Marc,
Call it assassination fatigue. After the Daily KOS branded Michelle, HRC hinted at Barack’s assassination as a path to her nomination, and Fox News giggled about the idea of killing Obama, I decided I need a break from political news. I didn’t want to write you about it. I didn’t want to analyze it. I just wanted to escape it.
So I did. For Memorial Day weekend I retreated back to the tower, the Ivory Tower. I finally read John Jackson’s brilliant Racial Paranoia, finished the provocative (but too conservative for my taste) The Bottom Billion and started Alan Jenkins' timely new edited collection, All Things Being Equal.
It was good to encounter ideas free from the need to form an instant opinion and write an 800-word essay. I started remembering how I ended up in the academy and not in the policy world or in journalism.
Then I realized that all the books I read were about race, inequality and politics. All are "trade" books, not my political science staples. I was drawn to them because they tackled real issues that affect our lives. And I was already feeling guilty for not writing an intelligent intervention about HRC’s RFK comments. I got really scared that maybe I am ruined. Maybe my time in the public sphere is making it too hard to reenter the Tower. After all, I like it there in the academy. All my friends are there. Let's face it my only real paycheck is there!
Like a lot of professors of color I feel constantly torn. On one hand is my desire to hang out in the cerebral world of pure theory and careful evidence. On the other is a gnawing sense that my life of relative privilege and resources requires more of me than self-referential work. But academic work makes important contributions. None of the trade books I read this weekend are possible without the tedious work of social scientists asking tough questions in the academy. Most of these trade authors did the work as academic articles, then translated for broader audiences. But that translation is tough to do and you can lose your ability to be fluent in two languages.
Because it is graduation season I was thinking a lot about our high school and college grads. But you and I also train young men and women who are going to be professors. Marc, what do you tell your grad students about making a career that nurtures their intellect and their politics? Do you talk to them about translation? What advice do you have for the next generation of public intellectuals who will be coming down from the tower?
Melissa
