Why We Need a More Activist Academy

I’m having an identity crisis. As a graduate student in political science, I learned to be objective. I was taught to be analytical, methodical, and scientific. I learned to proceed incrementally — immersing myself in others’ research, meticulously assembling modest, falsifiable hypotheses, then dutifully reporting the sources of bias, potential problems, and with trepidation, my findings.

In short, I had politics trained out of me. Instead of engaging in climate politics, my area of expertise, I study them. Instead of advocating, I analyze. This is my profession, and yet I feel that I am shirking my political responsibility as a scholar to do something.

But what to do? The academy is an inherently conservative institution, one that generally does not reward advocacy. Yet, addressing the existential threat of climate change will involve radical action and radical politics. As experts, we are in a unique position to participate in political debates.

I recognize that calling for more advocacy from within the academy will make many people nervous. The legitimacy of the university as an institution rests on the reputation of scholars as impartial researchers. In the realm of climate science, Roger A. Pielke Jr. calls on scholars to be “honest brokers” — experts that “expand (or at least clarify) the scope of choice” for decision-makers, but refrain from suggesting a specific alternative.

But the production of knowledge is necessarily political and cannot be otherwise. Choosing to ignore this reality has diminished the influence of political scientists in the public sphere.

In short, we need to rethink the relationship between advocacy and the academy. The time for being an honest broker has passed. The existential threat of climate change requires that we use our expertise, and our position of privilege in the academy, to advocate for solutions rather than merely lay out options. Some academics do pursue “engaged scholarship” — which seeks to link real-world problems to broader theoretical insights — but this type of work is not prevalent.

This does not mean we should become lobbyists. Rather, our job going forward is to lay bare the entrenched economic interests that prevent governments from phasing out fossil fuels. This is going to be a pitched battle, yet we tend to see it through the lens of technocratic management. This is a mistake. By not expressing views about what should be done, we are passing the buck. By merely providing options, we absolve ourselves of wrestling with more difficult political and ethical questions. As E.H. Carr put it: “Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be.”

When it comes to climate change, political scientists have missed the boat. There’s surprisingly little research on climate change in the mainstream of the discipline. In a recent study, Thomas Hale and I wanted to find out just how much research on climate change was going on in our subfield of international relations. In 2014, only 3.2 percent of U.S. international-relations faculty identified the environment as their primary area of study. And yet, more than half of the faculty surveyed ranked climate change as one of the top three foreign-policy issues.

We also analyzed data from the top 12 journals in the field between 1980 and 2012. Of the approximately 5,300 articles in the data set, only 65 — about 1.2 percent — were environment-related. The same problem also plagues comparative politics, where one study found that between 1990 and 2010, only about 1 percent of the articles in the two leading journals refer to the environment.

We’re not even studying the problem, let alone advocating around it. Asking political questions is the first challenge of engaging in advocacy in the academy.

And make no mistake: The real questions about climate change are political. Powerful actors benefit from the continued combustion of fossil fuels. The transition to renewable energy will create winners and losers, and the potential losers are fighting hard to maintain the status quo. We must focus on defining and understanding the root of the problem: entrenched economic and political interests.

We should engage in what Richard Falk calls “value-oriented scholarship and advocacy.” This means thinking about climate change as a normative rather than technical problem. It means pushing back against the logic of incrementalism and instead trying to theorize transformative political change. It means, as Falk suggests, encouraging “radical critique of political, economic, cultural and ideological structures.”

I make the distinction between technocratic and normative solutions because there are many scholars engaged in policy discussions. And the discipline is building institutions to facilitate this engagement. For example, the Bridging the Gap project at American University trains scholars to produce policy-relevant research; and the Scholars Strategy Network provides digestible summaries of research for policy makers, journalists, and the public.

This is a positive trend. But this conception of advocacy produces only certain kinds of ideas. To be an engaged scholar, one must produce “mainstream” work: politically feasible proposals and moderate critiques. The dictates of political feasibility can be insidious, narrowing our political imagination at the precise moment when an expansion is urgently needed.

The responsibility of scholars is not to be honest brokers, but to lay bare the entrenched economic interests that prevent us from a transition to fossil-free energy. What does this mean in practice?

First, we must clarify the power relations — and asymmetries — in place. We need to dispel the notion that there is a technocratic response that can paper over profoundly different material interests. For the technocrat, climate change is a puzzle. We have the technology to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, but we are incapable of doing so. Why? Because climate change is fundamentally a political problem, not a technological one.

Second, we should be wary of feasibility as a defining criterion. Policy making is the art of the possible. In the long run, politics is the art of changing what is possible. If we focus on climate change — or any other social issue — as a fundamental problem of redistribution (rather than one of technocracy), plausibility should not guide our thinking.

Finally, as individual scholars, we should plant a flag. We must be explicit about our political commitments. We should not, as Pielke suggests, be honest brokers, but rather be what he calls “issue advocates": Pick a position and convince others of its merits.

In 2004, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote a provocative article titled The Death of Environmentalism. In it they argued that environmental activists had become overly focused on the political feasibility of various solutions. As a result they were incapable of articulating a broader vision for change, and attracting the political allies needed to achieve it.

Scholars have fallen victim to a similar trap: By studying incremental approaches to climate change, we inadvertently validate them, skewing our focus toward short-term, trivial wins when we should be considering long-term, large-scale change.

Yes, technical policy analysis is useful, but it is not a substitute for politics. We also need to answer the questions that get to the root of the problem. How can we delegitimize fossil fuels? Build broad coalitions for renewable energy? Change societal norms? These are things about which political science should have more to say.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus give a vivid account of how incrementalism can neuter even the best-intentioned advocacy. In 2003 the Senate voted down the first of three federal efforts to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme. One member of a major U.S. environmental-advocacy organization spun the loss into a win, stating: “It’s a start. This may seem to be a defeat now, but in the end it’s a victory. A bill that gets at least 40 votes has a fair chance of passing if it’s reintroduced.”

Of course, it was reintroduced, twice, and we are still awaiting a federal policy on greenhouse-gas emissions.

This is how incrementalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Small solutions will not accumulate into larger ones. When the phaseout of fossil fuels is viewed as a problem of the powerful seeking to maintain the status quo, incrementalism cannot be the solution. Modest victories will prove temporary — lasting only until entrenched interests revert to the status quo.

We need to think bigger.

The view that advocacy in the academy is uncouth is premised on the incorrect assumption that facts and values are easily separated. Let’s not fool ourselves: We can never be completely unbiased. Political science is partially the realm of the “ought,” and the line between investigation and decision is blurry in practice. As Carr noted, “purpose and analysis become part and parcel of a single process.” And while we can never be perfectly impartial, we can be transparent about our motivations.

There is another reason academics should take the role of advocate seriously: We are not simply experts; we are also teachers. In general, the academy is inward looking. Scholars speak to each other, often in theories, formulae, or other languages that are not readily understood by a lay audience. There are important reasons for this. Peer review is the foundation of evaluation; publication in highly ranked peer-reviewed journals is the signal of success. Non-peer-reviewed publications — op-eds, commentaries, news appearances — are not counted as part of a scholar’s productivity.

Surely public engagement should be recognized as part of our roles as teachers and scholars. Making complex ideas readily digestible for a lay audience is perhaps the most difficult kind of teaching, one that should be acknowledged not only as a public service, but also as evidence of excellence in teaching.

Being an advocate and an expert should not be mutually exclusive. Rather, as educators and scholars, it is our responsibility to participate in public discussions. Choosing not to have a view, in the name of preserving our expertise, is an abdication of responsibility. That abdication works in favor of powerful interests, and against those seeking to reorganize power relations. There are stakes to the political phenomena we study. We have a professional responsibility to act.

Jessica F. Green is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.