Academia rewards clever papers over real world impact. That makes it less useful. But it also perpetuates privilege—those with less experience of injustice find it easier to play the game, i.e. work on abstruse problems while ignoring topics that address pressing needs.
I have no beef with fundamental research (which isn't motivated by applications). But most scholarship that *claims* to be motivated by societal needs happens with little awareness of what those needs actually are, and no attempt to step outside academia to actually make change.
Like many of academia's problems, this one is structural. Telling individual scholars to do better is unlikely to work when the incentives are all messed up. Here are some thoughts on what might work. I'd love to hear more.
1. Hiring/promotion committees and funding agencies should do less paper counting and work harder to assess impact. One example: the National Science Foundation's "Broader Impact" assessments of proposals. (I've found it to be 10% meaningful / 90% box checking, but it's a start).
2. Academic conferences should have (genuine, compensated) representation from communities supposedly impacted by the academic work being presented. Huge props to @KLdivergence for leading by example and showing me the importance of this.
3. Advocacy / civil society organizations could institute awards highlighting the academic work that they've found most impactful. In my experience, this type of recognition has a powerful and under-appreciated influence in shaping the priorities of academic communities.
While we're at it, I think we should get rid of most awards for just-published scholarship and make them retrospective, because impact can only be assessed in hindsight. The papers that were best at impressing peers at publication time aren't necessarily the most valuable.
In conclusion, complaints about the ivory tower are nothing new but the fact is that academia has always been in a state of flux.¹ The levers for change, while not obvious, are plentiful. The direction of change is up to us.
¹ files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED502…
¹ files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED502…
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