It’s no secret that higher education has a public-relations problem. (If you don’t believe me, just Google phrases like “Is college a scam?”) The breakdown of trust between town and gown has led to suspicion, caricature, and erosion of material support for our work. Many observers — including me — have suggested that we push back though more public engagement, to enable nonacademic audiences to see us doing our work.
Those calls, however, have also inspired some backlash within academe. Does a focus on public humanities risk devaluing more-esoteric scholarship? Worse, does extramural work compromise our academic freedom (because we’re only protected inside the walls)?
It’s true that some scholars’ work doesn’t lend itself to wide public exposure. Not all of us write about subjects that have wide interest. It’s certainly true that we shouldn’t fetishize public work — we should always value scholarship for the quality of its contributions, not the size of its audience.
It’s also true that a high public profile may attract negative attention — and possible attacks — from higher-education critics, some of whom really do keep an “enemies list.” Educators may joke about being honored to find their names on such lists, yet the danger the lists pose is real.
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But what’s the alternative? To build our walls higher so that no one can see us while we talk only to one another? That approach would receive its own criticism, and it would be well-deserved. If academic freedom depends on staying out of public view, then it’s a pretty superficial freedom to have. (And graduate students don’t have it anyway.) Academic freedom will have much more value if it’s widely supported by a public that appreciates what academics do — and if we don’t get out there and do it in public view, then that support will never materialize.
Public work forms part of our collective academic responsibility. Teaching is public work, after all — and in a different way, so are public writing and other forms of outreach. Not everyone can or should reach out to larger public audiences. But those who are willing to do so deserve our support, especially if they encounter difficulties. Because this work — whether performed by senior professors or graduate students — helps all of us.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at New York University, has been reaching out to a wide audience for years by writing “The Ethicist,” a weekly advice column in The New York Times Magazine. Appiah responds to readers’ personal concerns and ties them to the larger philosophical issues that they raise.
He became the Ethicist columnist in 2015, and has embraced the role with a combination of pleasure and duty. The work answers his felt desire to “do something that’s tailored to who you are.” For Appiah, public ethics is a natural fit for someone who “thought of myself as a writer, not just an academic.” In addressing the general public, Appiah has learned not to “tell people what they ought to think.” Instead, he tries to “give them tools.”
Appiah enjoys the work, but he also feels an imperative to do it. Aware of the example of W.E.B. Du Bois as one of the original American public philosophers, Appiah sees himself fulfilling a public need. To do this kind of work, he said, is “essential for the future of the profession.”
Of course most academics aren’t going to land a weekly column in a major newspaper. But you don’t have to be a columnist in the Times or a well-known philosopher like Appiah to do valuable public work. Just ask Ian Olasov, a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
I first met Olasov before the pandemic at a Brooklyn street fair where he was sitting in a modest booth with a sign reading “Ask a Philosopher.” As the guiding spirit behind the venture, Olasov staffs it with a rotating cast of local graduate students and philosophy professors. “Ask a Philosopher” booths appeared regularly at farmers’ markets, street fairs, and other retail spaces before the pandemic intervened: “Any comfortable place with foot traffic and people with enough leisure time to talk,” Olasov said.
“Ask a Philosopher” grew out of an ongoing speaker series that Olasov helped to organize for his local Brooklyn public-library branch beginning in 2013. “The speaker series publicizes what professional philosophers are up to” for a general audience, said Olasov, but “Ask a Philosopher” reaches out directly to that audience. “The booth is a way of meeting people where they are,” he said.
People have “different ways of using the booth.” Olasov welcomes them all. Some approach with a question or a theory, while others want a conversation. On the booth’s table sit three bowls, two of them filled with slips of paper holding thought experiments and questions (the third bowl has candy). Some people riffle through the questions and then pose one to the resident philosopher. And others just use the booth for a photo op.
While I was visiting the booth, a woman came looking for ideas for her mother-of-the-bride speech at her daughter’s wedding. Whenever prospective visitors circle the table uncertainly, Olasov reaches out first and asks, “What have you been thinking about recently?” Some will just take a candy and move on, which Olasov says is perfectly fine. “Maybe they’ll think of philosophy as a slightly sweeter thing than they did a moment before,” he said.
The booth has given Olasov many stories to tell. There was a mother and her 7-year-old daughter who were listening quietly to other questioners one day. When someone mentioned space travel to Mars, the daughter suddenly loosed a torrent of questions: “Who will own the land there?” she demanded. “What will we do with it?” Another child at another time asked whether ketchup is a smoothie. Her mother admonished her that such a question wasn’t philosophical, but Olasov used it as a way to talk about epistemology.
The pandemic necessitated a temporary shift of “Ask a Philosopher” to an online format. Covid also raised “a lot of specific philosophical questions,” Olasov said, about trust in science, risk assessment, and other pandemic-related topics.
But once vaccinated, he said he was “out in the streets” again (at least for now). He’s been eager to return to the booth because “Ask a Philosopher” gives him an immediacy centered on “people enjoying conversation, learning, making connections,” he said, and those connections deliver some of the best rewards of teaching.
The booth has also offered Olasov an opportunity for high-profile publication. His book, Ask a Philosopher: Answers to Your Most Important and Most Unexpected Questions, was published last fall by Thomas Dunne Books, a trade publisher. It’s a charming book, brimming with brief, clever takes on philosophical questions great and small (including the ones about Martian real estate and ketchup). Ask a Philosopher invites readers to think more deeply, and offers a reading list at the end, with suggestions ranging from writings by Lucretius to the philosophy podcast Hi-Phi Nation.
The book is a lot of fun. So is the booth. So is philosophy, when it’s done right. But having fun in public is a possibility that academic philosophers lose sight of too often.
Olasov went to graduate school because he wanted to be a philosophy professor. He still does, and he’ll be chasing those teaching jobs soon. But he feels that his public work has honed his professional chops and helped him realize how qualified he is for all kinds of jobs. This kind of public speaking — “talking to strangers about what they care about” — has led him even to consider entering politics. “I wouldn’t be leaving philosophy,” he said. “Just the academic profession of it.”
Olasov and his fellow street philosophers receive modest honoraria, initially supported by grants from the New York Council for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Association, and now covered by the Brooklyn Public Library. “Ask a Philosopher” is an inexpensive model that would be easy to replicate, but it’s also a whimsical illustration of an argument that goes beyond philosophy.
The point is not for lots of graduate students to go out and set up their own “Ask an Academic” businesses. Not everyone should try to write for the Times like Appiah, or The New Yorker like the Harvard historian Jill Lepore. And not every graduate student should consider opening a booth on the street. Instead, Olasov’s booth exemplifies the sort of socially committed venture that should characterize public work in the arts and sciences generally.
Socially committed work, no matter the size of its audience, demonstrates the connection between the university and the society it serves — and is served by. Higher education needs to attract public support because universities are inherently public institutions. If American society is to recognize higher education as the public good that it is, then higher education needs a public face. In that sense, Ian Olasov stands for something larger than both his booth and his discipline.
David A. Hollinger, a much-decorated history professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has said, “All of us, as scholars, have a responsibility to patiently and repeatedly explain the social value of what we do.” That often involves showing its value. The first public research universities began with the institutional dedication to service learning. The original “Wisconsin Idea” was that the University of Wisconsin would, in the words of Lincoln Steffens, “teach anybody — anything — anywhere.”
Steffens wrote those words in 1909, but today the outreach he described often counts more as a “weird hobby,” said Olasov, rather than as serious work. The American Philosophical Association has lately expressed its support and encouragement of public philosophy. That’s progress. Not many years ago, public philosophy was “actively stigmatized,” said Olasov. There was a belief that if you were doing this work, “you must be a charlatan.”
Some high-profile academic philosophers, like Appiah, do visible public work. But for most philosophers, that kind of labor isn’t professionally recognized. Olasov wants “to get to a place where working with the public is something you can be professionally rewarded for.” Appiah agrees: “Philosophy teaches people how to live. Everyone needs help with that question.”
Philosophers are hardly the only group that need take note of it. Across the arts and humanities, we can all step forward to help answer that question in our own ways.
