Facing the Future
What should be the role of the university in challenging times like today? Do we wait for more clarity? Or do we move to grapple with the complex issues roiling our nation and the world? I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: We take seriously our public mandate in UC San Diego’s Division of Social Sciences. As social scientists, we work hard to find correct information and provide potential solutions – actionable facts for people and policymakers facing the future.
So we keep doing our work. We keep producing new and timely research. We keep striving to discover the facts about immigration, or the facts about the economy and the electorate, or what it takes to educate a diverse society or build a healthy community. We do rigorous analysis and take part in the public dialogue – those are services we provide as social scientists.
We’re the go-to for the kind of content people need to have for informed public policy debates and to make responsible decisions. Sometimes the academy is accused of being elite and isolationist. But the way a university produces knowledge is, I believe, the best balance to hubris.
In a university, information circulates through a lot of people, among faculty and students, providing checks and balances to a unitary view. There are the professors and their peers, both within a campus and at other institutions. But there are also undergraduates, graduate students and postdocs collecting and assessing data. At all levels within the academy, there is a constant circulation of information – and fresh eyes looking at the material from new perspectives.
Adding knowledge that has been thoroughly vetted by our academic peers is a big part of a university’s public value. So are taking part in dialogue and serving as a model for inclusion and diversity. It remains critical to civil society that we in the academy do our level best to stay vital and engaged.