by Paul Sedra
Alongside the political and social upheavals that Egypt has seen from January and
February 2011 to date, my work life as a scholar of modern Egypt has seen very
significant change. In contrast to five years ago, I now spend at least one or
two hours each day keeping abreast of the voluminous news in Arabic and English
that emerges from the country, from the now significantly expanded number of
media outlets there. I have had to overhaul existing courses and create new
ones to offer my students historical perspective on the remarkable changes that
the Middle East has witnessed. Perhaps above all, I have tried to contribute to
public understanding and debate, both in my local community and abroad, about
these remarkable changes by granting interviews to various media organizations
and writing op-ed pieces and essays with my critical evaluation of recent
developments in Egyptian political, social, and cultural life.
I have welcomed and, indeed, actively sought out these opportunities for engagement
with the public, as a means by which to put my longstanding experience with
Egyptian affairs into action in useful ways. Without question, there is a
particular satisfaction associated with taking ideas usually relegated to a
classroom or library and applying them to live situations on the ground, as a
means by which to foster better informed debates about Egypt and the Middle
East. Before the Arab uprisings, these opportunities were usually few and far
between, and limited in subject matter to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Four years
on from the uprisings, these opportunities remain vastly enlarged given the
still keen interest in the contexts of the uprisings.
Without question, conceptions about the academic’s role relative to the public run the
gamut from outright rejection of engagement, to polite lip service, to warm
embrace of engagement as a scholar’s responsibility. My purpose here is not to
quibble with colleagues about which view is appropriate. Certainly a great
number of my peers have good reasons for skepticism about public engagement,
not least those who have had profoundly negative experiences in dealing with
the news media, having had their words intentionally or unintentionally misconstrued
or taken out of context. Arguably, Middle East scholars face particular risks
in having their words actively distorted and misrepresented, given the number
of well funded partisan lobbies devoted to advocacy on issues related to our
field of study.
However, what I find curious and want to highlight here is the apparent ambivalence of
academic institutions to the issue of faculty engagement with the public. I
doubt I have come across a college or university that fails to include forms of
public engagement among their central objectives. Yet, strikingly, in a recent
unsystematic poll of peers and colleagues at a range of institutions, I found
that public engagement was routinely ignored as a factor in how faculty are
evaluated for merit increases in pay. Indeed, a great number of colleagues
indicated that media interviews and op-ed pieces, while encouraged, are not
formally considered at all when their performance is evaluated.
I had distinctly personal experience with this phenomenon in my most recent
evaluation for a merit increase in pay. Despite having written dozens of op-ed
pieces and essays on Egypt and Middle East affairs over the past several years,
garnering far wider audiences than all of my peer-reviewed academic
publications combined, my performance was reckoned by the chair of my
department as good rather than exceptional, largely because I am between book
projects. The op-ed pieces and essays were regarded as part of the 20 percent
of my performance associated with service – and only a part thereof, because
that service category includes service to the university, service to the
profession, and service to the community.
The evaluation struck me as profoundly ironic in light of my institution’s most recent effort to brand
itself as a university engaged with the world. Indeed, at just the time that
the university is struggling mightily in the media to demonstrate the level of
such engagement, from an institutional perspective the university is
effectively discouraging this engagement through its structures for evaluating
faculty merit. And as my informal poll suggests, my institution is scarcely
alone in this apparently ambivalent attitude to academic engagement with the
public.
The lack of such engagement is an issue that is often politicized in this age of perennially shrinking university budgets. In light of my own experience, I cannot help but think that universities would be
better served in this political struggle by rethinking their methods for
evaluating faculty merit than by hiring marketing firms to mount elaborate
branding exercises. Indeed, if faculty are willing and able to engage with the
public, why not encourage them to do so rather than penalize them for having
taken the time? A little reworking of criteria could go a long way towards
creating a culture of academic engagement with the public.
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