There’s been an interesting discussion on Twitter (now helpfully collected together in one place by The Grumpy Historian) in response to a call by the president of the American Historical Association for historians to write more accessibly. This is a topic where I have a small amount of previous form, having annoyed the hell out of a well-regarded popular historian on this blog last year, and – more constructively – written on the tendency of certain historians to write in a way that seems designed to alienate non-academic audiences. My initial instincts tend to be entirely in favour of accessibility (many of my own books really were intended to reach as wide an audience as possible, even if I fail lamentably at this) – but @grumpyhistorian makes some points worth thinking about: “Academic works *may* become popular, but they have other purposes to fulfill at the same time… non-academic works are usually oriented *away* from academic audiences, which academics can’t get away with.”
Well, except that sometimes they do. On reflection, at least in a UK context, this academic/non-academic distinction seems to work only if it’s an attribute of the book and the way it’s written (in which case it runs the risk of becoming tautologous) rather than derived from the identity of the author, ‘cos otherwise it’s difficult to know what to make of any number of works by well-regarded academic ancient historians that are clearly written for a popular audience. It’s not (just) that they think they can “get away with it”, and that the prospect of substantially larger royalties outweigh any risk of reputational damage (though the money probably isn’t a negligible factor, and it would be interesting to have data on the correlation between academics acquiring a literary agent – I’ve no idea how one goes about doing this, but I know various people have done so – and academics embarking on projects intended to make them the next Peter Heather, or the Niall Ferguson of classical antiquity).
On the contrary, writing this sort of popular, accessible work is now promoted as an essential part of the academic role, something that we should all aspire to in order to demonstrate the relevance and popularity of our subject in general and the research of our own institution in particular. Such books may not count for much in the Publications section of the Research Excellence Framework, but they’re something to shout about under Impact (even if mere dissemination and popularity doesn’t count for the strict definition of Impact; at last I’ve found something positive to say about it…), and definitely something to wave in the faces of university senior management, who are generally reassured by the idea that they’ve employed people whom other people have heard of.
This isn’t likely to change any time soon; the real question is how many such ‘popular academic’ or ‘celebrity’ historians the market can bear. Looking at television, radio and the printed press, it does seem that the general public is quite happy with a pretty small number of ancient historians who are assumed to know all about every aspect of the subject, rather than a wider range of specialists – and we can also see the power of a very small number of gatekeepers, with a big say on which books get reviewed outside specialist journals, who gets to review them, who gets invited for media appearances and so forth. It’s certainly not the case that every would-be popular academic work gets reviewed anywhere that the wider public is likely to hear about it, in which case its prospects for a mass audience and big sales come down to the size of the publisher’s marketing budget. The flip side of this is that a few unashamedly academic books get plucked from obscurity now and again and featured in literary magazines if not in broadsheets, presumably just because the reviews editor liked the topic – though the risk is then that they’re criticised for being too academic and too cautious in interpreting the evidence, precisely because they weren’t written in order to appeal to a wider audience. It all feels very random from the outside; perhaps if I had more experience of popular publishing and the quality press it might make more sense…
Does this have any significance, beyond the usual sullen envy of the mediocre career academic who doesn’t get to appear on In Our Time and is delighted to get a royalty payment of fifty quid? I think it does, as another strand in the current process of transformation of higher education: celebrity academics are going to get ever more important, and become ever more powerful (or at any rate in demand). Competition between universities for students and their fees is getting fiercer; the prospect of being lectured by someone they and/or their parents and/or their teachers have heard of, even seen on the telly, may make a significant difference to their choice of university. This is, after all, the major selling point of A.C.Grayling’s New College of the Humanities; maybe it won’t prove to be enough on its own to sustain an enterprise, but it could determine the fates of some traditional universities, or at any rate some of their humanities departments.
The rise of MOOCs will simply accentuate this: if people increasingly study online, why should they follow the lectures of someone they’ve never heard of when they could follow those of a famous name? It’s never going to be just about academic celebrity, of course: the name of the university will play a part (why bother with Bristol lectures when you could enjoy a virtual Harvard?), and also the simple question of who gets there first (you don’t need more than one introductory Roman history course on a MOOC, so whoever gets that gig will get to define Roman history for thousands of students for at least the next decade). But I can still imagine a significant role in the competition between MOOCs for the number of famous names each can offer in trying to attract students – and hence competition between them for those famous names.
Over the last few decades, we’ve seen the rise of the research capitalist in many faculties, people who pull in the big grants that pay for researchers and postgrads to do the research that enables the project director to apply for further grants. Leaving aside consideration of all the problems of that set-up, the trouble for the humanities is that there simply isn’t enough research funding around to make that a sustainable option for more than a miniscule number of academics. In a world where the number of academic posts, at least in the humanities, is likely to decline substantially in the face of funding changes and new forms of course delivery, then academic celebrity of any kind – anything that means that, so to speak, the Dean of Engineering might have heard of you – starts to look like a better career move than any number of well-regarded scholarly papers or monographs.
Sphinx 
Various interesting bits of contextual information, specifically on MOOCs and their possible impact on traditional universities: blog by Clay Shirky comparising MOOCs and HE with the impact of Napster for the music industry, discussion between Shirky and Tamar Szabo Gendler at Bloggingheads.tv, good critique by Aaron Bady, and ongoing discussion of all this (with a rather more critical take on Shirky’s arguments from various commentators) at Crooked Timber.
One key issue is whether the whole thing is inevitable: Shirky’s Napster analogy is intended precisely to suggest that the genie is out of the bottle, and the recent burst of publicity about MOOCs will inevitably change people’s idea of what’s possible in education (he tends to emphasise the role of the consumer of courses, other commentators see this as primarily appealing to university administrators). Insofar as many academics can see lots of problems with the suggested likely course of developments but all for a few of them, is there any possibility of successful resistance (total failure to organise against REF, Impact or massive hikes in tuition fees suggests not), or is the only sensible option to start preparing for dramatic if not terminal change, either by trying to build oneself a sufficient profile to have a hope of survival in the new world without changing one’s approach very much, or (more constructively) developing skills likely to be useful in the new world such as online interaction and student support, or (constructively but also pessimistically) developing skills for an alternative career?
It’s inevitable in this sort of debate that people end up talking at cross purposes occasionally. In the posts I linked to in the previous comment, Bady makes the sensible point that, whatever Shirky thinks, getting an education isn’t like listening to music so the Napster analogy breaks down. But, re-reading Shirky, I see that he’d actually more or less anticipated this; his analogy is rather between the lecture as one component of education and a single music track – whereas the record companies wanted you either to buy expensive singles or albums with nine duff tracks for every killer, and universities insist on you sitting only in locally-produced lectures from whoever happens to be on the staff rather than being able to choose from the best lectures available across the world, so Napster and MOOCs create the possibility of unbundling and choosing exactly what you want. Immediate response: yes, but that’s hardly a proper university education as we understand it. Shirky has his response:
“The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
“Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.
In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.”
This suggests that (some, at least) elite universities may be okay, as students from wealthy backgrounds are still going to be willing to pay for the rounded college experience with real live academics teaching them – even if their students increasingly look to the internet for their lectures, implying that more of the workload of most academics will be hands-on tuition, and maybe you’ll need rather fewer academics to deliver that. Watch this space; I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that UK HE will be radically different by the end of the decade but no one yet has the foggiest idea how (admittedly I was thinking mainly of the impact of fees at the time), and I don’t expect to be proved wrong; admittedly, as John Holbo notes in the intro to the Crooked Timber discussion, ” it is one of those ‘the revolution is coming but we can’t know what it will be like yet’ prophecies, which are inherently – and sensibly! but frustratingly! – bet-hedging.”
But actually – not least in order to tie this back to my original post, which focused more on the place of the celebrity academic in this new context – I’d quite like to see if we can play with the music industry analogy a bit more. The focus in most discussion so far has been on the implications for universities, with the implication that if they (or significant numbers of them) go to the wall, this will have an obvious impact on academics. However, it’s worth stressing that the contemporary crisis of the music industry has not simply resulted in the redundancy of musicians and the cessation of the production of music – and I speak as the stepfather of a professional musician.
I’m going to have to think about this further, but for the moment a quick sketch of some of the major players in today’s music industry, and where we might imagine analogies with academia. At one end there are the established stars, for the most part still churning over the old hits, using records increasingly as advertising for their concert appearances (selling experience that can’t be fully copied; my impression is that the Niall Fergusons of this world now make more money from lectures to business groups etc. than from books, which serve rather to keep them in the public eye). At the other end there are artists, often working in minority genres like folktronica or prog, who have been able to use the internet to connect better with potential fans, build up communities, crowd-fund records etc. – but it’s bloody hard work maintaining a profile, putting together enough different opportunities to make a living etc. (possible analogy; internet offers students chance to pursue their interests and broaden their studies beyond what their college has to offer – and the chance for specialists to find an audience and build an intellectual community, even if only one or two of their own students are ever interested in what they do – you can tell I specialise in ancient economic history…). And in the middle there are plenty of musicians still operating under the old paradigm, expecting to follow the path of getting signed to a record company, getting an advance, producing records and making a fortune, getting very cross with anyone who suggests that the genie may be out of the bottle; some of them make it at least some of the way, as the system continues to look for new blood, but the turnover is higher than it’s ever been (yes, I think this probably works as an analogy for those who embark on PhDs in the hope of traditional academic careers, and those who’ve got a job and discovered that it’s not exactly what they’d hoped for or what their teachers enjoyed…).
Possibly more on this to follow…
Have had this bookmarked for a while tor read and finally, I have now caught up with it. A good article, even if the logical argument seems depressingly accurate. Your point on how ‘celebrity’ historian’s do then tend to become, ‘all knowing’ historians rings true and over the last few years any kind of history is therefore presented by one of the ‘stable’ of historians, regardless of expertise or knowledge in the subject matter. It is that they are recognised, trusted and popular to an audience who may not be aware of the nature of that historicans expertise. For Instance, I would put more store by a history of Sparta by Paul Cartledge than I would if it was presented by an historian I know to be an expert on Roman History, such as Mary Beard or TP WIseman. A modern television, or radio audience would most probably not have the level of insider knowledge to differentiate between classical historians like this. I imagine to the audience, classics/ancient history is one subject and a classics professor is an expert in all of it. But all of it happens to be a huge topic sliced into some pretty specialised and narrow fields, ranging over a period of 1000’s of years and hundreds of varying cultures and identities. I have come to label it the ‘brian cox’ syndrome; Arguably a great physicist, but now he has somehow become the face of physics to the public, (which is good in that subjects are reaching out in this way) but is he the greatest physicist at work in the UK? This ties into another of your points in that a lot of science students are applying to the university where he teaches because of this popularity, again, will this guarantee what the students want, or expect? ‘celebrity academics’ is a worrying trend, though not surprising to me now. The worrying aspect is how in the cult of celebrity, it is not always the case that celebrity is attained through ‘quality output’.
You’re absolutely right: when Brian Cox becomes the public face of ‘science’ as a whole – not even just physics, let alone just his specialist area within physics – then there’s little hope of persuading the wider world that ‘Greek history’ or ‘Roman history’ really deserve to be presented by specialists.