On Thursday 31 January, the editor of The Spectator came out with a tweet which, it is fair to say, wound a few people up.
Ben Tonra’s response was quick and predictably terse.
As I was tagged into Ben’s response, my mentions went a bit bonkers all day.
I didn’t respond immediately, as I felt the need to get a bit of distance from what is, in some senses, a bit of clickbait. Philip Cowley himself indicated he didn’t think that Nelson’s tweet was fair, although the other academic has not responded (and it’s hard to imagine he isn’t aware).
Others, like Simon Hix, said that they took it as a personal insult. I can understand that sentiment. It was also extraordinary that Nelson simply ignored the work of the awardwinning UK in a Changing EU “thinktank”, which is dedicated to the interface between academic work on the EU and the UK, and societal understanding of the same. Perhaps that sort of objective work just isn’t to Nelson’s taste. And there are others, too numerous to mention, who have been heavily involved in media commentary (and other types of engagement work — on which more below) related to Brexit, as many said in response to Nelson. Indeed, as the conversation on Twitter evolved during the day, it became clear that I did want to say something about this issue, from both a professional and a personal perspective. So in the evening I sat down and prepared a blog.
So here are my thoughts on the issue. They aren’t fully worked out. I haven’t referenced or hyperlinked every comment I’ve made, so please forgive me for that. I have added some edits to the post since I first put it online, as typos and further examples have come to my attention. Furthermore, this isn’t the article that Anne Deighton has suggested could be written about this issue. That still needs to be written, and I hope it will be.
It is certainly true that not all academics engage with the media. There are good reasons for that. The stories that they want to tell may well just be too complicated, and it isn’t simply a case that they haven’t thought properly how to distill them down to bitesize chunks.In some cases, press coverage of your results is precisely not what you want, as it may distort a complex story. It is also true that too many “Yes, but” responses in interviews on the radio tend to result in the phone not ringing very much any more.
Some ideas are simply not reducible to one or two sentences. That’s why longform radio programmes such as Thinking Allowed and In Our Time can work well for those who manage to get access. You don’t have to go short form to have impact. Michael Dougan’s lengthy and detailed demolition of so many of the pre-referendum arguments has received an incredible half a million views on youtube, and that isn’t the only platform it’s on. Even his 20 minute discourse on the Withdrawal Agreement has clocked up 70k views. Alternatively, some get involved in conversations on Twitter which — incredibly enough — can even be quite productive (like the ones that have followed Nelson’s tweet in which academics admit to learning a lot since the Brexit referendum **because they have had to talk to people outside their bubbles**). There are plenty of journalists who engage properly with academics, either by reading their work, or by building their insights into their own journalism. For many academics, that type of input, even though it can sometimes feel as if your thoughts are used but not fully credited, is still better than going on the radio or TV. Even if you have had the training for it, which every university now offers, it may not be a pleasant experience. As people like Roberta Guerrina and Annick Masselot have said, not only is Brexit itself a gendered political space, in which women’s voices struggle to be heard (Sue Milner), but there are also gender dynamics going on in the media (pdf), especially Twitter, which can make it a tough place for women to feel that they might be sticking their necks out. (I’d also like to draw your attention to a clever debate, arising out of Twitter, but not by academics but by all round smart people, about the gender of “Brexit” being male in most languages which give nouns a gender). In sum, there is a lot to the broad topic of “media engagement” which does not necessarily involve the craving to appear on TV, the radio or in the digital or print media (I’m looking here for an alternative for an unacceptable term about that form of compulsive and attention seeking behaviour that I simply will not write down, but which is in common usage).
Furthermore, if your bubble is largely focused on academics who are researching the politics of Brexit, then you are going to miss a lot of superlative work, like that by my colleagues Lesley McAra and Susan McVie who have literally changed the face of youth justice in Scotland, by Clare McGlynn on upskirting and revenge pornography, by Dave Cowan on housing or by Charlotte O’Brien with legal and advice agencies that work with some of the most vulnerable migrants in the UK (including EU citizens), who frankly care less about the niceties of Brexit than they do about the dignity of their client base. It’s also the case that a lot of this type of work comes from academics who are not based in London (which is the case with all four of the examples I’ve chosen), and who thus won’t easily penetrate the bubble inside which the Spectator’s editor clearly sits. Furthermore, if there is a theme which is common to all of those examples, it is that we must bring evidence back to the forefront of our concerns. That’s not an easy point to insist on at the moment.
We are certainly incentivised to engage. I sat on the REF2014 Sub Panel for Law and I could see clearly from that, and from my work from 2009–2013 as Dean of Research of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, how many academics responded positively to the impact agenda by doing some incredibly interesting work to bring about societal changes or benefits as an output from their academic work. A lot of that work involved academics initiating and developing a wide variety of engagements beyond academia.
Without claiming to be comprehensive, as academics we engage with NGOs, thinktanks, charities (I’m a trustee of the AIRE Centre and a Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Trust), cultural institutions, businesses, political parties, advice agencies, just to mention some of the private and third sector bodies that we work with. Numerous legal academics are involved in legal practice, some of which will be not-for-profit or in law clinics, and in cross-over work with entities such as the Law Commissions, Parliamentary committees and libraries, not to mention their non-UK equivalents in other states, in the EU and in international organisations. Academics across all subject areas are incredibly well networked across the UK and internationally. I’m a co-Director of the Global Citizenship Observatory, where we come together with academics (in many disciplines) and other stakeholders (NGOs, INGOs and international organisations) to provide databases and resources on citizenship laws and electoral right across the world. Our network comprises nearly 1000 people across pretty much every country of the world. It is a free resource and it’s well used by the press (e.g. when it came to the Donald Trump global birthright controversy in 2018). We provide infographics and visualisation tools, as well as policy briefs.
I hope I’ve helped to prove the point that Nelson’s comment is unfair, unevidenced, and requires pushback (as it got, of course). But this isn’t the final word, and there are so many good examples of other sorts of work that I could have included.
We also need to talk about the fact that, however incentivised we are, as academics, to engage in the ‘impact agenda’, this isn’t the whole story. We are also busy (inside our ivory towers, of course ;-) ) teaching undergradutes and postgraduates, dispensing pastoral care to students, supervising PhD students and early career academics, and sometimes even helping to run the multi-million enterprises that employ us. So getting “out there” is only one part of what we have to do. And that’s without entering into the debate about what value comes from our educational activities in terms of changing students’ lives, widening participation, etc. etc. Two good examples here come to mind: Paul James Cardwell’s work on ERASMUS, about which he is passionate, which he has used for an article on Does studying abroad help academic achievement? (Answer: yes it does, which means that the anticipated loss of participation in ERASMUS along with the support it gives for study abroad is matter of serious concern). And work by my own colleagues at the University of Edinburgh to offer a peace process simulation Building Inclusive Dialogue in Danaan as part of the University’s Festival of Creative Learning.
And then, finally, some personal comments. If we’re specifically talking about Brexit, then it’s fair to say that it can also be painful to talk about it in a media context. It’s hard for me — having worked on EU law for more than 35 years — to feel wholly dispassionate about the issue, even though I’ve long had major criticisms of how the EU works. I wrote about the importance of understanding disintegration as well as integration long before it was fashionable. I commend the long list those who have done important work on the EU law dimensions of Brexit, whether based in the UK or outside. They’ve done brilliant work on the nature and scope of EU competences (Article 50 TEU) as well as on the domestic effects of the various measures that the UK has been adopting. My own perspectives are more limited. I coined a nice phrase to deal with the citizenship dynamics of Brexit: “navigating an archipelago of contradictions”. But you don’t get radio coverage for that…
In relation to the issue of free movement, I find it hard to comprehend voting to make your fellow “citizens” (even if they have different passports) less secure. Whatever we heard from the Leave campaign, it didn’t take a genius to work out that a Leave vote was always going to involve chucking some people under the proverbial bus. Applying the principle of “wherever possible, do no harm” ought to have been enough, in my judgment, to mandate a vote for the status quo, given that migrants are amongst the most vulnerable members of our society. Right now, EU migrants (along with non-EU migrants who have long been treated with disdain by the British state) are having a truly terrible time. But, whatever. I appreciate that not everyone agrees with me on these issues, and I’m happy to have reasonable debates. But the pressure of the media spotlight is probably not the best place. Each deals with these issues in their own way. A Brexit-hating academic friend of mine in another city (not a legal academic) deals with it by writing little ditties and sending them to his friends.
So in sum, in my case it’s probably best that I steer clear of too much direct media engagement, even if that gets me disapproval from inside the London or Westminster bubbles.
But it was good to get my thoughts on Nelson’s tweet out there, even if it has in a way dignified what was clearly a stupid thought which shouldn’t have been uttered. But then, it was on Twitter, so that probably explains a lot.
Here end my reflections.
