Communicating is what we do in academia: we talk, we write. But is anyone listening? Many students are not prepared or motivated to absorb and critically evaluate what their professors say. The broad public is uninterested in, or skeptical about, much of what professors write. For example, large numbers of people don’t believe in human-caused global warming, the lasting effects of social class on life prospects, or the persistence of anti-Black racism, despite scholarly consensus on all these points.

Perhaps it was always so. The gap between public and scholarly knowledge is not new and may be an inevitable function of differences in attention and experience. (Nor does the gap imply that scholars are right and the public is wrong; I am open to the opposite diagnosis.)

But things have changed in one respect: academia used to be able to rely on a division of labor. We communicated in our own way, and other institutions mediated. High schools prepared our prospective students: that was their business. Journalists selected our most interesting findings and explained them to the two thirds of Americans who received a daily newspaper. The function of a newspaper was to attract people by giving them what they wanted–including sports, comics, etc.–but also to tell them what they should know on the front page.

Professors complained (incessantly) about actual high schools and actual newspapers. Their whining was unattractive but it reflected a social contract. Communication was a shared responsibility. Academics felt they did their own job well and had the right to criticize others.

Today, communications is our business if it is anyone’s. Newsrooms are closing; journalists are being laid off. The communications marketplace has fragmented so that there is nothing like the front page of the newspaper any more. High schools have other problems to deal with.

Meanwhile, we in academia have resources: nearly 5,000 institutions distributed across the country, commanding about 3 percent of GDP, employing and enrolling millions. We can address the communications problem if anyone can.

Here is a modest proposal. A liberal arts college–or even a whole university–would launch its own general-interest online magazine. This publication, professionally edited by a journalist, would present interesting and important work by faculty and students on a regular basis, perhaps weekly. It would be highly selective; authors would usually be required to revise before publication. The institution would reward them if they contributed frequently and well to the magazine.

I think the magazine would have to allow public comments, but if it received a high volume, many of the comments would be repetitive, hostile, and uninteresting. (The comment threads of most newspapers make depressing reading.) Thus I think a better way to promote constructive criticism would be to hire particular people to provide official responses. Leaders of local community groups could respond. So could proponents of ideological views not well represented on campus, such as social conservatives (if those happen to be rare).

This proposal would certainly not solve the problems with which I began this post, but it would have the following objectives:

1. To provide the magazine as a public service.

2. To encourage faculty to explain their work publicly, and to teach them how to do that.

3. To help the institution to identify scholars who are able to communicate with the public, thereby modifying somewhat its hiring and promotion criteria.

4. To provide an impressive venue for the best student work.

5. To offer a model of how one should respond critically to scholarship.