The incentives of academia tend to focus faculty discussions within their narrow disciplinary fields. In this episode, David M. Perry joins us to discuss how faculty expertise can be used to enhance public discussions and decision-making.
David is a journalist, a medieval historian, and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in History at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. In addition to his books on medieval history, his work on history, parenting, disability, and politics has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Smithsonian, Slate, CNN, and many others. His most recent book, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook, has just been released by Johns Hopkins University.
Show Notes
- David M. Perry
- Perry, D. M. (2026). The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- BlueSky
- Greg Britton
- Ellen Arnold
- Arnold, Ellen F. (2012). Negotiating the landscape: environment and monastic identity in the medieval Ardennes. University of Pennsylvania Press.
- David M. Perry on BlueSky
Transcript
Rebecca: The incentives of academia tend to focus faculty discussions within their narrow disciplinary fields. In this episode, we discuss ways that faculty expertise can be used to enhance public discussions and decision-making.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is David M. Perry. He is a journalist, a medieval historian, and the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies in History at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. In addition to his books on medieval history, his work on history, parenting, disability, and politics has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Smithsonian, Slate, CNN, and many others. His most recent book, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook, has just been released by Johns Hopkins University. Welcome David.
David: Thank you so much for having me.
John: Today’s teas are:… David, are you drinking any tea by any chance?
David: I actually am. I’m drinking ginger tea.
Rebecca: Nice.
John: And Rebecca?
Rebecca: I have blue sapphire tea today, John. I’ve re-upped my supply. [LAUGHTER]
John: Return to an old favorite, and I am drinking a Scottish afternoon tea by Brody’s, one that you had mentioned, and I happened to see it.
Rebecca: You must have been in my stash. [LAUGHTER] It’s usually what I drink. [LAUGHTER]
John: There’s a whole container of this over in the teaching center.
Rebecca: Oh, you’re just trying to woo me over there. All right, we’ve invited you here today, David, to discuss The Public Scholar. Can you tell us the origin story of the book?
David: Not every project has such a precise origin, but this one does because I wasn’t planning on writing it. I was posting on Blue Sky about public scholarship, as I do a lot, and I do it for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that something will happen and I will post: “Here are some pieces I could imagine coming out of this moment. If you want to write one, send me an email, because I try to basically help everyone who comes my way.” And Greg Britton, who is the executive editor at Johns Hopkins press, sent me a DM saying, “Hey, do you want to write a book?” I said, I have other things to write, but I’ll see. And I sat down, and I wrote 1000s of words that day, and then 1000s of words the next day, because I’ve been teaching this stuff for a long time. I’ve been giving workshops. I have a whole set dog and pony show, as I think about it. You know, when you teach something for a decade, the words are already all there. I have said all these words in various ways, and so I just sat down and wrote it. But it’s really just Greg jumping into social media and saying, you want to do it. And I guess I did.
Rebecca: Sometimes it takes a little nudge.
John: Could you define public scholarship?
David: It’s somewhat contested ground. We may not all agree I have what I think is a deliberately expansive, but not all encompassing definition. I like to say that public scholarship is any work that you do that is informed by your disciplinary expertise, by your academic expertise, intended wholly or in part for an extramural audience. And the reason I like it to be so expansive is that I want to obviously include the kind of writing that I do, but maybe not all the writing that I do, for various reasons. We have lots of models of other kinds of things. I would say that when someone who is in the arts faculty produces art in public, whether it’s theater or music or in a studio, that is a kind of public scholarship. My favorite local example is the honey crisp apple, which came out of the University of Minnesota. I’m a big fan of that apple, and I think of that as public scholarship. But also, if you study protests or labor movements and you are organizing a union, I could say that was public scholarship, too. So I really want to include the work that we do, informed by who we are as academics, not just accidentally finding a public audience, but some intention of reaching outside of our walls.
Rebecca: David, how did you get started in public scholarship?
David: Mostly, I got angry about things, and I had a friend named Bruce who was a writer, and he told me how to take my anger and write it down in about 1000 words. And he connected me with an editor, this is in 2006 and said, “This could be an op ed.” I was angry about the way that people talked about medieval history in the context of the war in Iraq. So 2006, a different era, though not as different as I might like. There was a lot of conversation about Crusades, and I thought of it in the context of discourse. I’m an academic. There’s definitely academic articles I could have written about that, but my friend said, “Hey, you could just write this for the local paper.” And I did. And then a couple years later, I did another one. A couple years after that, I did another one, and that’s all sort of the first six years as an academic. And then I got really excited about particular kinds of topics and started doing this writing seriously and really committed to it at some point when I thought, what if I give this five years and see if I like it? That was about nine years ago. So it seems to have stuck.
John: Now, graduate programs generally don’t prepare people for a career that includes a large amount of public scholarship. Most of what we’re trained to do in graduate school is to write papers that may be read by a few dozen other people, may be cited by a few dozen, or maybe, if we get really lucky, a few hundred people. But public scholarship reaches a lot more. What are some of the reasons for engaging in public scholarship to reach this larger audience?
David: First of all, I always want to say I am not opposed to highly specialized academic scholarship for small audiences. There are people who want to set the kind of public work I do and the kind of academic work that I used to do… I have done both… in conflict and they’re just not in conflict. There are different kinds of labor. They have different kinds of purposes. I do think learning to write without jargon is really an important skill for every academic. But I also think that sometimes you want to say something that requires highly specific language, and you should use that language if that’s what you want to say. It kind of goes back to intentionality. I want people to see possibilities to be intentional, but there’s no conflict between what I do. That said, there’s a bunch of different reasons, and one of them is sort of societal good. There are problems. People who are experts can contextualize them or offer solutions or new ways of thinking or connect stuff. There is a whole world out there that is surprisingly eager for academics, and I mean that very broadly, but people with advanced training, advanced scholarship in something to bring that to the public. People actually really like that. Editors are really interested in it, but you do have to know how to communicate that you’re ready to operate on their turf, that you’re ready to work within their norms. You can’t say, “Oh, you want an op ed, here’s a 10,000 word, highly footnoted essay. Publish it, please.” You can’t do that. You have to know how they work. It’s very trainable, and it’s very learnable. The kinds of things you’re doing with podcasting is another manifestation. I am this week making my first one minute Tiktok or Instagram reel-style video with my local newspaper that they’re going to do the work. That’s another form. And am I comfortable? I am not comfortable. I have written an essay. I like the essay. Now. I have to do a video, but I’m going to try, because I think there’s a lot of ways of doing this. It takes work, it takes training, and graduate schools can do it. So that’s one thing. It’s sort of the societal good that people want it. There’s lots of ways to live a life post graduate school, and relatively few of those ways, or fewer and fewer, at least in my field, involve the kind of formal faculty life within these highly structured professional environments that at least, probably our graduate advisors, if not us, lived in. I mean, I was a professor for 10 years, and that was good, but even when I was a professor, I was at a heavy teaching load, and I did not have the brain power to do scholarship in 13th-century Latin during the semester. Just couldn’t do it. I needed summers. I needed hours to get my brain up to gear to do that kind of work. I could think about things and write short-form essays even in those busy semester moments. And then, of course, lots of people are not finding a faculty career. Many don’t even want, necessarily, a faculty career, and this is another way to continue producing and living a life of a mind and having ideas and writing them down and being read and sharing outside of the academic world. I don’t want to say this is alt academic career building, because I got to tell you, the money is not great, but there is some money. It is work. I think that academics should talk about money and salaries and making a living and paying rent. I started accelerating, in part because I had two kids in childcare, and I was at a low funded university that I needed extra income. And then as those kids got out of childcare, I wrote my way out of graduate school credit card debt, $100 at a time, $300 at a time, sometimes as high as $500… pretty rarely. These are not big paydays, but they are paydays. It is labor. You get paid for it. You can then put that money towards whatever you want.
John: There are many people out there who are willing to engage in this type of public communication who don’t necessarily have expertise, and having academics joining those conversations with expertise to inform those discussions is really valuable, I think.
David: What I have discovered is that, particularly when kind of news happens unexpectedly, there is a void, and editors… I have been in a room with CNN editors because they were nice and invited me to sit in on their morning meeting… sitting around a table, talking about the news of the day and asking, “Okay, who can we get to write on this? News happens, there is a space for commentary. Someone is going to fill that space, and I would rather it was someone who has read all the books and done deep thinking, rather than someone who is working at a very surface level, or even at kind of a manipulative, more sinister level, to try to get something done. I want people who know things in public discourse. I just want people who want to do it to be able to do it.
Rebecca: One thing that’s quite different between academic writing and responding to the news in the moment is, as you hinted at, research can be slow in and of itself. The peer review process can be slow. The publishing process is slow. [LAUGHTER] You add all those together, and you’ve got really slow… but you describe in your book this different pacing for public scholarship as we’re addressing stories in the news. And one example that you provide is related to the resignation of Pope Benedict. Can you talk a little bit about this story as a way to illustrate this pace difference?
David: Absolutely and before I start, I just want to say you don’t have to move at this speed to be able to do public scholarship. There are people who write fast and people who write slow. You don’t have to. When the window opens, you need to move into that window quickly, but you can prepare for it. If there’s things you want to talk about that are important, you will have many opportunities to talk about them over time, so you don’t have to. However, the easiest way to get published in the public world is to already be published, and the easiest way to overcome that sort of fairly minor paradox is to move very quickly at a moment when news happens. And so let me describe what that looks like. It’s not my first essay, but it’s my origin story, when I really committed to this. So in February 2013 I was in a very specific academic moment that I like to talk about how this fits within an academic career. I was in my sixth year as a professor of history at Dominican University, a wonderful small school in Chicago. I had turned in my tenure file, so I could not work on my tenure file, which is weird. Even weirder, I turned in my book manuscript that had come out of my dissertation, so that was 12 years of work, or something like that, and I couldn’t work on it because it was in the hands of an editor. But I also couldn’t start something new, because ideally the editor would say, “Yes, let’s move forward, and here’s comments,” and the work would continue. So I was in this weird kind of liminal state at that moment, Pope Benedict retired. I woke up on a Monday morning in Chicago, the news had already broken, but it’s surprise news. It’s not news like when you have a presidential election or the Academy Awards or the Met Gala or something that people know is about to happen, then newspapers and magazines and other kinds of publications, they’re ready. They already have their people and sometimes now hundreds and hundreds of essays into my career, sometimes I’m one of those people. When news happens and it’s a surprise, there’s this empty space, and editors, their job is to have someone fill it, because they have a mission to provide expert commentary in the news, and every editor I’ve worked with really believes in that, but also it’s their job. They need clicks. They need eyeballs. People are going to go to CNN. The top of the homepage is going to say, “Pope retires.” And then there’s going to be next set of readings. There’s going to be three links, and one of them needs to go to the opinion section so they get some share of that readership. So the Pope retired, journalists jumped to Wikipedia. They saw the last papal retirement was in the 15th century. They start talking about that. And I got a very specific kind of what I call academic mad, which is to say I was really mad, and 100% aware that it was as petty as could be, and it did not matter. But I just want everyone to know that that 15th-century retirement was a negotiated settlement to resolve a schism, kind of a fairly calm, heavily mediated sort of way. But in the 13th century, and I am a historian of the 13th century, again, petty, these are narrow academic categories, there was a papal retirement in 1295 of an old man who would become a pope, taken from his Hermitage, wanted to go back to his studies. It felt much more analogous to what Pope Benedict was doing then the 15th-century retirement. A friend of mine who is the expert on this guy, Pope Saint Celestine, posted some pictures of Pope Benedict visiting the tomb. I’m like, this is 13th-century history, not 15th-century history. I ranted on social media, and people said, “pitch an essay.” And I said, “this is ridiculous. I’m aware that it is petty, but it’s my century, so I’m feeling petty.” I did, however, got my kids dressed, I got them out the door, I got them on the bus. Some point in that process, I sent an email to a CNN editor, and four minutes later, I had a CNN gig for this piece, not because my insight was so brilliant, although I have bigger points to make about memory and about papacy and about medieval history and history staying with us that I do think are important, but because I was fast, they needed someone to comment on Pope Benedict’s retirement, and they needed someone who had an idea and was informed. So I presented myself as a solution to their problem, and then they’re done. They would have liked the piece immediately. I had to teach a class, so I turned it in that afternoon. But it did have to move pretty quickly, because within three days, the papal retirement news cycle was over. Then there’d be another new cycle of Papal elections. I wrote about that too, the new name of Pope Francis. I wrote about that too, because Francis named after St Francis of Assisi, also 13th century. Not just 13th century, but 13th century Italy, which is my narrower category. It was just this moment in which I had the specific expertise. And almost every academic I’ve talked to has had a moment where the thing that they know really well has entered the news. And there can be things you sort of know, and there can be ideas you kind of have, and all of that is good. But when the thing you really know enters the news, if you move quickly, you’ll just get published. I’m gonna give one more example. It’s my favorite one I talk about in the book, but also I’m mentioning it with permission. I have a friend named Ellen Arnold who is a genius scholar of medieval environmental history, and her first book was on saints associated with forests, which is, I would say, even more niche than my specialty in 13th-century Italy. When Antonin Scalia died, the Supreme Court Justice, he was at a hunting lodge in Texas dedicated to St Hubert, a medieval forest saint. Then Ellen was in The Atlantic, because she moved quickly and with my encouragement, of course, just like other people had encouraged me, if Ellen can get published on medieval forest saints, everyone can, if they’re ready to move and move quickly and present themselves with an argument, can do this.
John: So the pace at which this can work varies. But what are some other ways in which engaging in public scholarship differs from the process of scholarly publication?
David: Working with editors, if you get accepted, is a really different process than academic editing. I had a wonderful editor for my monograph with a university press. I’ve had many great editors with the collections and journals, but media editor is a lot more in your sentences and rewriting and adding words and moving things around, and it all is happening under your name, and you get to sign off on it. I have occasionally had an editor publish a change without checking with me, but that happened very rarely and should not happen, but they sure do a lot of rewriting. Different people have different relationships to writing. I am dyslexic. I hated writing all the way through grad school, it was definitely a problem. It’s only in my late 30s, and I’m now in my early 50s, that I found this sort of short-form writing. And what that means is that I don’t care about my commas, semi-colons, em-dashes, paragraphing structure, things that other writers do care about, I don’t care about. So if an editor wants to move them around, I barely even see it when I look at the draft. Other people care more. But I would encourage people to see the editor as a collaborator in the best possible way. And when you work with an editor a lot, I’ve had a couple editors who’ve edited over 100 pieces of mine, they just take a draft and they make it a better version of David Perry, because they’ve edited so many of my pieces, they know what the best version of me looks like. If they know what the move I should have done is, they just do it, and then they send it back to me. That does not happen in academia. And it can be wonderful. It can also be frustrating. There can be people who try to take your text and have you say things that you don’t necessarily want to say. And I have a long example about a screw-up of mine, and it was my screw-up, not the editor’s screw-up, that led to an academic rival saying mean things about me on the internet and being correct because I had let a sentence go that I shouldn’t have let go. You should get paid for this work directly. You can get to something like $1 a word, but mostly it’s a couple $100 per piece, but it is still a payday. I really want academics to ask to be paid for their labor. I think it is a disaster that academics do so much writing for for-profit businesses, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, so on and so forth, and don’t get paid for it. But that’s not my windmill. I’m not going to go with that one. Hopefully you have other guests who will go with that one. But I am going to say that this kind of public work is happening in a market where you should be paid, not always, but mostly you will be. People might read it. That is probably the biggest one, and people might read it at a scale that is actually unfathomable. I definitely have had pieces that millions of people have read, and I can’t really get my head around what that looks like. That out there in this world, millions of people might have clicked on an essay, and it’s not even necessarily because it was my best essay. My most read essay, I wrote while my son was in the bath and I was mad about something, and I sent it to my editor, and my editor said, “This is good. Let’s run it.” It was small changes. And I said, “Great.” It doesn’t really have a good conclusion. It’s not a great essay. It’s okay. It’s fine. I believe everything I say in it, but it is not great writing. But it caught on to a story that had gone viral, and so maybe 10 million people read it. That’s just absurd. I have sort of rules of academic writing, including “move quickly,” but also that you will lose control. It can be terrible. I have had terrible moments. It can be amazing, but it certainly goes out into the world, and then the world can have a reaction to it on a scale that’s just really astounding. And sometimes you can really connect things you’ve written to shifts in Medicaid policy… that’s something I write about… or acts of legislation, or just one person getting mental health help, because they read about my own struggles with mental health help, that’s pretty good. And the only place where I feel like I have comparable impact ever is in teaching. And teaching is always the most important kind of public engagement most of us do, but you can also do it, and you can do it at a scale with this sort of public work that can be really meaningful. I know there’s a couple of laws in which lawmakers were thinking about essays related to my family when they started crafting the law. They were thinking about many things. They’re thinking about hundreds of families. But I know because they told me I was on their mind. That’s a good year’s work, a good lifetime’s work..
Rebecca: How does one be prepared for their moment?
David: That’s a great question. One thing is that you need to move quickly. You need to move in a way that demonstrates you understand what you’re trying to do. And that is a big reason why I have been doing workshops for years, but also why I agreed to write this book. Normally, what happens is, either it’s someone I’ve worked with on a workshop, or someone sends me an email and I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to write you all these things in this email. Try to process all that at once.” Well, now I’ve written that. I mean, it’s a short book, but at much more length, more fully in this book, so that people can be prepared. I like to think that if you read this book, you will start to see opportunities and know what to do and know how to communicate. I have a very specific template for writing an email to an editor. It’s a little pedantic, I guess, how I’m structuring it, but I just got to tell you, it’s a short email. It communicates everything you need to communicate to an editor, and it also demonstrates that you are thinking like a public commentator rather than an academic, that you’re not just presenting yourself as an expert, but as someone with an argument ready to move on. And I just think that’s how you get prepared. And I don’t think most people need to do what I have done, which is overthrow my whole career to do this kind of public work, and it’s turned out great. But I really like to look at what I did in those first seven or eight years, where I wrote one every two or three years when something really moved me, happily or sadly or angrily, that fits in really nicely with a fairly typical academic career, but you need to be ready to move when the moment hits, and so that’s what I’m hoping this book does.
John: People often think that public scholarship has to be in their own discipline or something directly related to what they’ve learned. But one of the things you emphasize is that in the process of becoming an academic, we’ve learned how to learn things quickly, allowing us to get up to speed on topics in the news fairly quickly. Can you give us some examples of areas that you’ve written in, outside of, say, medieval Italian history?
David: Yeah, I’d love to. I want to start by saying this is not about making stuff up, or, if you’ll excuse me, bullshitting. I have been telling students my entire career that I don’t actually care if they learn anything about medieval history, that they’re in my classes because I want them to learn how to learn, and that the skills of learning how to learn, read, write, argument, present, analyze, all the things that we learn in history classes and across a liberal arts and sciences education and in all these different ways, prepare them for a life as an informed person, a lifelong learner. It’s language that I use all the time. It’s language that every Dean and President I’ve heard talk about learning. I believe it, and I just want to say that my career has had me lean into that. It took me a while to get over that belief in it, but I just think it is true, and it becomes most true when you have no choice but to learn. And so the example I talk about the most that has shaped my writing, but also my life, is the birth of my son and his diagnosis with Down syndrome. It was not long after I had just gotten my PhD. I knew nothing about Down syndrome. I knew nothing about the policy, but I knew nothing about life with Down syndrome. I knew nothing about the last 40 years of history which were really significant in that world. I remember some of the stuff that I believed and it was all wrong about what his life would look like, what our life would look like. I could read things, but I had networks of people, reading things and sharing things. And it is in that process of having no choice, at least no good choice, to really apply myself as someone who knew how to learn to this life-changing event. And that’s happened, of course, many times in my life since, and I think it happens in everyone’s life. And when you do that work, and when you think deeply and when you’re ready to go, that is a space from which you can write. And just in general, having worked with so many people over the years, about half the people I talk to really want to write from their discipline in some capacity, particularly people who work on more contemporary issues or more politicized questions in this moment. But other people just want to write. They want to be writers, and they want to write their specialized scholarship in whatever context that means for their discipline. And then they want to write essays about parenthood or death or immigration or falling in love or nature, whatever it is. They just want to be writers. You can do that. It takes practice. There are people who are just naturally gifted at it the first time. But again, I’m dyslexic. I was not naturally gifted at it. Whatever I’ve accomplished becoming a better writer has just been through practice of writing 1000s of posts, 1000s of blog posts, and then hundreds and hundreds of essays. That was my method. And I just think it’s okay to want to be a writer and to say I have learned how to learn. Now I’m going to try to write, and even when it comes to our academic discipline, grad school teaches us, it enculturates us to narrow ourselves in ways that are appropriate to our discipline. I wouldn’t even say I’m an expert in 13th-century medieval Italy. I’m an expert in Venice from kind of 1190 to 1260, that’s what I am, and really only on a couple of specific things related to Venice. Those are the spaces I would claim as expertise as a scholar, that’s just not how knowledge works in any other context. If I’m introducing myself to someone, I’m not going to say, “Oh, I’m a historian in medieval Venice from 1190 to 1260.” I’ll probably just say “I’m a historian.” And only if it comes up will I say I’m even a medieval historian. Sometimes it comes up. I interviewed a rock star last weekend about using the word Crusade in one of his songs, and I had to explain why I was interested. It mostly doesn’t come up. I’m just a historian, and that’s okay. I think we can all just be teachers or just be scientists, just be biologists, just be whatever, in most contexts, unless we’re making a kind of disciplinary expertise claim, and then we got to back it up.
Rebecca: In the story you shared earlier about your first move in this space, this kind of submitting of your tenure folio, but others might be interested in entering this space prior to that moment of their career. What advice can you give about getting this kind of public scholarship to count toward applying and getting a position or tenure or promotion if you’re in that kind of academic space?
David: Yeah, we’ve actually come a long way on this, although there are relatively few cases that I’m aware of in which the load-bearing part of a tenure file is based on this kind of public work rather than a more traditional kind of academic work. In most fields, there’s something that’s kind of load bearing, then the other stuff is window dressing around it. Our tenure and promotion documents do include public work, but everyone I know who’s gone up has gone up with an academic monograph, and then other stuff. I do think it’s actually increasingly easy or increasingly possible, with really good models, to use all kinds of different publicly oriented products as the other stuff in a strong tenure and promotion and hiring case. It is pretty rare for it to be the main body of work, but it is technically possible. If you just go around and you read tenure and promotion requirements, you will see public work, and more and more of them. Disciplinary bodies are increasingly putting out guidelines. I talk in my book about one from the American Sociological Association, one from the Modern Languages Association, one from the American Historical Association. So there’s three. There are more out there, let alone fields like public health or science communication or public history or museum work that have a naturally publicly oriented component. There are guides and models out there, and they’re pretty new. I wrote my first op ed in 2006. The earliest, really clear articulation of how to count this kind of work that I read came from 2008. I’m sure there’s earlier work, and there’s an endless discourse on the public intellectual… that is a different book that I didn’t write. But 2008, it is something that is intensifying, and people are more and more aware of it, and there are good models. The other thing that I want people to know is that when I talk to Deans, Provosts, Presidents, they tend to at least say they’re very open to this kind of thing. I would think that most Regents and trustees and such would be very open to this kind of thing. I do know what it’s like to be in a very standard academic context, and it is other faculty who are the most suspicious of change. If we think this stuff matters, we have to count it, and we have to convince ourselves in our own spaces, rather than worry about, “Well, what will the regents say?” The Regents don’t know. You tell them, “This is good work,” and you point to your tenure, promotion requirement, all things being equal, that’s likely to be persuasive. Now, there are many other structural issues in the university in how things are counted. I’m not just dismissing them, but in terms of sort of snobbery or skepticism or thinking there’s no rigor or significance. the real problem, to my reading, is still among faculty, and that’s where we can change first. And that’s the good news, that we can just change it by changing it.
John: And even if a department does not take public scholarship as seriously as research, we generally are evaluated on teaching, research, and service, and it certainly is a form of service, which often has more of an impact than our research does.
David: It would be great to have a team read 3000 tenure promotion documents and assemble it. I do not have a team, so if anyone wants to give me a team, I’ll be happy to lead that big research project. I do feel like someone somewhere out there with a big research budget should do that work, but you would need a lot more funding than I have as just a freelancer sitting in Minnesota, I have read dozens and dozens of tenure promotion guidelines. I tend to read them before I go to a workshop somewhere, so that’s just sort of carried me through. And often the public engagement work gets put into the service category. And I think that’s great. I think you could say, “Hey, instead of being on a committee, this is what I’m doing on public engagement work.” And I would look askance at a department that didn’t accept that, that tried to say “No, you have to serve on these committees. You can’t just do this public work.” I think that is a very reasonable kind of ask. If your job is three articles or a book and two articles, replacing an article with a sustained practice of public commentary over years… again, that’s pretty reasonable. One op ed is not an academic article. 100 op eds might be an academic article rather than counting, a sustained practice. I just think these models are not too hard. They exist out there. We don’t have to reinvent the wheels. We just have to decide to let them roll.
Rebecca: I know that I had public scholarship in my folio when I submitted. I framed things largely around service, but also helped readers understand how they overlap between categories.
David: And honestly, what we’re doing right now, this podcasting, I don’t talk a lot about it because I try to stay on ground that I know. I do talk about it a little bit. This counts, right? I mean, this is clearly public scholarship in a way that really matters and should be counted. I didn’t put any public scholarship in my promotion document, my tenure document, because I didn’t think it would count. That was wrong. We had explicit language in my tenure/promotion portfolio that could have counted it. Now it was fine, because I had exceeded the relatively low publication requirements at a school for which being a good teacher and serving the institution was where the tenure and promotion decisions were really made. It didn’t matter. But I do feel kind of silly having thought, “Oh, it wouldn’t count,” when it was right there. It wasn’t even buried in page 200. it was the models of scholarship, the scholarship of engagement. The models are out there.
Rebecca: It also seems like there’s some value in encouraging folks to include this in their folios, even if they don’t, quote, unquote, need it, because they have plenty of other stuff, because it starts to change the culture of what people expect to read about and what might be in those spaces becomes more familiar.
David: Again, it’s a different set of windmills. What is the future of the university press? What is the future of the academic press? What is the future of the academic journal in an era without as many people to do peer review? There are big questions out there, and they are not questions to which I have answers or intend to find answers. But I do think that valuing other kinds of work is at least one way to move forward.
John: For people who would like to get engaged more in public scholarship, in addition to getting a copy of your book, which has a lot of information on all the steps, what’s some advice that you’d provide to people to get started.
David: So the first thing is, you have no business trying to write things that you’re not reading. Hopefully we know that in other contexts. It is also true in this. Oeople say, “I want to write an essay.” I say, “Great. Well, what kind of magazines do you read? What kind of outlets do you read?” “Well, I read the New York Times.” That’s not enough. You need to read the kind of place you want to write. And if the only place you want to write is the New York Times, good luck. It’s a tough one to get into, and there are lots of other options out there, but you got to read them. You got to find your niche. And there are so many niches. Every field, every industry, every region, has publications that you can tap into and look at and get involved with. I made a deliberate decision two Decembers ago, after the last presidential election that I really wanted to put my writing down in my community. It turns out that right now, I’m very glad that I’m a writer in Minnesota, given the winter we’ve had here, that I’m sure everyone knows about. I decided I was going to write here. I’m not pitching the New York Times. I’m just writing for my local outlet, and I’m really pleased with that. Y’all can do that too. Industries have very specific kinds of public facing or semi public facing magazines. Go look at them. Literary, whatever. You got to read the kind of work that you want to produce, and then you have to think about it like an academic, which is to say, what are the genre norms? What are the structures? What are the word counts? What can we figure out from reading, not hundreds, but 10, 20, 30 pieces, and read it using your whole critical thinking facility. Think about it as a discourse and then how you might engage in it. There are lots of people who want to help you figure out the stuff you can’t see, which is, in my case, the behind the scenes email, the nonfiction trade book proposal so you can get an agent, how to Aapply for local arts grants. Like these things are not public. So there you need to have guides. There’s a public component, and the first step is to just read a lot and think about, how would I engage with this? What might I do? What might I say? Is there anything I have to say that isn’t already being said? I try to only write about things that other people aren’t writing about or aren’t saying the things I care about in the same way, and I don’t always succeed at that, because, again, I’ve trained like an academic. Where are the gaps? Go write in those spaces, don’t just repeat other people’s work. And I think applying that kind of lens to public work is a great way to go. The other thing is, it’s a little harder right now because of the decline of Twitter, on social media sites with a little bit of work… you never have to post. I’m not telling anyone that they have to post, though you can… but on social media sites, there are lots of writers and editors and artists talking about public work. They talk about it… we cannot stop talking about it, often with some bitterness, often with some love, sharing pieces, connecting to people, an editor will put out a call saying, “Hey, I’d really like to read this kind of thing this year.” It is worth your time if you get really interested in it, trying to figure out where is this public conversation between practitioners happening, and then eavesdrop, because if they’re posting it on Instagram or threads or bluesky… I’m mostly on bluesky, so that’s where I see it. It’s not private. If they wanted to be private, it’d be private. If you went and followed me on blue sky and paid attention critically to what kinds of editors I’m talking about and what other writers I’m sharing, you could very quickly intuit the whole network of a certain kind of writing. For other work, you’d have to find other nodes in that network, but it’s right there for you. So, if you really want to get involved, go see what people are doing and think hard about it.
John: And we used to use Twitter in a very similar way. LinkedIn has filled some of that gap that Twitter has left behind.
David: I’m hearing that more and more from other people about LinkedIn. I did reactivate my account there recently, and I have posted zero things, but I have been thinking about it.
Rebecca: Do you have any thoughts about common mistakes that people make trying to get started in this space?
David: The biggest mistake I see is that something will happen and someone will feel like they could write an op ed. And I use op ed in a general term, but a short-form public essay of some component, and they will send me a draft of their pitch, and what the pitch will say is, “This thing happened, I am an expert. Would you like me to comment?” Sometimes it works, but that is not how you do it. What you say is: “This thing happened. I am an expert, and I will argue, and you fill in the argument.” Now, anyone who’s taught freshman writing knows you got to teach people to write a thesis. I mean, this is not a new problem, but I can’t tell you how many email drafts I’ve seen of people who propose themselves as an expert. Now, if a journalist is writing a story and needs to interview an expert, you’ve done the work, but if you want to write the story yourself, you have to have something to say. And people do have something to say, they just don’t know to put that in the third line of their email, or the first line of the second paragraph, or whatever your structure is. So that’s really the biggest mistake. The other mistake, though I see, is people giving up. There’s a lot of rejection in this. I feel like academics, we’re all pretty good at rejection, and coming back from it, I was certainly rejected by all but one graduate school. I was rejected by all but two jobs. I’ve been rejected by 100% of my grants. It’s not fun, but it’s fine, and this is just what happens. Some of the rejection is silence. So you don’t even get a “no,” but if you feel there’s something significant, you just can kind of try a little bit and then put it in your pocket, and then do some more reading, do some more thinking, see what else is out there, any one essay, particularly at the beginning, is likely to not get published. So if you want to do it, you have to try more than once.
John: Can you provide our listeners with an overview of the topics addressed in the book?
David: Yeah, I tell my story of how I became a writer, but I try to use it to illustrate how this world works, because that’s the story I know best. I feel like it does hold up beyond just me. Then I talk about the pitch email. I’m really interested, in general, in the hidden writing behind public-facing writing. I’m interested in grant applications for academics too. It’s just not what this book’s about, but I think that’s the model we’re most familiar with. You do a grant application, you get the grant, then the work itself is something different, and most people never see the grant, even though sometimes they’re available. The pitch email, I spent a lot of time talking about, I do think that if there’s one contribution that I do at least as well as anyone else, is helping people figure out how to write this email, and also helping people figure out how to do the thinking that results in a good email, because that thinking also results in a good essay. Then I talk about what essays look like. I talk about the norm of the op ed, which can vary, but there are genre norms, and it’s worth knowing what they are, even if you don’t want to follow them. I talk about what happens after acceptance. Conflicts with editors, harassment, trying to build from one piece to another piece. Chapter four is about what happens after publication and then chapter five is all the other places you can go, including podcasting and video and newsletters and literary nonfiction or literary fiction. Just like I haven’t gotten a single grant, I have failed to sell my science fiction novels, but I have written some. You never know. I’ve succeeded at one set of things and not succeeded at other sets of things. I’ve never published a long- form literary nonfiction essay, but other people have. I talk about what that looks like. So, all the different ways you might think about writing different kinds of things. And then I finish by talking about the tenure question. At the beginning of this book, I say, and I say this a lot, that I’m interested in the how, that there are lots of people talking about why do public scholarship. I want to say, Okay, let’s not have that conversation again right now. I want to tell you how it works in a very sort of nuts and bolts sort of way. I do have a why, and I’ve said some of it here with you right at the beginning of this talk, and I say some of it at the end of my book. That’s how I finish up.
Rebecca: You mentioned earlier, the inclusion of some templates, like the email template. What are some other templates or models do you include in your book?
David: This may be partially my own history with struggling as a writer. I love constraints. I love form. I love word count limits, but also an expectation of form as a way to guide my writing. Now, you don’t have to follow them all the way. And I haven’t always followed them. Constraints can be oddly liberating, because they take a certain set of choices off the table so that then you can focus on the remaining choices on the table. Say, “Okay, I’ve got to write a lede. I’ve got to write a really good intro. That’s how these start. They all start with this kind of intro.” So you don’t have to worry about whether to write that kind of intro. You’re going to have to do it. So then you think about what kind. So I have a very detailed structure for one kind, and really the major kind still, of Op Ed style essay, that I then illustrate a lot of examples. And then that, plus the pitch email template, which is even more constrained and even more limited. But if your pitch is longer than eight sentences, it’s too long, and eight sentences may be too long. These people we’re trying to get to say yes, are very, very busy, and they get hundreds of emails, some of them a day, and you just have to be very concise. I find the Op Ed template liberating, and I find the pitch email frustrating. You have to be incredibly concise, but you can’t leave anything out. That’s a struggle. It’s a writing struggle, but hopefully, with my guidance, it’s a struggle people can make their way through.
John: Now, we always end with: “what’s next?” What’s next for you?
David: It’s been a difficult time here in Minnesota, as everyone knows, and there’s plenty of things as well, on a more family-level scale, in terms of health and teenagers and things like that that has been taking up a lot of energy. I’m really focused on local writing in terms of my short-form work. I do have another big book project, and it is sold, and I’m writing it. Just between us and your listeners, I’m a little behind. My editor also knows I’m a little behind, but I am trying to write a book about history and masculinity, and add some longer history into these non-stop conversations about the crisis of masculinity today. I’m a historian. I’m tired of people talking about like it just started, or it just started in the 80s, or it just started in the 20s. I’m starting with Gilgamesh, and you could go before that. That’s just where I’m starting. So that’s the book that I’m working on now.
John: Researching this book, I ran across a list of some of your public scholarship publications, and if I remember correctly, it was over 600 items at the time.
David: It’s something like that, yeah. Thank you.
Rebecca: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
David: Well, thank you for having me just a pleasure.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
John: Editing Assistance provided by Fred Llerena.
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