Quote Originally Posted by SteveMetz View Post
I realize there are scholars and even programs that are exceptions to this. But it is still my impression that it is common..
On this we absolutely agree, Steve (and it applies not only to the military and national security policy, but to the broader conduct of diplomacy, aid policy, and government in general).

Of course, the world is also full of politically naive aid workers, undiplomatic soldiers, and all sorts of policy-doers who aren't aware of existing research in their areas of responsibility. However, I think there is a particular burden on scholars to actually understand the things they purport to research/analyze/write about.

In some ways it ought to be easy enough to do: summers with no teaching and sabbaticals every seven years provide ample opportunity to involve oneself in the policy world as resource, consultant, or even practitioner. However, most social science disciplines view such activity as less worthy than the more traditional research-and-publish activities, and university reward systems (tenure, promotion, salary increments) reflect this.

In my own case, I suspect that everything I've done in the policy world (policy advisor at the Department of Foreign Affairs, a decade on the Interdepartmental Experts Group on Middle East Intelligence, World Bank and UN consultant, second track diplomatic negotiation) collectively count for less than an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. I'm not complaining about my personal situation--after all, I'm full professor at a great university, full of great students--but to get there you do rather have to burn the candle at both ends. More importantly, it results in a discipline that often seems to be preoccupied by abstract theorizing and to have little intrinsic grasp of the actual nature of politics and policy processes.

The odd (and even tragic) thing is that many, perhaps most graduate students usually come into the system wanting to not only study the world, but to engage with it too. We put then put them through a series of disciplinary tribal rituals that emphasize the theoretical at the cost of the actual, and in the end reproduce the discipline's own weaknesses. (Or we put them off graduate school altogether--which is a shame, since there is a lot that is useful to learn too.)