Citizen Scholar Chapter 7: Activism and Active Citizenship

For scholars who are worried that being too political in their public life will undermine their status or legitimacy as scholars, I want to urge a more open attitude toward an activist orientation, regardless of your political perspective, and help guide that choice. If we only have one identity across our various platforms and modes of communication then you can’t separate them, can’t leave your scholar identity behind. So the alternative to speaking out “as a scholar” is silence, which is not acceptable for a citizen. Meanwhile, a smaller contingent of academic scholars, including “scholar activists,” sees its scholarship as activism. In the second section, then, I argue for maintaining a distinction between different forms of speech and communication, so that your active citizenship does not in fact compromise your scholarship.