 excellence, broad inclusion, and meaningful social impact. That vision has driven Arizona State University's rapid transformation into one of America's leading public metropolitan research universities. And we're so pleased to have you both with us today. President Crow or Michael, like Andy, cares deeply about public scholarship. And I'd like to read a little bit of the blur that Michael wrote for Andy on the back of the Engaged Scholar. So Hoffman, in his new blueprint for an academic world that makes a difference, delivers an architectural template for the academy that is long overdue to help us find ways to better translate and make our insights matter. Hoffman outlines the logic and philosophy to move from sequestered scholarship to social understanding. This is a critical design map for a critical moment in academic and human history. So without further ado, I'm gonna turn my camera off and open the conversation between Michael and Andy. Take it away. Thank you, Beth. So Andy, can you hear me okay? I can hear you just fine. So first it's a great little piece because you put it into a format that's very digestible, very understandable. Not, it can't be shunted away by academics because of your own academic standing. You know, it can't just be thrown off by others. And so I think it's just, it's the perfect piece to sort of make the case. But I'm gonna do something that you and I didn't talk about. And so you might or might not be prepared. I'm gonna say that we got off course way back when, when Plato and Aristotle and Socrates were thinking up this notion of the notion of the intellectual human, the, what Plato called the philosopher King sitting over there and those in the Plato's Academy, the gymnasium, the gymnasium, you know, sitting there in the 25, 2400 year old suburb of Athens called academia of all places. That was the name of the place. We took their name in a sense. It was kind of a weird thing. But I just want you to comment on how it is that we got to a point that intellectual development and scholarship and know how got premised on the notion of philosopher kings and now queens, but philosopher kings and that everybody else was an idiot. And what do you think that, what I'm after is you're basically arguing for human nature to now prevail, but there's a certain element of academic nature that's very, very elitist. Just talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that's a good, thank you, Michael. That's a great question. You know, the form of the book is designed to be small. It's designed to be digestible. My hope is that it will end up in doctoral seminars and become part of training to undo a set of norms that have become established within the university. In the book, I trace it back to the end of World War II and the report by Vannevar Bush, you know, World War II science helped win the war. And then the president of the United States said, okay, how can we turn that to civilian use? And Vannevar Bush wrote this report and he made a very sharp distinction, basic research, applied research is done by somebody else in business, but universities do basic research. And that created a divide. It isolated, began the isolation of academics from real-world connections, real-world applications. And I think that through the decades since then the professionalization that has happened through the rankings, through the reward system, through the bean counting that we do so much of, we've kind of lost our way and we've focused on just the currency being academic articles, speaking to narrow academic audiences and connecting to real people is not rewarded within the system. And so I would argue, I know for a man about, you know, Van Bush, you know, who was the MIT vice president for research in the 30s and then became the president of the Carnegie institution of Washington and then was appointed in June of 1941 as the president's science advisor and then started heading up the office of scientific research and development and then four years later, he's outlining this plan that then, you know, made academic science in the United States, one of the most powerful institutional frameworks that ever existed. But even he was acculturated by a system that suggested that in fact, the best thing was separation from politics, separation from people. I mean, it was this notion of separation. So I wanna go to the root element of separation from academic design. And then what I wanna lead up to is that the notion of whether or not universities that are not separated could also be designed at some point and emerge as differentiated types of institutions where you can have differentiated types of faculty as opposed to the same kind of faculty. So what do you think is at the root of even Bush, you know, going all the way back 75 years? Well, it gets down to the idea of the pure scientist devoid from any kind of political influence just focused on their work in the lab. You know, Roger Pilka Jr. wrote about this in his book, The Honest Broker. And he argued that that's largely a fiction, but it is a fiction that many people hold on to this strive for objectivity, deny our humanity, deny our connection to the people around us, deny the connection we have to the subjects we study that we care about. Yeah, one of the charts you have in the book is Don Stokes's Pastures Quadrant Arts. And I was a reviewer of Stokes's book before it passed away and before it was published. And I remember the brilliance of the four positioned quadrant. So Boer's quadrant, Pastures quadrant, Edison's quadrant and the Birdwatcher's quadrant. And the notion that somehow academia has built on the notion that it's all Boer's quadrant, no purpose, no meaning, no expected outcome just understand and unravel nature. And while that certainly has been going on, you know, forever and ever and ever, there's little evidence that that's not a totally incomplete characterization of the process itself. And so what do you think are the roots, even at the University of Michigan, you know, a well-established world-class research university, which over time has even changed its character. It's become in some ways less and less engaged with the day-to-day activities of society. It admits now only students with A averages from high school, it has a high cost for out-of-state students to attend and so forth. I'm not arguing against that per se. I'm just saying what leads to that notion of separation and then how do you get scholars to be more engaged that have the same status in a society that values exclusion so much? Well, I think that young people coming into the profession are enculturated into this mindset. I've talked to many doctoral students who feel they came in with a real desire to have impact in the real world and they feel it got pushed out of them and they got pushed into the corner and they feel discouraged. I wanna bring that back. And I think that young people coming into the field now are our hope. I think that they want to push against the norms. I mean, when I got my PhD in the early 90s, the norm pretty much was if you said to your committee, I'm not sure I wanna be an academic. Many of them would have quit my committee. And that is becoming less and less so. And I think it's in a large part because so many students now in high numbers wanna have this kind of impact. And if we flush them out of the system, we're gonna have a serious drain on the future rags. But just that phrase that you just said, committee is like, why would I be on your committee unless you're gonna replace me because I've so carefully produced you because if I am Plato, you are my Socrates. You are my Aristotle. And that my job is to produce me to carry on through time with just incrementally enhanced understandings. And so give me your best definition of the engaged scholar and how does the engaged scholar then gain social status in a world constructed by philosopher King elitists? Yeah, I think about what I'm trying to do in this book. I mean, there are many people who've written about engaged scholarship, study topics that have practical implications that have answer important questions. And then we put them in our academic journals, we put a line on a resume and we move on to the next article. Like it's somebody else's job to bring it to the public. That's not my job. I'm not gonna lower myself to do that. And so what I'm talking about in this book is what do you do then? After you finish the article, after you finish the academic article, where do you take it? And add some more to your portfolio to bring the work to the world that needs it through many different platforms that are becoming increasingly available to us. Now it's a challenge because the reward system is what it is in academia right now. And so there are risks to doing this. The formal rewards, still the coin of the realm is academic publications and I would say A level publication, which I think is extreme. For the book I was able to have a short exchange with Paul Krugman and I asked him, why did you, the work you got in your Nobel Prize was on what we call B journals. Why did you publish it there? And he says, because the A's wouldn't take it. And so there are some people who see this narrow focus on A journals as creating this theory fetish, this very narrow sense of what is considered legitimate research and it kills creativity. It kills any kind of endeavor outside the box. I've talked to junior faculty, let's work on a paper. How about this journal? No, it's not on my list. I can't do that. And so we've created this structure with such controlling rules that I think people are afraid to step outside the lines. And I would add there's also informal rules. There's something called the Carl Sagan effect that if you engage- Most people, most people, Andy, don't know that Carl Sagan was considered an idiot by any elite astronomers. Right, yet he was extremely influential, denied tenure at Harvard, wasn't he? Probably changed the trajectory of our species in a lot of ways. And the people that got tenure at Harvard probably didn't. And so now the Carl Sagan effect, if you lower yourself to engage in public discourse, you must not be that serious and academic. And when I was a doctoral student, I saw this happen at my graduate school, a very respected economist became dean and he started writing trade books. And so the economist started mocking him, calling him less thorough and that dogged him. And I just, you know, that kind of mentality, it sticks. And there are many people who do this that would rather not call attention to it. And that's unfortunate because I think- So that my opening comments were basically that it's built into the cultural design of the institutions. And we live in a world in some books that I've written where we're obsessed with a British phrase called filiopiatism, which is adoration of tradition. And we then are also as a function of that, highly isomorphic. And so you have a number of universities, for instance, I'll pick your school who want to be Michigan, because they believe that Michigan is the pinnacle of the peak, you know, Michigan and Berkeley as the two great public universities in the country, UCLA, maybe three, those three universities. And then that's what we need to do. And then to do that, we need faculty that do exactly what you're talking about. Otherwise we can't get there. And so then as the public trust in universities, Wayne's as the global climate change problems accelerate as the nation demonstrates its science illiteracy by its inability to understand a simple RNA based virus, as all those things occur, someone has to say, well, how did all this work out? We've got a lot of philosopher kings concentrated in some places as we're still continuing to evolve unevenly across the rest of our society. And so what would be the design things that you would enable or change to get more engaged scholars out there? What we're doing is bringing together the crisis that I think is at the door of the academy, you know, the degraded quality of public discourse on science, degraded understanding people have of science. And I think that that part of that problem is self-inflicted, that not enough scientists, not enough academics scholars are engaging with the public to say, this is how science works. This is what it tells us. This is why it's important. Because if they do that, they get, they get called less thorough. But you know what though, so what? So what, once we become tenured and certainly we become full, let's finish it at the end of the year, I do my inner review and I take it seriously and it will get me at most a 2% raise. Why shouldn't I do, why shouldn't I be the kind of academic I want to be? In many ways, I want to give people the courage to do that by saying that there is a path here and you can do this without destroying your career. You have to do it smartly, but you can do this. And so we are starting to see incremental changes. Some schools are changing their promotion and tenure to allow a fourth criteria practice. Some are allowing student candidates to write impact statements or get letters from people in practice. There is an increasing amount of training out there on how to do this. There is certainly a growing number of platforms, our host, the conversation is one of them, where academics can write a short piece, bring it straight to the public without going through a journalist and outlets are hungry for this content because they've been decimated of their journalists. So we are at a time of crisis, we are at a time of need and we are at a time of opportunity. Yeah, so I happened to have been, I was at Columbia for 11 years and then been at ASU here for 19 years, so the last 30 years at two institutions, two very different institutions. And in the case of ASU, we've taken on many of these things that you're talking about, where engaged scholar, well, that's one of our mantras, the re-engineering of the institution, 30 new transdisciplinary schools, whole new ways to think about tenure, whole new ways to think about things. But at the same time, when people are looking around and saying, well, the real great universities are those still doing these same things in those ways? And so how do you get people to, well, let me go back to my question about the notion of the evolution of the system to empower more differentiation among and between universities also. So what do you think about that? I think the challenge here, this is an institutional challenge. If you want to change the system, everything has to change from the accreditation to the rewards, to the journals, the donors, the recruiters, everything has to change, but it can change quickly with proper stimulus, with a crisis. And I think we're in one of those crises. A lot of schools are struggling right now and a lot of questioning, a lot of people are questioning the value of higher education given the cost and the way it's going up. You have embarked on a different model there and the jury's still out that this could be the model that goes forward where more communities will say, hey, we want an Arizona State next to you. I mean, we had an embarrassment here at the University of Michigan where we had the Flint water crisis and some scientists at the University of Michigan were invited to participate. And the answer was, we'd rather not, we don't want to upset Lansing and we're not sure we see academic publications in that. And that is the kind of myopia that's created in this system, but it can change. Yeah. Yeah, you talked about another thing at the beginning and it reminded me this notion of the Flint project, the Flint situation, but about the meaningfulness of research. And so several years ago, I did a paper before a joint meeting of the Ecological Society of America and the Geological Society of America. And the paper was about why all the fundamental research in those two disciplines about mudflow off of volcanoes in Central America was of no value when 10,000 people were killed by a hurricane came in, everybody had all the models, everybody had all the understanding of what would happen. Nobody knew how to use them and translate them into action at the government. And literally the people that wrote that stuff said, well, I'm really sorry about that, that's not my job. And it isn't necessarily their job, but it might be their job to work more with others in ways that lead to the actual return on the investment in the research. So what's your thinking about that? What I'd like to do is think about broadening the tent. Right now we have a very narrow idea of what the academic is supposed to do their job. They write their academic articles and something else you brought up, the interdisciplinarity that you're trying to foster there. The silos between departments means that we talk to narrower and narrower communities. And that further isolates us. And such that like I, my work is in the area of organizational theory, institutional theory. I do it in a tradition in business schools, very often different than sociology, very often than different than public policy, which is very strange. And so how do we break down those silos and broaden the tent so that, yeah, you can do the basic research, you have a place within the academy, but others may wanna do work that's more closer to the real world and application, keeping in mind that there is a line, you don't cross it of advocacy and things like that. We do wanna maintain some kind of boundaries over knowledge generation, but applied knowledge, going beyond just the basic research model, getting into Stokes Pasteur's Quadrant, where it's more applied, more useful. Someone has to do that. And if we just simply, when I hear academics mock something, oh, so-and-so read that, wrote about that in such and such a journal 20 years ago, I laugh. I was like, did anyone read that beyond their narrow academic community? Because how do you expect it to get out of there? I mean, when I meet senior professors close to retirement and they feel frustrated that the world hasn't recognized their genius, I often wonder, well, what did you do to bring it to the public? And if you think you just wrote in an academic journal and you contributed to public conversation, you didn't, and that's the problem. And so we do have these very insular conversations where academics talk to each other in this very knowing way. And, because to bring it out into the public, you have to speak differently. You have to engage differently. There's a problem that academics have, we call it the knowledge deficit model, and the logic is I'm talking to the average person. That person's brain is half full. I'm gonna pour my knowledge into their brain. They will think like me and they'll make right decisions. No one likes to be treated like that. And the deficit model is the huge error. It's a huge error. Huge error. So you have to engage, you have to listen as much as talk, and let's face it, a lot of academics aren't very good at listening. When I hear academics say things like, well, the literature says it is so off-putting to the people they're talking to, because if you're not familiar with literature, how do you engage? Right, yeah, exactly. So one of the things that's kind of interesting, you talk about sort of we're at these different types of, I guess we call them challenges slash crises, you're at this social transformation moment for rapidly accelerating social transformation. We've got all kinds of things going on. So even picking your own area like organizational theory. So clearly we haven't organized ourselves either at the national government level, the state of Michigan level, picking your own state government, which has been running so fabulously, in the last couple of years. You know, we haven't figured out how to take on really complicated things that are moving really quickly. So in certain private sector enterprises, they've done that. In certain public sector enterprises, outside of the military, they haven't done that. And so this notion of, how do you get people to work and to transit and to move back and forth? But let me add another thing to this. And the other thing I read, and the reason I was so excited about your book was that the engaged scholar also meant that maybe academics would take responsibility for things. That is, well, we got that wrong or we should have done more of this or it turns out there's a design limit to the Michigan state government that we ought to really take a look at or taking elections. You know, we have all this democratic theory and we don't seem to be able to implement an actual democratic theory because we have design limits. And so how would you restructure academia itself to say, well, why don't we figure out how to produce an actual functioning democracy with one person, one vote? And why is it that we can't do that? Because we're all split up. We got so many different ways that we're looking at things. So how would you take on something like that? Well, I mean, what we're talking about here, and I think this is very germane to the book is that the challenges we face today are systemic. They're not these isolated, not all of them are these isolated, discrete problems. They're these systemic problems, whether it's climate change or income inequality or any number of issues. And so they can't be handled from one lens alone. If you really wanna work on these problems in a very serious way, then they need to be addressed by a diverse group of people from multiple disciplines. And but here again, here's some of the problems. Well, where are you gonna publish that? Multidisciplinary journals are very hard to come by. And we are ruled by our list of A-level journals. And so these cross-disciplinary teams become problematic until you're full. Then you don't care. You may be called less thorough, but why should you care? When you're a junior faculty member, you need to do this carefully and thoughtfully because you can sabotage your own chance at tenure unless the rules are changed. But there's a sociology here that's at work that is so inwardly focused and in some ways so selfish. Now, at the same time, you gotta protect it so that you can allow the new ideas to emerge and so forth and so on. But this notion of systemic problems, I've been making the case increasingly so that the very negative outcomes that we're going to feel from global climate change, which was probably avoidable, are basically partly a result of a non-systemic approach, partly the results of the silos in academia. That is, I've been saying this, that we actually contributed to the problem by the notion of not allowing for economic theory to work well with other kinds of decision-making or environmental science working well with something else. And so how do we, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. No, because I was going to build on that because when you look at it from one discipline, one lens, by definition and complete, therefore you said, why can't we admit our mistakes? If you find a flaw or a mistake, you're afraid to admit it for fear of weakening respect or trust in the institution. And yet I think that people would trust the institution more if it was honest and open saying, okay, this is why, for example, we said that bacon was bad and now it's not so bad. Why, this is why the data is changing on COVID itself. I mean, it's hard work, it's messy. Dr. Fauci, how hard that is, but it's far worse. You know, they say it's the cover-up. You know, when someone sees a cover-up, things get messy. And Roger Pilka again wrote about this, that the objective of the scientists is put everything out there. Don't narrow it, because once you do that, people will distrust the institution. Yeah, so one of the things when Washington, who was one of the founders who didn't go to college was self-educated. You know, he argued several times while he was president for a national university and his idea of the national university was could you build a university in service to the nation? And of course, all of our big public universities and a lot of our private universities and community colleges and others, they all believe they're in service to the nation. And of course they are, because, you know, we're not doing nothing, it's just we're not doing enough. And so we're necessary, but grossly insufficient. Right, but let's face it though, we do research. You know, I quote Jane Lubchenko's idea of the science and social contract, which I really like that. We have an obligation and responsibility to provide a service to society with the money and the support they give us. Yet, let's face it also, we write our academic papers. They go into journals often behind paywalls. Taxpayer paid for that research through tuition dollars or through taxes. And we put a line on our resume and move on. I mean, we have an obligation and responsibility to provide a service to society. I feel that very, very strongly. And, you know, some schools were founded on this idea, a lot of land grant schools were designed around this to provide a service. But even they've started to drift. We're driven by donors, we're driven by politics. We've lost our way, I think. And then out here in the desert in the hinterland, we just decided to build what we think we need and then see if we can get it done before someone kills us off. Well, you're certainly getting attention, Michael. I mean, you're doing something that people are noticing. I mean, you are. Because there's a need for a new model. I see that Beth has joined us again. So we may be moving into the question session, right, Beth? I do because there's so many questions. There's dozens of questions. So I'm going to start by consolidating a few and I'm going to do this to Michael for you first, given what you're trying to accomplish at ASU. Several people have asked what is the impact you're looking for in the public sphere? And the second part of that question is, should the researcher start with that question in mind when they embark on a question to answer? Yeah, let me just narrow it down. And I think it fits in with Andy's model, the engaged scholar. So we still live in a society where 20% of the kids that go to high school don't graduate and 50% of the kids that go to high school don't come out with a high school, really a solid high school education. They don't know what they need to know. Are we responsible for that? We say yes. And so if we are responsible for that, that means we start measuring our scholarship, our output, our people, products, everything against that objective. The objective should be the graduation with successful learning outcomes of every single child. Anything lacking that, I mean, that's what engaged scholars would do. So we're not doing the scholarship about some theoretical discussion. We're producing a million high school dropouts a year. And oh, by the way, we, the universities trained all the teachers, all the superintendents and all the principals, and they're producing a million high school dropouts a year. And so the notion is, could you engage scholarship in a new way where the objective is no high school dropouts? And that then is a completely engaged scholarly institution. And those are the kinds of things that we're doing here. I have something on that. Michael's looking at high school and coming up to college. Let's flop that and bring it forward as well, because I think one of the problems in our society right now is the populace needs more continuing education, constant education as they develop to life. I mean, James Madison warned about this. If your populace isn't well educated, you're gonna have a hard time having a solid democracy. You could have riots at the Capitol. I mean, you could have anything happen. And so the university can play that role of, I think about it in the book, expand, broaden your conception of the classroom. It's not just people who come in and pay tuition to come to my classes. I think of the engaged scholars thinking about the classroom much broader and trying to educate other people within society, not just those that pay tuition. Yeah, absolutely. That's really helpful. But let me just hone in, because another question came in about the same thing. Should a researcher, should they be thinking about public scholarship when they embark on a research question? Or like how important is that? Or is it really after the fact that they've done their basic science or moving something forward? And I'll give that one to you. Okay, that's a really interesting question. I've had debates about that with my colleagues. There are some who really feel that you can't put that list mis-test in the front. That you embark on an academic inquiry and then maybe that work will come out useful later. Maybe decades or even a century later, that's not unheard of. And so the academic inquiry proceeds by the same token. If you just allow your theoretical driven questions to take you a certain place, the notion that that will automatically be able to be translated for practice will be purely coincidental. If it's designed for a particular purpose to add to theory, for example, then it would be coincidental. And I can suddenly take that and translate that for the public. So I wouldn't put the list mis-test in the front, but that doesn't mean that everything coming up the other end is gonna be useful at least now. Michael, do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I mean, I think there's all kinds of reasons that you pursue knowledge or do knowledge. And all I'm saying is that they should probably be of equal status. And so if you're pursuing something solely for the pursuit of some unknown thing based on some unknown theory, you know, why do red photons move more quickly than blue photons? Okay, well, yeah, let's figure that out. And so, but I think that what we have, we need more deliberateness and more breadth of understanding of what is academia. We need a broader view of academia. I will say for those who were not with us in the beginning, there's a question about if bacon is unhealthy. And we've had a question said, wait, bacon is not unhealthy. I miss the beginning of this, but I do have one. I'm not the back of the board. It just depends how much bacon you eat. Exactly, exactly. So this is a question that there's many questions about this and it really gets into where's engaged scholarship and where's advocacy, right? Like where do you draw the line? How do you distinguish between engaged scholarship and action research, Gina? So both of you, but Andy, I will start with you. That is such an important question, especially early in your career. The line is blurry and you can step over it and you lose the statue of the object, the statue of the university. The knowledge generation and the knowledge advocacy, there has to be a handoff because otherwise you're seen as an activist that loses your credibility as a scientist. But the line is so blurry and you get a tiptoe for it and let's face it, it's more dangerous earlier in your career than later. You overstep when you're coming up for tenure, that can cost you. When you're full, you can start to move forward. Do we become like Noam Chomsky? Clearly someone who's cost way over the line and is very much an advocate, but questionable whether that he has lost his position on that as a knowledge generator. You have others like Paul Krudman, Jeffrey Sacks, they stepped out and they said, okay, I'm gonna be a pundit. That's the role I'm gonna play. But as a professor, you gotta be very careful, but don't be too timid either. Don't always play it safe. Stand by what you've done your work on, stand by your knowledge base and bring it to the fore even if it offends people. Go ahead, Michael. The only thing I'll add is short and that is that advocacy is in the context of a policy debate or a policy unknown or a policy resolution thing. And so people just have to understand that scholarship and advocacy are not necessarily the same kind of thing, even applied scholarship, even engaged scholarship. They're not the same. And so you just have to sort of know where you are on the roadmap. Now, I can take an advocacy position about a certain kind of research or the importance of a certain kind of research and the results of that research without being a political advocate. I'm just telling you that messenger RNA research that leads to the development of new vaccines that can be developed rapidly to respond to new things entering the human ecosystem, that's good. So it's different than advocacy per se, political advocacy. No, I think it is a blurry line, but I totally agree that distinction is paramount. So this is a question for Michael. Students that are coming into ASU, like, where do they stand on this idea of public scholarship? Is there a desire for, it's certainly at the conversation, we see a lot of postdocs in younger career, scholars who wanna be more engaged and it's difficult. So could you address that? Well, we have tried to create an environment where our students can find a welcome soil to plant their ideas in and move in a new trajectory. So we're not focused on producing PhDs only for the academy. We believe a PhD is a functionally important level of training and level of thinking and type of thinking and type of approach to all kinds of things and that we should be producing more people with that kind of training and that kind of background across a broader spectrum of things. So we're looking for that. So we've been producing lots of PhDs in our new school of sustainability and a few of them go into academia and many of them go into industry or they go into government, they go into policy, they go into design. So the key for us is to make certain that people don't think that we're just Plato's Academy, Plato producing Aristotle or Socrates or whoever else comes out of the system. Well, I'm gonna ask any of that question. I will say by the number of people writing from ASU for the conversation, the job of that. Andy, could you- They can write me also, just send me the question. Right, Andy, could you take a stab at that as well? Yeah, I mean, I think academia is changing. I'm seeing incremental elements, I think of it like Foster's S-Curve and it could turn the corner and really start to take off. If you are going into a PhD now, I would encourage you to think about adding engagement to a portfolio, while also recognizing that right now the rules are the rules. And if you wanna survive in academia to get tenure, look at the understanding of the rules. If one school were to come out and say, you know what, for tenure, we're gonna come up with a different set of standards, follow these standards and you can come up for tenure. You'd be crazy to follow them because unless you guarantee tenure, you have to go out in the open market. And if you don't have a saleable packet, you're not gonna get a job. But I like what Michael said that if we train people to focus on really important questions, A, you're gonna be focusing on something that's gonna get you out of bed 20 or 30 years from now because you really care about it. To me, it's like the idea of a vocation or a calling. It's gotta be deep inside you. And then if you decide that with your PhD, you can better realize your vocation by going into academia or a think tank or business or government, go that way. What a PhD should do is train you how to think, how to ask really good questions and how to answer them. And you decide how you wanna play that game. But to pre-ordain that at the beginning is that we're only gonna produce PhDs that are gonna be my offspring as a professor, I'm gonna make little clones so that I can create this aura around me. That's part of the problem and we need to break that down. I do think personally that as you do engage scholarship, as you do connect, as you do bring your work out into the real world, your work is gonna be better because you're gonna get tested, you're gonna get better questions and your subsequent research is gonna be better informed and on you go. I do think that there's a virtuous circle here. We've gotten lots of, I think you're right, and this sort of is a good segue, just keeping track of the time into several questions we have actually more than several from early career scientists saying this, and I'll read one from Cynthia. The biggest issue for me as a postdoc, trying to work in the area of Transdisciplinary Engaged Scholarship is funding. Very rarely will peer reviewers for funding application or applications themselves demonstrate an understanding of what you're talking about here. So she goes on, other people go on to say, what, how do you convince funders that public scholarship is interesting and also Transdisciplinary Scholarship, if I can read into the question a bit. Yeah, I'll just say that with the new Frontiers Act that's moving forward in one form or another with sort of the rebirth of a concept for the National Science Foundation and other things that are going on with an emphasis within the NSF and other agencies, as well as many foundations, the whole notion of transdisciplinary funding is accelerating rapidly. I mean, the amounts of funding, types of funding, types of projects, there's even a ranking now of by the NSF of the top interdisciplinary schools, who's working in the most interdisciplinary project spaces and as well as institutions. So we put most of our internal research investment in transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking because it is a little bit more difficult to get. I think that to Cynthia, to the postdocs and others wanting to move in this direction, just don't give up, I mean, just keep going, just get every shekel wherever you can find it. And you're gonna find people interested in your problem set out there. So I think the world is moving up wave that is we're getting an oceanic uplift in resources for transdisciplinary thinking moving forward. So to Cynthia and others, don't be discouraged. Just sort of keep at it. I think the resources are out there. And there's a trajectory. They'll be on the front of this wave. And if they stick at it and the stars to catch on, they're gonna be one of the pioneers, one of the leaders. That's one of the benefits of being a first mover. But it's harder. There's no question it's harder. Yeah. One thing that we haven't talked about and we have about four minutes for Michael left and then Andy, there's lots of questions specifically, Andy, you as well, is how do we fix the system, right? You talk about this disconnect between academic research and public scholarship. How does that system get fixed? And I'm gonna give that to Michael first. You know, I'm a big sort of the system. I don't pay that much attention to it. Basically assume that your role, I mean, you have to survive also. I mean, so I got that. I understand that. And I will say I've survived. And so while at the same time attacking the system. And so you attack the system by not accepting it in its totality. You attack it by contributing to new ways to advance it. New ways to think about it. And so, you know, I'm not a big person that thinks that you need to calculate your path to success by emulating something that occurred 40 or 50 years ago. That's just not the way the world is. And so you have to be courageous and take your chances. And if all else fails, your ideas will still have been produced. So think of what you don't produce as your ideas because you're playing the game only. And so I just think that there's, you know, you only live once, you know, why play just the game? Why not actually edge it out there and move it out there and take a calculated set of risks moving forward. And then as Andy suggests, as you build a little bit more foundation under you, then you take more and more risks. And then when you become a full professor protected by the license of tenure, which allows you to work on the topics that you want to work on, then take lots of risks and move out into new areas. And so you got to sort of always have your eye on disruption, not just on what's called normal science by Coon. I mean, it's like, you know, I'm gonna fall asleep if everybody pays attention just to that. So. I'm really well said. And if Andy wanna add anything, we have only about a minute left for Michael. I didn't know if you wanted to... I wanna be brief because I wanna hear more from Michael, but you know, Deb Meyers and the Stanford has this idea called the tempered radical, which I really like. You're tempered, you fit, but you're a radical. You keep these ideas in your head and in local spontaneous moments, you start to bring them out. As you develop, as you start to advance, new things become visible because you've taken these chances and you will progress and you will grow. If you just try and look at the rules and follow the extrinsic rules, you will shrivel and die. I mean, you will become something contorted not yourself. Focus on the internal motivations for what you're doing. You're gonna be a unique person, a unique professor, you're gonna be a unique scholar in being who you wanna be. Yeah, I agree with Deb very much. And I think that's a very, very clear articulation of what we need to do. And if you don't, you're basically driving metal wheeled vehicles on metal tracks, also known as railroads. There's no creativity in railroads. And so you've got to understand the railroad. You've got to measure it very, very carefully. You've got to pass through your PhD program. You've got to do this, you've got to do this, you've got to do this. But then as I like to say sometimes, just take those metal wheels off and put on your off-road wheels and then move out. And then be able to come back and still work on the tracks as you need to, then move out, then come back and work still on the tracks. And so she's got it absolutely right. So I do have to go. It's nice to see everybody. Andy, great book. I hope everybody has a chance to get it. And it really is disruptive in a design sense. And so I'm hopeful that a lot of people take a look at it. Thank you very much, Michael. Yeah, Beth, thank you for the invitation. We're going to continue on. We've got a lot of good questions for you. Thanks. Andy, there's lots of questions for you. So I'm going to talk to you. Oh, no. I'm just going to read a couple. So David asked, Andy mentioned tenured and full professors a bit while speaking. Can Andy say more about, quote, sabotage and what junior scholars should avoid as they work to be engaged scholars? And it goes on a bit. Why don't you take that? Because there's a few questions like that. Meaning they will be sabotaged. They'll sabotage their own careers. Yeah, I think he's right. How do you do? I think do you suffer the criticism of your peers sometimes when you become a public scholar? How do you avoid that? Well, I mean, play the game carefully if you're a junior scholar. Recognize the rules of the game. Be tempered. I've seen some junior faculty or even doctoral students who want to do blogging. And that's great. And then they fill the resume with blogs. And then they have like one academic paper or not even any academic papers, but lots of blogs. I would consider that very unwise. Signaling, putting out the front. You do have to, Michael used the analogy of a railroad. I use the analogy of musician. A musician has to learn how to play the scales. Then they have to learn how to play other people's music. Then they can start to advance and start to play jazz. So learn your scales. Understand that you're gonna be tested on your scales and then start to develop. There's an important point here though is that if you shunt all interest in engagement until you get tenure full, it's gonna be hard to reengage it. The passion will die. You will become inculturated in what's safe and easy. I'm gonna keep producing those little academic papers because that's what I've always done. I had a colleague put it in a very funny ways as one of the problems with their field is we have too many senior professors thinking like junior professors. They keep doing the same thing. They always did as an assistant professor. And that's really unfortunate. So think about the arc of your career. And we don't do that. I never thought about what it meant to be an associate professor until I was one. Never thought about what it meant to be a full professor until I was one. I'm not starting to think about what do I be perhaps as an emeritus professor? These are different stages in life. And each one has a different role, a different set of responsibilities. I do think my role now as a full professor is to attend to the institution. Because no one does that because there's no reward for it yet. It's important work and it's meaningful to me. And that should be good enough. That's great. There's several questions about NSF. But let me ask this very kind of provocative question from Scott. Is it reasonable, let me see if there's a couple like these. Is it reasonable to imagine community members as citizen scientists who as experts in living with issues can function as peer reviewers for publication and advancement? That's so out of the system, I realize. But I think it's an interesting question. Why? Because if you are engaged, you're a citizen scholar, you're not capable or qualified to peer review. I don't quite get that. I think that Scott is questioning this idea. Right now, academic journals are peer reviewed by your peers in the academic specialty. Would it be worth it to have a member of the public in there? Oh, that's interesting. That's very interesting. I mean, I think that question as it relates to tenure is a very interesting one because I do wanna see, when I came up for tenure, I said, can I get some business, I'm a business school professor and I have some business people or at least one write a letter and they said, no, it's irrelevant. And that's starting to change when we start to think about people on tenure committees, if they're only cutting the dried, A-level publications are only the matters, it's gonna be very hard to get through that process if you have engagement as part of your portfolio. In terms of the journals, certainly the really theoretical ones, it's very hard to read and there is value in the rigor that's in there. So someone from the general public there, probably not so good, but in some of the journals that get more into the real world, I think there is a place for there. And I'm not just somebody walking in off the street, but if you're doing something on a particular topic that has someone, someone, my work, someone from a major corporation forward would have something to say about my papers that are more applied in their orientation to say either this is total nonsense, this is another academic living in the cloud and no connection to the real world, or this is a very interesting set of observations that can inform me. And it's always challenging. I remember when I first did my first academic work and part of it was with the folks at Amaco, which doesn't exist anymore. I remember the vice president right away said, no, that doesn't work that way. But after he thought about it, he came back and goes, you know, Andy, I've been thinking about it and I think you're right. And that's the challenge and that's the real gift of being an academic. We can see it in the classroom. We're being, practitioners in the classroom, they tell war stories, which are great. What an academic does, take it all together, put it into a model, tell a story, use it to be able to inform other practice. That's what we do. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's exactly right. This is, there's a lot of advice seeking in these questions, but if some personal and some not, but this one is a nice one, an anonymous attendee. How can we effectively create research visibility for the public where it's both readily accessible and understandable? Now, I know this is what your whole book is about. It is amazing. But I think several listeners or watchers are really eager to find out like, what does impact look like, you know? And what is that? What is that? You know that? Well, there are two questions there. How do we make our work accessible and understandable? And that's not easy. You need to become multilingual. I can go into my academic jargon right now and you're gonna look at me like, what world are you talking about, Andy? But it serves a purpose in certain audiences. And then I can go into a business audience. I use a different language, a different style, a different tone. I can walk into an environmental nonprofit. Again, a different language, a different style, a different tone. You have to develop it and it takes time. And what comes with that also is finding your voice. If you are merely repeating what's in papers, you're not really informing. You're just passing along knowledge, but you're not bringing it together in a way that's digestible and usable. And accessibility is key. There are some scholars that I know that are brilliant in their field that couldn't explain their work to even a group of professors because they're so steeped in their jargon and their models and things like that. I'm blanking on what the second part of that question was. I think I forgot it too. It was who we were talking about. How do you actually, what actually is- Oh, what does impact look like? This is the $64,000 question that universities are asking now. If we're gonna start to reward impact, how do we measure it? Because we don't know how to do anything unless we measure it. We measure citation counts, age index, A-level publications. We know how to do that. Which I think going back to Michael's comments is really warped things because too many times we just bean count. I mean, there are some schools that give you a bonus if you publish an A-level journal. Does it matter what you wrote about? No, you got it in A-level journal. And that creates a very weird set of circumstances such as, for example, I get credit for writing an A-level publication. That's for a very narrow academic community. If I write something for my students, not in the award system, write something for business people, not in the award system, I find that bizarre. But how do you measure impact? That's what people are trying to crack right now. So you've got some metrics being formed, alt metric, impact story, plumex. There's some big money behind that, trying to track it, trying to make it work. Some schools allow, like I said, an impact statement. Are you interviewed by the press? Do you have a citation or reference, a quote in the newspaper? Schools like this, but they don't know how to measure it. And even the conversation, I've used this as an example. The average academic paper is cited 10.8 times. 80% of humanities articles are never cited. 30% of social science articles never cited. Yet we get tenure for this. Now, what if you had a piece in the conversation that a million hits? And I'm thinking of Ricky Rood right now. He has one that has that. Are you gonna tell me that that doesn't matter compared to a citation count of 10.8? That doesn't make any sense. So how do we measure that? Now, on the flip side, there's something very interesting. There was a survey of academics in the United Kingdom. And they were asking about academic life. And on the questions on engagement and impact, a lot of them left it blank. But those that did, a lot of them said, please don't measure it. Please don't quantify it. Because once you do that, then we're gonna be rewarded for that and not rewarded from other stuff. You're gonna ruin the creativity in it. I do it because I want to because it's meaningful. It would be kind of like the movie Dead Poets Society where they have the equation on how to calculate the quality of a poem. And Robin Williams tell the class, tear it up, throw it out. Is engagement more of an art than a science? I don't think so. I hope not. Don't get too constraining on how you define it because it's constantly changing as well. I can talk to a group of high school students. I can talk to a group of senior citizens. I can publish in the conversation. I can speak at a business conference. There are many, many ways to do this and constantly changing. No, I think that's really, that gets at a lot of questions. I think that's really valuable because we struggle with it too, the conversation. So I just want to say there's so many questions everywhere, we're not gonna get to all of them but we still have a few more to go and I will save them and share with Andy and we'll try to maybe do a Q&A or something if we can. But Tatsushi from Kent State University has a question, how does scholars create time and resources to walk through this process of public engagement with research? What is Andy's personal experiences of managing this process? How have you done it? A concrete example would be very helpful. Yeah, this is an interesting question. You're gonna need to take some time to learn how to do this. And there is increasingly training on doing this, whether it's at universities, you know, Stony Brook has the Ellen Alde Center on Science Communication, National Academies has the Science and Science Communication, AAAS. I went through the Leopold Leadership Fellows Program. So you're gonna have to get outside your comfort zone and you're gonna have to learn it. Beyond that, I do think that, you know, I'll talk to colleagues that they have a paper done. They say, you should write something and get it out there, a short piece. And they say, I don't have time to do that. I'm thinking, you just spent three years producing this paper. You don't have to have an afternoon to summarize it in 500, 700 words. Send it to the conversation, I'll give you an editor. I have trouble believing that. And, you know, you'll write it and then maybe NPR or some other media I'll pick it up and invite you to talk about it. And it's meaningful, it's gratifying, it's energizing. To my mind, if it takes a little more time, it gives it back and re-energizing, engaging that passion. You know, in human resource management, we always talk about the idea that if you want someone really engaged in their work, connect them to the person who benefits from your work. If you're a carpenter, let them see the owner's pleasure in what you build and it will change. And same here, academia can too easily become extremely monastic. But if you bring it out into the world, it really does energize you and make you wanna do this more. And I don't think it's a significant amount of time, at least in the implementation. But again, you have to learn how to write in a different way. And also, you know, I bring it up in the book, you know, you have to be prepared for this that the public engagement is not always nice. I write about climate change, I get hate mail. At first it's stung, but I've learned to roll with it. But, you know, if you wanna say something important, there's a very famous quote, I still can't attribute it, because if you're not offending anyone, you never took a stand. If you're saying something important to the public, you will get blowback, accept it, engage it, embrace it. I do wanna ask, there's so many questions, we can't get to them all, everyone. And I apologize for that. But there's been three questions talking more about this idea of not just the academic becoming a public scholarship, but the public scholar becoming an academic. And there's a couple of examples of Nicole Hannah-Jones, who's an I-10 year at University of North Carolina. So, and you don't have to address that specifically, but disengaged scholarship depend not only on academics breaking free of tradition, but non-academics being welcomed into the academy. Wondering. Yeah, yeah, that gets to the snobbery that Michael was alluding to. That if we, I know this is a term that's fraught that a lot of people have trouble with the term public intellectual. But if we do take it in its intended sense, I'm just trying to have an intellectual in society who says things, who brings things forward that the change how people think, then they don't only reside in the university. Jacobi has the book, The Last Intellectuals. He talks about Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell. I mean, these people that, well, Bertrand Russell was an academic, but Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, others that wrote tremendously influential, tremendously rigorous thinking from outside the confines of a university. And I think that there are many people today that I read that aren't academics that have tremendous impact on how I think. So the idea that the intellectual only exists in the university does the university and society a disservice. And so I would like to see that line blurring. I mean, look at Michael Pollan. I mean, he's written some great stuff and now he jumps back and forth over the line. I think he's at Berkeley, he's been at Harvard, but he's still doing his thing free from the pressures of publisher perish. He has to publish and survive because he has to make money doing it. But he's certainly an intellectual and one I would stack up against an academic any day. Right, right. Yeah, no, I think that's, it's a really interesting question. We struggle with the other conversation because our barrier is you have to be affiliated with an academic institution. And there is a, but we do have to wrap this up. It's been such an engaging hour and I'm so grateful, Andy, that you came. We're gonna show a discount code for the engaged scholar. I read it in a day and I loved it not only because Andy who has written for the conversation it embodies our belief, but for anyone in academia, just I would love to leave you with like actually this one anecdote of why many people got into academia and it's to save the world, to help the world. And Andy, I would love if you'd be so kind to just tell that anecdote about when you talk, ask people who climate scientists, we do that and then we'll show the discount code. Yeah, I gave a talk at a university, I won't name the university, but it was a bunch of, it was at a business school and business school scholars caring about environmental issues, sustainability. And in the Q&A we got a little fired up on this topic because I was doing an academic paper, we got on this topic. I said, let's do a survey. How many people in this room are concerned about climate change and all the hands went up. And then I said, how many people do research on climate change? Most of the hands stayed up. I said, how many are naming that research at A-level publications? All the hands stayed up. I said, how many think one of those A-level publications is gonna do anything about climate change and all the hands came down? And I said, what's the problem here? What are we doing? Why are we doing this? If not to try and address your climate change? That really got a lot of people thinking, oh, wait a minute, what's going on here? Yeah, I think that's a great place to end. I get apologies, we've got everyone's questions. People have to do this again. And Andy, thank you so much for arranging this. It was a real pleasure. Yeah, can't wait to see your 18th book. Because not really quite anyone who actually wrote 17 books, but here we are, that I read one. I'll read more. So thank you so much. Okay. Right, bye everyone. Thank you so much for attending. Close up.