Don’t forget the general public

As graduate students and later as academics, we are trained to write and research for our fellow academics. Our careers will involve scrutiny on the part of our professors and graduate advisors. Then, after graduation, we will write and present to search committees, fellow colleagues, journal peer reviewers, grant boards, tenure committees, and other specialists who will evaluate our research and our work. Our professional lives will involve creating specialized research with special terms that other specialists evaluate. It is easy to dismiss non-specialists, the people who don't understand our equations and our jargon. Today, scientists and scholars face laws that restrict their work, cuts to funding, and repeated insults in popular media in large part because we in the academic world have failed to present our research to a larger public. This issue is not new, in 1931, historian Carl Becker issued the following: Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices, leave us it may be to cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of antiquarian research. Such research, valuable not in itself but for some ulterior purpose, will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common knowledge. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world. Now, over 80 years later, Becker continues to challenge us all. We need to be better at talking about what we do to more than other specialists. We need to be able to talk about our work and its significance using ordinary language. It is nothing less than the key to our very survival as scholars.