Ivory Tower

I was starting to get worried that I was leaving my reading phase, seeing as how long it took me to finish Th!nk. Fortunately, I’ve found I’m not. I just picked up the ‘Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson and found myself speeding through it. Even with the little time I’ve had this week, I’ve still managed to get through the first quarter of this quite hefty tomb.

This just goes to prove how important it is to write well and write clearly. It seems to me that quite often academics choose to hide behind difficult language, be it through arrogance or through fear. Arrogance, in that they feel that ‘the unwashed masses’ shouldn’t have access to all information and fear that somebody might discover that their ideas are just so much horse piss.

This is truly unfortunate. As somebody said, after they had read the first few pages of ‘a short history’, “If my text books in university had actually been written like this, I might have enjoyed studying science”.

By making text inaccessible academics are making sure of two things. Firstly, that fewer people enter their academic field (which is good for the individual scientist, through less competition; but bad for the science as a whole, through less research) and that fewer people trust academics as a whole.

And believe me, the common man mistrusts the academics. They see them as elitist, arrogant and out of touch with reality. In many cases, they are right. For that reason academics only have advisory roles in the world at large. They are often consulted, but get no real say in the decision making process. That, instead, is left to politicians and bureaucrats. Now, I don’t have anything against politicians and bureaucrats (no, I’m not always completely honest), but I do think that people who make decisions based on gut feelings, red tape and polls aren't really the best decision makers available.

Academics, instead should base their decisions on painstaking research (yes, big should). If this is done properly (again, big if) then ultimately the answers they come up with should be far more valuable than any of the ideas by the politicians (which are ultimately populist) or the bureaucrats (which are ultimately consensus based).

What is more, the more the common man trusts the academic, the more funding academics will receive and the higher the salaries they can receive. From that, in turn, we can then extrapolate that better, more intelligent and more motivated individuals will enter the academic life. That, in the long run, can only be good for the world as a whole, as it is these academics that do most of the pure science research, as well as the teaching of the next generation of business leaders, politicians, bureaucrats and academics.