Expanding the American Mind: Books and the Popularization of Knowledge

Chapter 5: Academic Philanthropists

87 5 , academic philanthropists John allen paulos, a prolific popularizer, once took his colleagues to task: “mathematicians who don’t deign to communicate their subject to a wider audience are a little like multimillionaires who don’t contribute anything to charity.”1 his colleagues might defend themselves with a number of explanations : academics are not rewarded for writing popularizations; current scholarship is too complicated to explain to laypeople; it’s too hard to write for nonspecialists—much harder than writing a check to the food bank. how valid are these defenses? how widely are they believed? and what rewards await those who do share their intellectual wealth? as we have seen, the distinction between “scholarly” and “popular” writing is relatively new. For generations, those who made scientific discoveries or gained new understanding of history simply wrote books and articles for readers with a solid general education. the authors themselves were rarely professional geographers, anthropologists, historians, or chemists, for these fields were not professionalized until the late nineteenth century. rather, they were men—almost never women—with the time and money to explore, conduct research, and write. the intelligent but less affluent sought patrons. the people who could afford books and had the leisure to read were sufficiently educated to understand almost everything that was being written. at least through the Victorian era, educated people in the english-speaking world could understand virtually any book published in their language on any subject . every educated person could, and can, read locke, darwin, or Gibbon without specialized training as a philosopher, biologist, or historian. as learning advanced, and as education and research grew more specialized and professionalized, the Great schism between scholarship and popular literature emerged. For the past century, and especially since World 88฀฀ academic฀philanthropists War ii, scholars have been professional philosophers, biologists, historians, or academics in some other specialization, and they have worked from a base of knowledge far deeper and narrower than that of most educated readers . they have also learned to write in a language shared by their peers, but not necessarily by anyone else. and they have been trained by scholars who value research and its communication to other scholars more highly than they value teaching—whether in the classroom or in popular books. the rise of academic professionalization and specialization described in the previous chapter has had two contradictory effects. some scholars have chosen to focus inward, on their own research and on communicating exclusively with others in their subspecialties. others use the security and status of their academic posts to reach outward, to the public at large. in one study of professionalization, eliot Freidson offers an economic explanation: University professors are granted enough time free from teaching to make it possible for them to do scientific, scholarly, and intellectual research and writing that does not generally have sufficient market value to provide a living by itself. some can work as extremely specialized scientists or humanistic scholars who report their obscure investigations in academic journals and monographs. By virtue of their sinecures they are free to address only each other rather than the general public, on whose support they would otherwise depend. . . . others, however, are made similarly free by their sinecures to spend much of their time serving as critical intellectuals in nonscholarly journals of opinion. they can address the general public on broader subjects as “intellectuals” if they so choose but without having to depend on the public’s economic support because they gain their living from teaching.2 each of these paths has its own rewards and pitfalls. Carl Sagan and the National Academy if we use paulos’s simile, carl sagan was extraordinarily philanthropic. Whether he actually said “billions and billions” of stars (he denied doing so), he captured the imaginations of millions and millions of readers and academic฀philanthropists฀ 89 viewers by sharing what he knew and loved about astronomy. his books and television shows, together with nasa’s own lobbying and promotional efforts, garnered millions and millions of dollars for the american space program. he was probably the only astronomer besides Galileo whose name was a household word. Yet when carl sagan was nominated for membership in the national academy of sciences, the nomination was voted down. many scientists and journalists attributed sagan’s rejection to academic attitudes toward popularization. academy member lynn margulis, one of sagan’s former wives, wrote to him saying that his fellow scientists were...