engagement, https://www .purdue.edu/engagement/. 18.  S. Holgate, “Emerging professions: Knowledge broker,” Science, June 8, 2012. 19.  L. McCall et al., What Counts? Evaluating Public Communication in Tenure and Promotion (Washington DC: American Sociological Association, 2016), https://www.asanet.org/ sites/default/files/tf_report_what_counts_evaluating_public_ communication_in_tenure_and_promotion_final_august_ 2016.pdf. 20.  D. Cabrera, “Mayo Clinic includes social media scholarship activities in academic advancement,” MCSMN Blog, May 25, 2016, https://socialmedia.mayoclinic.org/2016/05/25/ mayo-clinic-includes-social-media-scholarship-activities-in -academic-advancement/. 21.  P. Tufano, “Impact should be included in promotion and tenure criteria,” Times Higher Education, November 18, 2019. 22.  A. Grand, G. Davies, R. Holliman, and A. Adams, “Mapping public engagement with research in a UK university,” PLOS One 10(4): e0121874, 2015. 23.  K. Burchell, S. Franklin, and K. Holden, Public Culture as Professional Science: Final Report of the ScoPE Project—Scientists on Public Engagement: From Communication to Deliberation (London, UK: BIOS, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2009).

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24.  University of Minnesota Community Engaged Scholars Award, https://engagement.umn.edu/faculty/faculty-awards/ presidents-community-engaged-scholar-award. 25.  S. Forrest, “Provost announces changes to promotion, tenure criteria,” Illinois News Bureau, March 19, 2009. 26.  M. Thelwall and T. Nevill, “Could scientists use Alt metric.com scores to predict longer term citation counts?” Journal of Informetrics, 12(1): 237-248, 2018. 27.  C. Wien and D. Deutz, “What’s in a tweet? Creating social media echo chambers to inflate ‘the donut,’” LIBER Quarterly, 29(1): 3, 2019. 28.  P. Cress, O. Branford, F. Nahai, and S. Konkiel, “Altmetrics: An analysis of social media promotion, gaming, and ethics in academic publishing,” Altmetric, 2019, https://altmetric .figshare.com/articles/Altmetrics_An_Analysis_of_Social_ Media_Promotion_Gaming_and_Ethics_in_Academic_Publishing/9747458/2. 29.  K. Crowe, “Why does it cost millions to access publicly funded research papers? Blame the paywall,” CBC News, March 9, 2019. 30.  Responsible Research for Business and Management, https://www.rrbm.network/. 31.  D. Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Science and Technological Innovation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). 32.  Scholars Strategy Network, https://scholars.org/. 33.  D. Bachrach et al., “On academic rankings, unacceptable methods, and the social obligations of business schools,” Decision Sciences, 48(3): 561-585, 2017. 34.  J. Kavanagh and M. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).

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35. B. Checkoway, “Strengthening the scholarship of engagement in higher education,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 17(4): 7-22, 2013. 36.  J. Lubchenco, “Delivering on science’s social contract,” Michigan Journal of Sustainability, 5(1), 2017; J. Lubchenco, “Entering the century of the environment: A new social contract for science,” Science, 279(5350): 491-497, 1998. 37.  Cabrera, “Mayo Clinic includes social media scholarship activities in academic advancement.” 38.  J. March, “A scholar’s quest,” Journal of Management Inquiry, 12(3): 205–207, 2003.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew J. Hoffman is the Holcim (US) Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan; a position that holds joint appointments in the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the School for Environment and Sustainability. His research explores the processes by which environmental issues both emerge and evolve as social, political, and managerial issues. He also writes about the role that academic scholars can play in public and political discourse. He has published over 100 articles and book chapters, as well as 17 books, which have been translated into five languages. His work has been covered in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, Scientific American, Time, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Atlantic, and National Public Radio. Among his list of honors, he has been awarded the ONE Teaching Award (2020), Page Prize for Sustainability Issues in Business Curricula (2019, 2018, and 2009), Responsible Research in Business Management Award (2019), Aspen 165

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Institute Faculty Pioneer Award (2016), American Chemical Society National Award (2016), and Rachel Carson Book Prize (2001). He earned his PhD in both management and civil & environmental engineering at MIT and lives with his wife, journalist and writer Joanne Will, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For more information, go to: http://andrewhoffman.net/.