Photo Credit: Taylor Vick
My CC professor has a really beautiful outlook on research, and it’s one that I try to apply to all of my research work. She always used to say that research should only serve one purpose— to amplify knowledge. Yet instead, research is often used as a tool of obstruction. Big words and big phrases are used to intentionally confuse people from accessing the knowledge the research is purported to discuss. How many students have tried reading an extraordinarily dense piece of text, their eyes scanning the same words over and over again, without any actual meaning sinking in? But as soon as somebody explains the summary of the text to you, it suddenly all makes sense. It’s not that the material being discussed in research is confusing—it’s just the presentation of that material.
I think a lot of us researchers at Columbia are guilty of glorying in the ‘intellectual’ culture research is often defined as. It’s not really our fault; the first thing you see when you walk onto our campus is a grand hauteur building with the names of famed ‘intellectuals’ written on it. You then go into your LitHum class, often your first class in all of college, and read the works that the ‘intellectuals’ have written. Often it’s so confusing that you sometimes have to read at the pace of one page every ten minutes. As you get older and study more, you’re able to read faster and faster, because our ‘elite’ university has given you the ability to consume research. It’s easy then, I think, to start to become proud of this skill you’ve gained— this ability to understand the dense and complex text of the ‘intellectual.’
Being an intellectual is something a lot of Columbia students aspire to be. My goal of this post is to inspire you to reconsider what being intellectual means. The purpose of research is knowledge production and knowledge sharing, but too often the language of that research—sometimes considered the language of the academy—means that these discoveries are available or disseminated only to a select few. There’s a real tension here: while research is about knowledge production, what ends up happening is that this world of discovery is hidden, made unavailable to a broader audience of readers, thinkers, people. To me, being an intellectual means not only understanding the dense form of language often used in academia — it means being able to disseminate your thoughts to anybody who wants to learn. Research might require being published in a journal that is only read by a select few. But as a tool used to improve our existence and enrich our society, research can also be something that is accessible, relevant and exciting to a broader public.
In a recent psychology class of mine, we read a peer-reviewed paper and then got the chance to actually speak with the author. This paper, which I had spent 2 hours attempting to read, became suddenly clear with just a few words from the author. If we want to make our research more accessible as a community, having conversations about one’s research is one way to engage a wider audience, to promote the importance of research, and to celebrate it. I am certainly not the only person to lament on the lack of accessibility in research. That’s why in recent years, more creative forms of sharing research have begun to pop up, such as podcasts, videos, and blogs like this one. But we as Columbia students need to do our part to encourage more of these methods. For example, instead of just submitting a written thesis, why not get a group of seniors in a department together and create a podcast where each episode features an individual talking about their research? As we start to produce and publish our own research, it’s incumbent upon us to think about who our research is reaching and what we can to do to make it more accessible. If our goal as students is to truly become ‘intellectuals’ these are the questions we must consider.