The Dangers of Scholar Speak

Without giving it a second thought, I filled in the comment box to a friend’s Facebook post and hit “Enter.” And then I re-read what I typed, cocked my head to one side, and said, “Huh.” We’ve all been in this position, of course: wishing we would have given a comment a second thought or, better yet, just moved on with our lives and not commented. This situation, for me, felt slightly different in that the reason for my reflective pause was not that I wrote something ill-advised or incoherent. Rather, I was profoundly taken aback by how academic-y it sounded. And not in a good way. 

Here I was, late on a Monday night, when most people are perhaps enjoying leisure time, debating with another scholar-in-training about whether the rhetoric of a politician was “neoliberal” or deserving of some other descriptor/concept. The fact that I spent my free time this way wasn’t really the issue. I’ve long realized my version of a “good time” can, at times, be baffling. Part of the reason I pursued a PhD program in the first place was because academic work stopped feeling like work a few years ago. It’s fun, almost a game, which is problematic in its own right.

What threw me for a loop about this seemingly innocuous event was that it brought together in a perfect storm the very worst of “scholar speak.” I’m including a few choice excerpts below, followed by a quick rundown of the main issues I noticed. This is more of a cathartic, self-deprecating exercise. I can’t claim to speak for anyone but myself. At the end of the exercise, it could be apparent that these issues are inevitable—part of the socialization process inherent to advanced study. However, it could be instructive for others, or start a conversation amongst those of us undertaking doctoral work to think about how we express ourselves.

The excerpts:

“Well, I don't think it loses its meaning. I just think in the case of Turkey, in particular, you have to be prepared to contend with its contradictions. The Turkish approach to economic development under AKP has been undeniably neoliberal. However, political exigencies occasionally lead to strange state intervention in markets, which run contrary to the overall project (e.g., alcohol ban). The same thing happens in the US. But I think the tension is especially strong with a party attempting to reconcile capitalism and Islam.”

“I actually think we're on the same general page here, although I'm referring more to neoliberalization as a process, or as it actually exists, in the words of Jamie Peck, as opposed to a concept. I'm familiar with Tugal's book, but haven't read it. I would be curious to see the argument. I don't doubt that the AKP has found a way to make Islam and neoliberal capitalism compatible. Such is the evidence. My guess would be that there are still inherent tensions at play, which have to be managed, probably discursively. But this is the case in many places.”

Issue #1: Performance

Part of being an academic is having knowledge, competency, or expertise. For a variety of reasons that aren’t central to this conversation, scholars have become more specialized in their pursuit of expertise. We find what few remaining niches are left in our field, stake our claim, and start mining for “original” research that will set us apart from the other accomplished, smart people. This is partly why, despite having no pre-existing connection to Turkey, I exerted a great deal of effort learning about it. On some level, I do this because I think it’s important to know. Beyond learning, I also spend a lot of time demonstrating my knowledge because it’s expected of me and good for my career.

That’s the tricky thing about expertise: it must be enacted. In academe, I can’t simply say I’m an expert in education policy or economic development. I have to prove it, typically through writing journal articles, book chapters, monographs, or presenting at conferences. The reality is that only a very few pieces of research are all that important or necessary. We can’t argue that there is copious demand for academic articles, but that hasn’t slowed the steady increase in articles published each year. (See the graphic below from Altmetrics.) I suppose the logic is that, if I find it interesting, so must someone else.


We young scholars especially go to great lengths to perform our expertise. In performing, we sometimes fall victim to replacing doubt or speculation with false conviction, or mask uncertainty with abstract argumentation. We often don’t have a full sense of what we are talking about, but admitting to not knowing something seems rather defeating. The danger is that we “play the part” and eventually reach comfort with pretense.

Issue #2: Poetics

Part of the scholarly craft is making use of words to convey ideas. Choices must be made about which words to use, and how to arrange them in ways that achieve desired outcomes. The quality of these choices is used to evaluate our work. How strong is the argument? Is it convincingly presented? Clarity is not always a top concern here, as sometime we select words because they are en vogue or reflect that we are well read on some topic. Before long, sentences include a dozen clauses and are chock full of jargon like “dialectical” and “fiduciary.”

We see this all the time in journal article titles, which make use of strategic language to increase the likelihood of acceptance or readership. I can’t remember all of the times in which I’ve read half of an article, only to find that it says virtually nothing about sexy concepts that are used in the title. To be fair, many of us are grappling with complex social phenomena for which there is no clear language. We do the best we can and often recognize that our wording can be diversely interpreted. Sometimes we even invent entirely new words (I admit that this is a favorite pastime of mine). The danger is when our language becomes so esoteric that only a few others can translate what we’re saying.

Issue #3: (Re)production

In a PhD program, you read—a lot. You are expected to master certain bodies of research according to the demands of your discipline, program, and/or adviser. Over time, it’s easy to read some of the same scholars and ideas over and over again, to the point that they seem like truth. Enough people have cited this book or article, we reason, that it must be getting something right. The ideas are constantly at the forefront of our minds, making it easier to find evidence of them on a regular basis and marginalize alternatives.

Within the circles we run, we make recourse to these scholars and ideas to legitimate what we’re saying. This is why, for example, it’s almost impossible to escape Foucault or Bourdieu references in education research. Want to give your article greater currency? Throw in a Foucuauldian concept (my favorite is governmentality; see above for invented words). It’s not enough to simply use someone’s idea—we have to explicitly drop their name. Before long, academic work can feel a lot less like a creative enterprise and more like artful regurgitation. It’s important, of course, to pay homage to our intellectual forbears and give credit to others’ work. The danger is that our scholarship becomes stale and our writing reads like a list of names and concepts to “fit” within disciplinary currents.

My Facebook comment included many of these issues, but it probably wasn’t my worst offense. It was enough to cause me to seriously rethink the way I express myself. Perhaps more importantly, it raised questions about how pursue academic work with honesty, integrity, and authenticity. I’m not suggesting we dumb down our writing, and I understand some of these issues arise as a result of normal limitations. Consider it a call to critically assess whether, like me, you sometimes are guilty of “scholar speak” and how we might all change for the better.

"Innovation" and University Legitimacy

A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Governor Andrew M. Cuomo has written an economic development plan that turns all 64 campuses of the State University of New York into tax-free zones. This means that companies that move into these zones would pay no sales, property, or business taxes for 10 years, and employees would pay no income taxes. The rationale for this idea is that it would encourage businesses to set-up shop around the state’s universities and drive the translation of research into products, thereby promoting economic growth. 

North Carolina's Research Triangle Park 

New York is not alone it attempting to place universities at the center of regional innovation hubs, which might be defined as institutionalized partnerships between public universities and private industries to capitalize on their respective expertise and assets for economic value creation. These public-private partnerships are not simply linking two discrete sectors, as suggested by the hyphenated name, but rather represent a new structure in academe, with its own jargon, goals, rationales, resource base, and specialized workforce. The collaborative process not one in which university researchers sit in their labs and churn out knowledge products that a nearby company buys and develops. Rather, private companies use funding to set the research agenda; faculty members build careers around the needs of spin-off companies; and universities own equity in ventures they helped to launch. The line between university and business, public and private, non-profit and for-profit is intentionally made obsolete. 

The National Science Foundation supports the establishment of innovation hubs by funding what they call I-Corps Nodes, which they say “work cooperatively to build, utilize and sustain a national innovation ecosystem that further enhances the development of technologies, products and processes that benefit society.” The University of Maryland, Virginia Tech University, and the George Washington University received $3.75 million to become nodes in a regional innovation network. According to a news release about the award, the goal is to “find the best entrepreneurial student and faculty researchers and help them bring discoveries to market.” NSF is thinking even bigger, funding many nodes and facilitating many networks as “the foundation of a national innovation ecosystem and focus on the front-lines of local and regional commercialization efforts."

In some ways, university-based innovation hubs are an exciting development because they may just be responsible for making discoveries that tackle some of society’s biggest problems. However, there are also several downsides to these arrangements to consider, starting with two assumptions that underpin the whole notion of marrying university research and business creation. The first assumption is that problem-solving is best accomplished through the private sector and taking ideas to market. The second is that the private sector is the source of solutions and not the origin of problems. This assumption is particularly tenuous in light of the myriad products developed for the defense industry. Both assumptions have an ideological basis in the effort to discredit government as inefficient and ineffective, positioning corporations in negative relation to the bureaucratic welfare state. In this way, we should not think of innovation hubs as entirely distinct from other forms of privatization.

Privatization is clearest when we consider Gov. Cuomo’s plan. Of course, a tax-free zone is a monumental incentive to locate a business near a university. However, it effectively means that the private sector can harness the research and development (R&D) capabilities of universities, some of which are publicly funded, without giving money back through taxes. The reduction in costs by outsourcing R&D and not paying taxes certainly facilitates the accumulation of profit, but questions remain about whether there is any presence of the “public” in the objectives, processes, or outcomes. There are also lingering questions about who or what, precisely, stands to benefit. Universities may generate some revenue from licensing intellectual property and equity ownership, but it is hard to tell if this revenue amounts to much because we don’t have a good sense of how much is being spent to build and administer innovation hubs. There is also some research suggesting that only a handful of institutions (e.g., MIT, Stanford) make much money from their entrepreneurial ventures.

Why, then, are universities seemingly so eager to partner with the private sector and position themselves as innovation hubs? Positioning, I think, is a key part of the decision. Far more lucrative than money to universities is the symbolic value of showing that research money is not being wasted—that universities are relevant and even necessary to propel economic growth. In an era when people are regularly critiquing universities for their inability to control costs, their inefficient preoccupation with traditions, and their lack of success at creating and transferring usable knowledge, it is no stretch to claim that public higher education is in the midst of a legitimacy crisis.

Universities are desperately seeking legitimacy, and what better way to do it than by orienting what they do to innovation? The legitimating logic, then, for many institutions has been to constantly extoll their contributions to business growth, job creation, and national economic competitiveness. It is no coincidence that the I-Corps Node news release quoted Congressman Dan Lipinksi: “given the size of the federal investment in research—$60 billion annually—the American people should be getting even more new companies and jobs for their money. I-Corps represents a low-cost way to get us across the much-discussed ‘Valley of Death’ that separates laboratory discoveries from profit-making companies that boost economic growth and American competitiveness.”

In its drive to be seen by taxpayers, consumers, and other stakeholders as legitimate, universities have symbolically and structurally emphasized anything that connects them to the “economic imaginary” of the knowledge-based economy. At every turn, university presidents are highlighting the businesses created at their institutions, and organizational change is justified with language of “innovation and entrepreneurship.” The legitimacy conferred by these efforts may be an important short-term survival mechanism, but the long-term returns could be marginal and forever change the philosophical moorings of higher education and the key actors involved in its governance. Once the “innovation ecosystem” is in place, it may be impossible to tell where the campus ends and corporation begins. It's possible that the campus-corporation distinction was myth to begin with, but if there ever was purposeful distancing between the two, a drastic new approach is being taken, and I venture to guess many of us who work, teach, and study at universities, while perhaps somewhat conscious of it, do not fully grasp its pervasive influence. 

Under-acknowledged Dimensions of College Affordability

Conversation surrounding college affordability is inescapable in education policy circles these days. Pundits point to steadily decreasing institutional subsidies to students and attendant tuition hikes. It is true that, after adjusting for inflation, tuition at four-year public institutions increased by 75 percent between 1991 and 2004. For some, state governments are partly to blame for rising tuition, as many have cut appropriations to higher education. Nevertheless, there is a key dimension to this conversation on college affordability that is consistently overlooked—the student-consumer. It’s not just institutions or states that need to rethink their approach to higher education. Students and the cultural norms driving social spending in college likewise need to be re-envisioned.

As an important backdrop, financial aid began a marketization process in 1972 when the Higher Education Act of 1965 was amended so that financial aid was given directly to students, instead of institutions. This policy shift was justified through discourse of student choice, making it one of the first pieces of federal higher education legislation to explicitly use market-based rhetoric. Pell grants effectively became vouchers, and students became state-subsidized consumers in higher education quasi-markets. This shift meant that higher education institutions were more explicitly competing for students. Competition was accompanied and fueled by the rise of corporate management techniques and ranking systems starting in the 1980s.

Institutions compete through the reputation of their academic programs, but also through amenities like gymnasiums, student unions, and residence halls. Because the competition is often motivated by a desire to improve in rankings, amenities become part of a positional arms race, with no definitive end game. All of these amenities carry cost, some of which have bearing on tuition (see this report by the Delta Cost Project for additional data and analysis on this topic). A handful of these amenities are paid for by student recreation or programming fees. Although these fees may not contribute to rising tuition, they certainly factor into wider affordability concerns, as indicated in a recent story from New Mexico University. Sharing the responsibilities of rethinking higher education, then, should be students, who must confront how their own demand for certain amenities is ratcheting up what they must pay to attend college. 

Student Union at the University of Akron

This re-thinking shouldn’t be limited to bricks and mortar on campuses. In considering college spending and affordability, few people account for all of the social spending that has been normalized in the college experience. Anyone who works in higher education is well aware of how much students and their families pay for a variety of things to increase comfort and make adjustment and acceptance easier. This spending includes the almost outrageous amount of stuff bought prior to move-in day to decorate or outfit dorm rooms: mini-fridges, bed lofts, carpet squares, televisions, storage units, and more. Several companies have capitalized on this spending by making lists so that students have everything they “need” to start college. I would argue that a good portion of the spending on outfitting dorm rooms is designed to signal that one has the requisite class standing to make it or belong in college. Ironically, some recent research suggests that students whose parents pay the entirety of their educational expenses don’t perform well because they engage in more leisure activities.

Dorm room designs courtesy of Wal-Mart

The sad reality is that much of this stuff purchased to outfit dorm rooms is perceived as disposable. At the end of the year, dumpsters around college dormitories are stocked with a variety of gently worn futons and the like, which students either can’t move or figure they will repurchase for next year. Several organizations have started to dumpster dive to recover these items and donate them to charity. At my own alma matter, volunteers would sit next to dumpsters on move-out day and inspect any “trash” students were throwing out for items that could be repurposed.

Dorm room items are just a small piece of social spending in college. Other spending includes:

• clothes that bear the college or university’s name, which can be purchased from the bookstore at phenomenally high prices;
• food and beverages, including coffee and alcohol, especially at concentrated campus-based consumption areas; 
• Travel for spring break, away weekends, or study abroad. 

Purchases on these items were patently evident to me a few years ago, when I collected data as part of an ethnography of how students use the campus library. During participant observation, the brand-name accoutrement of studying was ubiquitous: Apple products, Starbucks coffee cups, and Under Armour apparel. (Full disclosure: I also drink an embarrassingly large amount of Starbucks coffee.) These are not cheap items, and I know several students who have sought employment on campus to support their spending habits, not contribute to tuition payments. I have also spoken with students who have acquired large credit card debt as they went through their college years, precisely due to social spending. Of course, it should be kept in mind that there are students for whom these comments do not apply—students who work several jobs to pay for school or make different lifestyle choices. Still, I think this is an important line of research that should be pursued to provide a more complete picture of costs associated with higher education.

Even amidst efforts aimed at sustainability, many campuses have actively encouraged social spending, turning their unions into mini-malls and allowing companies to test products on campus. Some scholars have suggested that college has become a training site for consumer capitalism, where students internalize a never ending cycle of studying, credentialing, and working to afford more and more stuff. Again, social spending may have negligible effects on tuition, but it has major implications for affordability. The cultural expectations of the college experience can have a strikingly high price.

As we search for ways to reform higher education so that it is more effective and efficient, the conversation should not exclude the habitus of student-consumers. We need to address the wastage and values being cultivated among these actors just as much as institutions and state governments.