change burst bubble

You Can’t Change the World From a ‘Safe Space.’

Most of us who go into the humanities and social sciences don’t just want to understand social problems — we want to help resolve them as well. There strong agreement about what our societies’ biggest problems are (for instance, inequality), and broadly, how to go about solving them (i.e. harness expertise and leverage the state or other major social institutions for technocratic interventions). This is in part because most of us in the humanities and social sciences are decisively on the left.  

Students in our fields are rarely even exposed to non-secular or non-left viewpoints in the classroom – let alone encouraged to engage them as morally or epistemologically legitimate options (i.e. as perspectives reasonable people, educated people could hold in good-faith). Scholars do not make use of non-left, non-secular, non-technocratic perspectives in working to understand or address social problems (except to define it as a problem that so many people are religious, conservative or insufficiently deferent to expertise). If anything, in the age of Trump, academics seem even less interested in, or capable of, extending any kind of moral or intellectual charity to towards those we view as “the enemy.”  

On the one hand, this siege mentality is perfectly understandable: in many respects, academics are under siege. However, we hunker down at the expense of our capacity to meaningfully influence society. If we truly want to be agents of change, students and scholars alike need to understand and engage with a much wider breadth of perspectives than we currently do.  

From Social Research to Social Change 

Despite the aspirations of many social researchers, it is really hard to produce impactful work. A huge portion of academic work is never cited or even read by anyone other than the authors and editors who produced it. Fewer still make any significant difference outside the ivory tower. It’s easy to see why:  

Academic writing tends to be needlessly technical, abstract, verbose and dry. Social researchers obsess over identifying and analyzing problems, but provide few practical solutions to perceived societal ills. In response to these types of shortcomings, organizations like Scholars Strategy Network and the Frameworks Institute have sprung up to help translate research into more accessible and actionable formats – and connect scholars to journalists and policymakers. However, even in these instances, the impact of social research is limited because scholars typically interact with only one swath of the political spectrum: left of center.  

Yet Republicans control the White House and Senate, they dominate the judiciary, and control a majority of state and local governments nationwide. And despite the unpopularity of Trump and ongoing demographic changes, Republicans are likely to maintain a strong veto over major social policy for the foreseeable future – well beyond the current administration. Indeed, even were the pendulum to swing all the way back to the Democrats’ near-historic consolidations circa 2008, as President Obama was himself somewhat astonished to discover, many Republicans would still have to be brought on-board (or at least, not actively resist) for major reform initiatives to succeed.  

There is no way around it: progressive academics will be unable to achieve their social objectives to the extent that they engage only with other progressives or their fellow academics.  

Consider: only about one-third of Americans have a four-year degree. And while progressives outnumber conservatives more than 10:1 in fields like the humanities and social sciences — in the broader society, Americans are (and basically always have been) more likely to identify as conservative than liberal. When one adds in the moderates, the picture is clear: the American public is decisively to the right of most university faculty and students.  

To the extent that experts — and the institutions which produce them (universities) — seem to have a political agenda that is out of step with the will and interests of the general public, populists like Trump  will be able to seize and maintain power by exploiting growing mistrust of elites. Meanwhile, social research will increasingly be devalued and defunded.  

From Local to Global

Up to now we have only been talking about the United States! However, for those who want to work abroad with for NGOs, advise foreign governments, or support global social movements, the disconnect problem only grows more severe:  

Across much of China, Africa, Latin America, South Asia or the Middle East (my area of expertise) people hold views on race, gender, sexuality and social justice that aren’t even in the bounds of acceptable Western political discourse – let alone falling to the left of the U.S. spectrum. This matters a lot for those who want to design and implement social policies.  

Research shows that appealing to others’ moral values, group identities and cultural-historical narratives tends to be far more effective for convincing people to accept change or sacrifices than appeals to material incentives, statistics or scientific facts. In many contexts, religion subsumes these transcendent commitments. Indeed, across most of the rest of the world, people are far more religious, and perhaps even religious in fundamentally different ways, than we tend to be in the U.S. and Western Europe.  

Yet social researchers tend to be substantively ignorant about religion, are often disdainful of believers and overall ill-equipped to understand or engage in religious discourse. This distance between those who are designing policies and those whom the policies are intended to serve can cause well-meaning programs to fail in achieving their stated objectives, or even bring harm on those they are intended to help.  

Put another way: if scholars want to work with ‘the people,’ then we’ll have to be able to meet ‘the people’ where they are.  

From Diverse Viewpoints to Broad Coalitions

By listening to, and coming to understand, those on the ‘other side’ of issues they care about, researchers can gain far deeper insight into social problems, how they are created and why they persist—and develop more viable strategies to mitigate them.  

In the process, we are more likely to discover holes in our arguments, problematic assumptions and ineffective framing, which may not be noticed by allies who share our priors, but could prove lethal to our projects in the ‘real world.’  

We may even find opportunities to build broader coalitions to realize our objectives. As I explained for Inside Higher Ed, there are conservatives who support causes ranging from guaranteed basic income and single-payer healthcare to criminal justice reform, environmental protection,  recognition of gay marriages and restraining corporate power. However, without exposure to the complexity and diversity of conservative thought, activist scholars may needlessly alienate potential allies, and undermine the very causes they seek to advance.  

Up to now, criticisms of campus activism have focused intensely on issues like misplaced priorities. For instance, ostensibly progressive students seem to be more easily outraged and mobilized by inappropriate Halloween costumes at a frat party than pervasive food insecurity on campus. Professors focus on “deconstructing” abstractions like “the patriarchy” while disengaged from practical politics. There is more than a little legitimacy to these lines of critique.  

However, even if these academics were to dedicate themselves to more meaningful and concrete reform efforts – even if student activists transcended campus solipsism in favor of the broader society in which universities are embedded — it is not clear they would be able to competently realize their aspirations. Our abilities to listen to, and engage with, non-progressives and non-academics are rapidly eroding – and with them, our abilities to effect social change, or to make our work matter. 

Effective advocacy and activism requires a much more expansive approach to politics – one that has room for people usually excluded from university spaces, such as working class people (who, by the way should not be synonymized with ‘whites’),  rural populations – and yes, conservative and religious people too. 

Originally published 2/3/2019 by Open Democracy


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