Of all places to find public service radio, Newstalk might not be one’s first guess. But every Sunday night, for 42 weeks a year, Prof Patrick Geoghegan’s history show offers a rare specimen of an academic offering the station’s 700,000 listeners education for education’s sake.
We should be thankful, then, that Geoghegan’s appointment as adviser to Taoiseach Leo Varadkar hasn’t whisked him away from the show. From excavating the past, as Geoghegan’s show does, to digging up the clues for the future, the role of the public academic is much more than breaking down difficult concepts or ideas. Instead, it is about making people care.
The increased cynicism towards experts should prompt soul-searching from our academics. Brian Cox, the archetypal 21st-century public academic, warned that such attitudes are “the road back to the cave”. And yet, sometimes, academics get the recognition they deserve. It was midway through the UK general election when commentators started making gags that John Curtice, Professor of Politics at University of Strathclyde, was the night’s sole winner. Having successfully predicted how the night would go, he said afterwards: “When you actually discover something that people don’t know. That’s what we’re meant to be doing.”
Politicians are often shy about revealing their learning. Others take pride in not having any or using TV and Twitter for policy-making. And even for students, it can be difficult to explain to friends or family why our degrees matter or why someone would want to hire a 21-year old expert on the 12th century.
This is why we need public intellectuals and prominent academics. Not just because they tell us what we need to learn, but because they help us think about things we don’t. Every time Brian Cox explains what a Higgs Boson is, or Mary Beard talks us through ancient Pompeii, we’re not just picking up trivia. Instead, we learn to discern a world through more than binaries or ideologies.
These academics are not only serving the public. Crucially, they’re promoting the very systems and institutions that create and refine this knowledge. Attending marches, presenting radio shows and helping us learn – it might be that public academics might be the only people who can finally convince the world that higher education is a public good.
