Regular readers of this blog (all two or three of them), will have noticed that I sometimes write about peace and war – especially the nuclear variety. In the process, I’ve been amused by occasional comments to the effect that I, an evolutionary biologist, have no business presuming to step outside my officially sanctioned expertise. My amusement stems from the fact that indeed (albeit evidently unknown to some people at least), I really have credentials in this respect, and lots of them. But more interestingly, it leads to a worthwhile subject for present and future discussion: What are we to make of the question of scholarly credentials and the legitimacy of holding forth on
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Regular readers of this blog (all two or three of them), will have noticed that I sometimes write about peace and war – especially the nuclear variety. In the process, I’ve been amused by occasional comments to the effect that I, an evolutionary biologist, have no business presuming to step outside my officially sanctioned expertise. My amusement stems from the fact that indeed (albeit evidently unknown to some people at least), I really have credentials in this respect, and lots of them. But more interestingly, it leads to a worthwhile subject for present and future discussion: What are we to make of the question of scholarly credentials and the legitimacy of holding forth on any topic?
First, my own “strategic” credentials. Since 1979, when it became clear that we wouldn’t have a SALT II Treaty, and even more so after Ronald Reagan was first elected President, I have immersed myself in matters of peace and war, with respect to the personal psychology of participants and even more regarding the arcana of nuclear doctrine, a focus motivated by my conviction that nuclear war simply trumps all other considerations (a revelation that was brought home most vividly to my wife and myself after we hosted Dr. Helen Caldicott for a week in 1980). This new research direction was also facilitated by the fact that I wasn’t afraid of mathematics, which led me to function increasingly as a “numbers maven” in the world of nuclear-freeze activism, both scholarly and rabble-rousing, dealing with throw weights and megatonnage, the calculation of “exchange ratios,” the use and abuse of game theory in the rarified realm of strategic deterrence, and so forth.
As a result, although I continued to research and write about evolutionary biology, much of my scholarly activity since the 1980s was no less devoted to these strategic matters, such that many of my new colleagues in the world of strategic and international studies didn’t know (and probably still don’t) that I am also an evolutionary biologist!
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In my war/peace incarnation, I wrote the first college textbook dealing with nuclear weapons and strategy (adopted by both the U.S. Army and Navy War Colleges for their first courses on the subject), the first college textbook—1,300 manuscript pages, now sadly out of print—in the emerging field of peace studies, a nuclear weapons/nuclear war primer that was nominated for a National Book Award, a study of evolutionary insights relevant to nuclear war (which, according to senior Kremlin adviser Georgi Arbatov, Gorbachev—while Soviet leader—had translated into Russian so he could read), and I’m currently preparing the third editions of two other widely used tomes, Peace and Conflict Studies (Sage) and Approaches to Peace (Oxford), in addition to scholarly articles on the subject. I’ve also given nearly as many lectures and symposium presentations on war and nuclear strategy around the world as on evolution and human/animal behavior, including invited university lectures on every continent except for Antarctica, participating in several NATO conferences (one of which involved a detailed comparison of Soviet SS-20 and NATO’s proposed Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles), as well as testifying to Congress.
But as I said, the really interesting question isn’t whether I’m qualified to write about this stuff (which I sure as hell am), but what does it take to be qualified to write about anything? Some people may be surprised to learn that just as it is possible to walk and chew gum at the some time, it is also possible—and I say this at the risk of sounding intolerably immodest, and not for the first time!—to develop multiple areas of expertise. Even without a degree in that subject. Sometimes, without even taking a course in it.
Sure, when it comes to assessing someone else’s credentials in the absence of other information, it helps to know that she has earned a Ph.D., but this isn’t and shouldn’t be a prerequisite. I have a Ph.D., but in zoology—not strategic studies or even in psychology, by the way, whereof I am a longtime professor. My fellow blogger Laurie Fendrich is a painter and professor of fine arts; I assume she has a Ph.D., but who cares? What I do care about is that her writing is consistently interesting and well-informed. (Indeed, its when she writes seriously about art that Laurie is most likely to go over my head, such that I prefer reading her on other topics, on which she may or may not be an acknowledged “expert.”)
I recently wrote a blistering critique in this space of a review appearing in The New York Review of Books in which Freeman Dyson revealed an appalling ignorance of psychology, the purported subject of his essay. I wasn’t upset that Mr. Dyson, a physicist, had the effrontery to write about psychology despite lacking an advanced degree in it, but rather, that he knew so little and evidently didn’t even know that he didn’t know! Incidentally, Freeman Dyson doesn’t have a Ph.D. in physics, or in anything else … which scarcely matters to his eminence in the field, nor should it.
After all, there are Ph.D.'s and there are Ph.D.'s. John Gray (the Mars/Venus best-selling “relationships expert”) has a Ph.D., but it’s worthless (except to mislead the credulous), from one of those mail-order shlock shops. In addition, there are people with legitimate Ph.D.'s and even tenure at highly regarded universities whose official credentials are impeccable but whose writing, in my book, isn’t worth the electrons by which they are instantiated. I’m thinking here of Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT and climate-change denialist extraordinaire.
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Ah, politics! Lets note, in that regard, that at least one former Brainstorm blogger doesn’t even have a Ph.D.–the horror, the horror!–something pointed out by numerous commenters as though it was important. It wasn’t. As it happens, I consistently disagreed with her writing, but NOT because there was no Ph.D. behind it; rather, because of what she wrote. I hope The Chronicle will replace her with an academically solid conservative (I could even suggest a few, and in fact, already have), whose blogs would be worth reading ... because of what he or she has to say, and not because of “credentials.”