Bret Devereaux

It goes to a view of the field that I think often conceives of the proper historian as practically a history-monk - kept pure by their lack of concern for the outside world. It is a fundamentally narcissistic view of production in the field... 7/21

...where only writing either for other academics, or for use in our classes, has any worth and consequently those are the only things we should write. But we're not monks and more importantly the broader society is, one way or another, paying for our work. 8/21

Academic monasticism is, it seems to me, a bad organizational culture holdover from the days when most academics were from the leisured classes (or retained by them) and thus could afford a fashionable disdain for the economics of the profession, on account of being rich. 10/21

But I suppose the more serious-sounding rejoinder is then 'why not write for the public but in a more rigorous, hard-nosed sort of way? Why not write a book on the topic with enough pages and footnotes to really be very complete and break new ground and so on?' 11/21

And my answer is: Yes, I am doing that. I am working on my narrowly tailored, extensively over-footed book project (very, very slowly). I also write academic articles (also slowly). But the reach of that sort of thing is narrow, too slow to come out and we all know it. 12/21

So you want to write the 'traditional media' article because that is a way (not the only one) of at least engaging the broader chattering classes instead of just other academics (convenient, since the chattering classes control both our funding and most broader policy) 13/21

But the demands of such writing are tricky: on the one hand you need to supply all of the necessary background information because you simply cannot be sure that your audience knows any of it. On the other hand, you have tight word limits (1200 is common). 14/21