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So on the one hand, I do get this. But on the other hand, I also get sick of it. The onus isn’t *all* on the academics to baby everything down; there have to be *some* people in a society who actually research stuff properly and acquire the necessary detail, because... 1/? https://twitter.com/bencobley/status/1286252899622948864
..God knows govt and journos won’t. Civil servants also carve-out time for plenty of other pointlessness when it’s adequately incentivised (here comes yet another mandatory online training..), so it’s a question of prioritisation. And if you *want* the ‘BLUF’ 2-pager/15-min.. 2/?
..summary talk, *ask* academics for it. We do these at conferences all the time - but then yes, the actual published research has to come out in long form, for some fairly obvious reasons. As for the point about business interests and pressure groups generating more.. 3/?
..influence, what a bizarre sledge; that’s literally their job. You don’t expect your doctor to also be the hospital’s PR officer; if you’re a conscientious enough patient, you *ask* to speak to the specialist. Too often, this “academics write long articles full of complex.. 4/?
..arguments” refrain is cover for “we could’ve looked up the country’s specialists, but they always disagree, and half of them need a train fare from Edinburgh, and we need to have this done by Thursday, and the minister’s already decided what he wants anyway. So, let’s.. 5/?
..do a bit of policy-based evidence-making with the same tame think-tanker we always use, spare ourselves a bunfight of contradictory opinions, and we can then leave ourselves more time to make the PPT slides look nice.” 6/[stopping for now]
(I should add that I say all of this as someone who had to synthesise the consultation responses for two White Papers back in 2011. So I do have a lot of sympathy for civil servants and their particular need for concise, punchline-up-front academic input. But now being in... 7/?
..the academic camp, I know plenty get tired of being told our long-form research is too long-winded for policy, as if it was failing in its main purpose. If you want the pithy summaries, create calls/channels for them. Some will be better, some will be worse, obviously. 8/?
..But, punchline: it’s a two-way street; academics must work to present the punchlines of their work clearly and accessibly, policymakers must reciprocate by (a) actually asking for such summaries and (b) carving-out time to engage with scholars’ findings.) 9/?
(As an aside: newspapers could help by commissioning actual experts to write accessible op-eds. But instead they’d rather give yet another column to [insert your preferred flavour of left-/right-wing pundit], because that’s what generates clicks.) 10/[stopping again]
