The Campaigning Academic

So I’m sitting in a nondescript airport bar in Vancouver with Brian Lamb. We’re at the end of an immense and amazing conference on Open Education (OpenEd12, which I’ll be writing much more about). We’ve drinks in hand but have not yet reached the “gentle incoherence/blind rage” stage. And what are two supposed luminaries of the EdTech/edublogging scene talking about? The slow inexorable march of Coursera? The current consuming obsession with learning analytics? Gartner Campbell’s amazing keynote?

No. We are lamenting, with passion and disappointment, the slow death of investigative journalism. Brian speaks of the end of his long-standing support for the Globe and Mail, I respond with my own lingering fondness for Private Eye. We discussed of the freelance work of Nick Davies in uncovering the News Corp phone-hacking scandal – the way that one single revelation (the hacking of the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl) turned an astonishingly well-researched “niche interest” media story into an all-engulfing political and media firestorm.

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Flash back six months to another pint of beer, this time in the home of an old friend and (currently) a sub-editor. “All my life I wanted to be a journalist”, he tells me, “but the job I had dreamed of and trained for no longer exists.” I worry that the job of his dreams is the one I’ve been doing in my own time, for free, here.

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And back even further, as I nervously check and re-check the sums that crystallise the argument that the new model of funding UK higher education would cost the tax-payer significantly more than the then-current method. I was so terrified I was actually ill – bottled publishing myself and sent the whole story to another blogger who published it word-for-word…

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Forward again to last Friday. I follow a link on twitter to read of Jennifer M. Jones’ decision to quit her PhD. In the build-up to what I can only call the “’lympics” she blogged and tweeted from a range of bizarre and twisted ‘lympic education events, about the pressures and the politics that defined not just the games but the planned public reaction to the games. It was mesmerising, it was chilling, and it was – I’m not sure whether she’d agree, but this is how I saw it – investigative journalism at it’s very finest.

But the structure of a PhD meant that she had to keep engaging with the topic. I remember seeing her tweets from a cheap hotel in London, during the hysteria and suspension of critical facilities that was the Opening Ceremony. I remember how painful it was for her when the whole world seemed to get sucked in to the insidious machine that she had been documenting and understanding over a research project that had taken over her life.

And I couldn’t help thinking that getting out then, getting out now should not be seen as failure. She’s clear that it isn’t – she’s able to do the small community projects she really wants to. And for all those of us who benefited from the way she reported back from the belly of the beast and have since had chance to get to know an amazing person don’t see it as a failure either.

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So what am I drawing together here?

The realities of the media profession mean that investigative writers like Nick Davies are becoming increasingly rare, and that even the ones that do exist have to fit their findings into easily digestible nuggets for the 24 hour news juggernaut to graze on.

The realities of academia mean that, although sustained investigation and reflection are possible, they are constrained to the need to produce “academese” outputs, which are constrained to arbitrary lengths and timings, and a written in a language that is nearly incomprehensible to all but a small group of specialists. And that work outside of these constraints is not rewarded, or even stigmatised as failure.

There is a space – in the gap between academia and journalism, somewhere in the vicinity of the digital humanities movement – for what I would call the “campaigning academic”, someone who is supported (in a similar way to traditional research funding) to investigate issues of interest and to report back in a variety of accessible media. Maybe this “reporting back” could build up into equivalence to an academic reward, maybe not.

These would be cross-disciplinary scholars, not tied to a particular critical perspective or methodology. And they would likely be highly networked, linking in both to the interested and the involved in any particular area – at times becoming both. They might have a high media profile and an accessible style (Ben Goldacre comes to mind). Or they might be an anonymous but fascinating blogger (whoever it is that does the wonderful Public Policy and The Past). Or anything in between.

But they would campaign, they would investigate, they would expose and they would analyse. Bringing together academic and old-school journalistic standards of integrity and verifiability.