The Duty invites you to take the back roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up all summer long like a postcard. Today, we are addressing the challenges of popularizing science.
The term “ivory tower” is used to refer to the segregation of academia from the rest of society. It depicts the university as a realm of intellectual isolation in which professors and their apprentices master and refine abstract theories while ignoring the “real world.”
This distance is nevertheless felt by the public. For the apprentices who train in the tower, the line that separates the academic world from the everyday world is thin.
By day, master’s and doctoral students work under the guidance of professors to master and apply abstract theories and concepts that elude the public. But by night, they emerge from their ivory towers and return to their friends, families, and lovers, with whom they eat, drink, go out, and talk.
Having just left university, these students expect to talk about more everyday topics: hobbies, the latest football match, the party planned for Friday, or housework, rising rents or slow public transport.
However, these students chose to study politics, a discipline that manifests itself in everyone’s daily life and, therefore, interests a large number of people, even if these people do not study it.
Between the city’s decision to build a new bike path and the invasion of one country by another, on a global scale as well as on a daily scale, there is always a topic that interests people.
As a result, political science students find themselves being asked about political issues by family and friends who are seeking insight, learning something new, or gaining a new perspective on an issue from someone who is a “politics expert.”
Differences
For political science students, it must seem easy, even entertaining, to talk about it with their families or friends. Yet they quickly learn that political discussions outside the ivory tower and inside it are vastly different.
Instead of theoretical questions, they are faced with direct, simplified and subjective questions. Often, these are predictions: Will the protesters succeed in making themselves heard? Will this policy slow down inflation? The master’s or doctoral student finds herself stuck.
On the one hand, her answer will affect her legitimacy. This answer must be well explained, well thought out. After all, the student is a “specialist in politics”. If the student cannot give a correct, or at least justified, prediction on a given issue, what use is she? What will she be able to do, if not her own career?
On the other hand, the narrow nature of graduate studies in political science, or graduate studies in general, is typically overlooked by the interlocutor. Politics, like any other discipline, is a broad field, and when one studies it at the graduate level, one must choose an even more specific subfield and issue in which to specialize.
So you become an expert in that subfield, or rather in an issue within that subfield, without having a very deep knowledge of the rest of the field. So a student looking at feminist social movements in Latin America will have a hard time explaining the trajectory of the competitive relationship between the United States and China.
Caught between the need to assert her legitimacy and the reality of specialization, the student must quickly take a position and think of a justification that holds up. Otherwise, she risks appearing incompetent in her career.
Audience
Moreover, the nature of the audience inside the ivory tower and outside it is not the same. At the university, professors understand the intellectual limitations of students, the scope of their specializations, and the need to nuance the positions one takes and to accept uncertainty.
On the outside, however, people expect explanations to be precise, short and interesting. They expect the student to already have a ready answer, a thoughtful opinion that is supported by evidence and easy to understand.
Outside the tower, there is little patience for long, nuanced explanations, and people quickly become bored with explanations involving difficult-to-grasp concepts. Consequently, even in a subfield she knows, the student finds herself forced to popularize her knowledge. This is a translation of the obscure language used between professors and their apprentices into a language that is familiar, friendly, and accessible to people trained in fields other than political science.
At first glance, this act of translation may seem complicated or irritating and may discourage students from discussing political issues with people outside the university. Instead of the understanding, tolerance and patience of professors, students in the “real” world are faced with impatience, emotion and a desire for simplicity.
Real world
The expectations that “policy specialists” face outside the ivory tower are therefore very different from those they encounter at university. However, translating the technical knowledge acquired and cultivated in the tower to a more general audience is an important experience for students.
After all, a large number of students do not stay in academia after they graduate. So this translation capacity is at the heart of their ability to export the knowledge generated in the tower to the rest of the world so that it can be used to make important changes.
This is why, despite the difficulties and frustrations, students must take advantage of the opportunity to learn how to bridge the gap between the intellectual world and the so-called “real world.” It is by being effective ambassadors that political science students can build bridges between the ivory tower and the rest of the world.