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John Aldrich: Disseminating Knowledge in the Service of Society -- It's What We Do

Political science professor welcomes new graduate and professional students 

A good number of you are here, at an opening convocation, having in the spring listened to commencement addresses that probably seem like this, all centered on celebrating the wonderful achievement of earning your baccalaureate degrees.  And, indeed, congratulations are in order.

So, now you are used to people telling you how just great you are.  And I am sure that it is true.  But the very first thing I want to tell you is that you are lucky, really lucky.

Even if the American K-12 system is fraying at the edges and no longer so clearly the world leader, the American system of higher education remains at or near the top of its game and post-baccalaureate education is justly the envy of the world.  And for here, well, Duke is not only one of the most beautiful places at which to work, but it is also one of the most intellectually rewarding places for you to exercise your good fortune.

You have demonstrated a fine ability to capitalize on this, your good luck, so far in your life, so let me try to put into perspective what is about to be coming at you -- coming at you, let me warn you, in what seems to be an unhurried pace, but very soon you will realize just how fast the pace really is. 

As undergraduates, the value of a liberal education was pressed upon you and justly so.  I am a product a small liberal arts college, and its faculty, like those at all liberal arts colleges, repeated nearly as a mantra:  What is important is not the answering but the asking, asking, that is, the right questions.  And that is indeed what a liberal arts degree provides -- the best path to follow that humans have yet conceived to develop one's capacities for critical thinking. 

But now your task is different.  You know how to ask the right questions, or at least have a fantastic start on that ability. 

Graduate and professional schools are primarily about learning how to answer those questions.

Your thesis, for those of you who will write one, will be the demonstration of how well you have learned how to answer the questions you have asked.

It is of course, a bit more complicated than that.  There are two steps in the ability to answer a question. 

The first step and by far the hardest is to ask the right question in an answerable way.  Or to put it slightly differently, you are about to learn that what it means to "ask the right question" is the concatenation of two necessary conditions.

The first is the liberal condition:  It is necessary that your questions be sufficiently important to society.  In other words you are not now off the hook, it is still true that is necessary to ask the right questions. 

The second is the answerability condition.  It is also necessary that you transform your question from its liberal arts guise: 

Usually that means carving out a small portion of that right question to transform that subset of the full liberal question into an answerable question. 

So, you will be learning that, just as it is not sufficient to ask the right question, it is also not sufficient to ask the answerable question.  That is, not just any answerable question will do.  It still must be a question with an answer that reflects meaningfully upon the larger, right question. 

The second step is, of course, learning how to answer that answerable question.  This one is, on the surface, the most nearly formally methodological, and indeed a large part of what graduate school consists of is learning methodology in one form or another.

Still methodology matters, and if you learn your discipline's methodology well, you will learn that knowing how to design and execute research, how to answer an answerable question, is crucially dependent upon knowing why your question is a "right question," that is knowing why it is important to society for you to answer it.

And these two steps of asking and answering are related.  You move back and forth -- ask a seemingly answerable question, find out that you need to modify the question to be able to answer it, go back and start designing the answerable question again, and so on.

The key point is that all of this specialized asking and answering of questions is so that you can do your part in advancing society -- in specifying the right question correctly so that you can answer it, and in helping yourself and others think through the implications of the answers.

Two more lessons for you:

You may have already heard it said, and surely you will hear it again, that, when you do complete your dissertation or its equivalent, you will know more about that subject than anyone else in the world. 

That is in part because you have narrowed that question down to a sufficiently precise and thus answerable specification of it so that only experts in the field will know much about, in the first place. 

But it is also true because, if you have a good thesis, you will know something that no one else knows because you will have created new knowledge.  And that is an amazing thing. 

So how do you know you have a good thesis?  The old saying is that there are two kinds of theses, a good thesis and an unfinished thesis.  But of course what it really means to say that you have a good thesis is to ask if you have created new knowledge in answer to some important question.  These two definitions are functionally the same in practice -- no thesis committee should pass, and thus allow you to finish, a thesis unless it meets this definition.

Of course, if you are in a situation in any ways similar to mine, you will find that your thesis will be sufficiently arcane that you will not really be able to explain it to your parents.

And this gets to the second lesson, the second half of all of our tasks (and it is second only temporally not in terms of importance)  

And that half relates to the dissemination of knowledge part of our task.  If you do research, you get used to thinking and writing that research in the specialized language of the field in which you are working.  We get used to talking to those primarily in our discipline, and most of the time, in fact, to those in our sub areas of specialization.  That has two problems.

First, if we are asking the right question, we are creating knowledge that other people want and should have access to the answers that you and others have offered.  That is the essence of what it means to be a teacher, whether in the classroom, in the peer reviewed journal, or even on The Colbert Report

Second, failure to communicate to the larger world sufficiently clearly and sufficiently often can have consequences. 

Let me offer a story about what is in part a collective failure of my discipline, the social sciences and humanities, and even the knowledge creation enterprise as a whole.  It involves people up here on the podium trying to make it into a success and, even better, it is a story that, I promise, will eventually lead to my concluding.

Last spring, Political Science as a discipline and as a program for the funding of original scientific research at the National Science Foundation was singled out by a U.S. Senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, for defunding.  An amendment to what is the closest thing we have right now to a budget was eventually passed in the middle of the night, as part of a large block of amendments, accepted without discussion or vote by the Senate and then signed into law.  The effect of the amendment, which imposes onerous political conditions on the scholar-applicant before funding any research, was that the Political Science program at NSF has not awarded grant funding for a year (so far). 

There are many things I could say about this amendment, only a few of which are appropriate for this chapel.  But one of them is that this amendment was a clear signal of the failure of at least my discipline -- and likely replicated to one degree or another thourhgout the community of those who create new knowledge -- to communicate sufficiently convincingly just what answers we have provided.

One of the immediate consequences of the Coburn amendment was that the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, a program to encourage minority students to go to graduate school in political science, led by Dean McClain since 1997, and presented here at Duke since she moved here in 2000, was up for renewal at just the wrong moment, and had to be cancelled this past summer. 

Hopefully, it will eventually be a success story.  Here at Duke, President Brodhead, Provost Lange, and the administration, and above all Dean McClain remain committed to the program at Duke's end.  The NSF and the American Political Science Association do so at their end.  The APSA is to vote next week on committing to securing the funding for next summer and to raising an endowment for the non-Duke portion of the funding, should NSF not be able to figure out a way to resume their portion of the funding for this program.  All that is hopeful, and I am confident it will come to pass.

Still, we are all put on notice.  We don't know yet what will happen even this year, but there are those in Congress who are trying to end at least NSF funding for all of the social and behavioral sciences, and there are those in Congress who are seeking to place political constraints on every single program at the National Science Foundation.

This is a potential problem:  As I said earlier, there are two conditions to good work, the liberal condition and the answerability condition.  Both are necessary.  I propose that, together, these are also sufficient conditions.

Political Science at NSF labors now under a third condition:  the politically acceptable condition.  That is neither necessary nor sufficient. 

That may spread to the entirety of the National Science Foundation, perhaps then to the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Institutes of Health, and so on.  Surely it will some day, if we do not take care to exercise our responsibilities fully.

To return to the story of the Political Science and the Bunche Institute, one reason these extraordinary steps had to be taken was because of a collective failure to be certain that we have disseminated the knowledge we have created to the full set of people who want or need to know the answers we have come up with.  We may never convince Sen. Coburn, although we might try, but we should have already convinced sufficiently large numbers of others so that no midnight deal would have been struck.

The key point is that all of this specialized asking and answering of questions is so that you can do your bit in advancing society -- in specifying the right question correctly so that you can answer it, and in helping yourself and others think through the implications of the answers.  Just knowing something new, advancing knowledge, generating new insights, and obtaining great findings -- all of that is simply insufficient.  It must be disseminated.  It is your responsibility, as it is all of ours here. We are all teachers whether there is a classroom or not. 

Disseminating within our peer group in our discipline is easy, at least in the academy.  We get acclaim, promotions, and raises for doing so.  But beyond that narrow set of those already in the know, it is no longer easy or obvious how to communicate new knowledge.  In this arena, beyond the occasional, extremely rare, appearance on The Colbert Report, we don't usually get much in the way of personal reinforcement.  And that is what led to the failure of the social sciences and humanities in that respect.  We have much more work to do.

We call all of this creating and disseminating knowledge, in service to society.  It is what we do.

It is your good fortune, your amazing good luck, as it is mine and rest of us here, to leave this remarkable chapel, head out on to this beautiful campus and begin the process of creating new knowledge and sharing what we have created with others, in service of improving our society.