Does the Academy Need an “Extreme Makeover”?

In the spring of 2007 I helped organize a research cluster with three other graduate students at the University of Washington that focused on the question of public scholarship for academics. We formed the group Students Writing in Public (SWIP), and, taking it as given that public scholarship is of value because it extends the readership of our work beyond the academy and therefore the impact that it might have, committed ourselves to pursuing (via weekly writing meetings/workshops and quarterly guest speakers) how to go about doing this thing called “public writing.” At the time, we conceived of public writing as a translation of our academic work into non-jargon-laden prose, largely as articles and editorials for popular magazines and newspapers. We saw SWIP as an opportunity to try out different kinds of writing so as to engage with an audience less familiar with the “conversations” in which we regularly take part.