Jeff Isaac has an “interesting response”:http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-the-Value-of-Political/48811/?key=GTggJwlgYCFIY3dlKSdFfyJVO3lwIB8ranFFNnsaYVFW to the Coburn saga in the _Chronicle._
but if Senator Coburn is misguided, we political scientists are passing up an opportunity for self-reflection if we respond defensively, in the manner of a mere interest group (though scholarly associations are legitimate players in a politics based on interest groups). Yes, we want public recognition and support, for what we do is valuable. But the most compelling aspect of our demand for recognition is that we are a community of scholars dedicated to free and critical inquiry. And while our teaching and research produce many social benefits, our activities’ primary value, in a democratic society, is the value of inquiry itself.
Yet here a bit of candor is in order. For while most NSF-funded research is surely as valuable as many other federally supported projects, we political scientists kid ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit that we might defensively, if legitimately, claim for it. In fact, in playing up political science’s scientific credentials, we might be losing sight of some of its most obvious potential public benefits. Most political-science research that is modeled on the hard sciences professes a naïve “value neutrality.” Much of that work, moreover, is framed in fairly narrow disciplinary terms, and is little concerned with illuminating public problems in ways that might easily enhance public understanding. One more study of whip counts in Congress surely does no harm. But is it the best our profession can offer? I think we can do, and have done, better.
And he goes on to talk about how we can do it better and how _Perspectives on Politics_ can help us do it better.
I agree with pretty well everything that he says, but feel that his underlying argument (as I understand it – he should not be held responsible for the following) can be stated more bluntly. Political science, even at its best, has few, if any, redeeming aesthetic qualities. We do not offer beautiful theories of how the cosmos came to be; our prose is at best serviceable; if our diagrams convey the meaning they are supposed to and no more, then they have done their job. That means that political science has to justify itself on the pragmatic grounds of its usefulness. But much of political science is not only ugly, but not especially useful. It doesn’t say anything that non-political scientists might possibly care about knowing.
The implication is that political scientists need not only to think about how best to convey what they do to the public; they need to think about doing whats that ought to be so conveyed. This is not to say that political science needs to be in the business of pleasing the crowd; many of the truths that political science might want to convey might indeed be somewhat unpleasant to the sensibilities and prejudices thereof. But it needs to see itself as making a _useful_ contribution to public discourse. Jeff (if I understand him rightly) is suggesting that political science needs to be engaged with public debates in some quite profound ways. This would require a major reshaping of how political scientists understand themselves. That certainly is part of what we have tried to do with _The Monkey Cage_ – to build a point of contact between political science and broader arguments. Our experience would suggest that it is not easy to do this, but that it is (as best as we can tell, anyway) worthwhile.