The following is the first part of my two-part interview with Margret Grebowicz, Professor of Philosophy at Missouri University of Science and Technology. She is the author of ten books, including Why Internet Porn Matters (2013), Whale Song (2017), and most recently, Rescue Me: On Dogs and Their Humans (2022). She is also the founder and editor of Practices, a book series ‘for real-life hobbyists, devotees, and enthusiasts.’
This interview took place on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2024, the day after Margret gave the keynote talk at WashU’s inaugural Public Scholarship Symposium. My aim was to record as organic a conversation as possible with one of the leading voices in public humanities. In the first part, we discuss how Margret got started in public scholarship and her practical definition of the genre. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
T: I think I wanted to just first start by asking you to introduce yourself and then share perhaps some of the aspects of public scholarship that you are drawn to. And it can be a much more free form sort of thing, too.
M: So you know, like I said in my talk yesterday, there’s kind of nothing to think about. You just do it. And the more we talk about it—like this fluffy—it becomes this nothingness. Right, so just be warned.
T: That might be useful to talk about. How about we start there? You say it’s…you just do it. Do you think that’s because it’s inherently—you were talking about this in your in your speech yesterday—it’s inherently a private thing? In some ways, it’s an inward turn, even though it’s for the public.
M: Right. So all of this, our writing and even just our thinking in this context, are subject to these metrics…these performance metrics. And so, in response to that, public scholarship is this kind of punk rock, DIY, which is not subject to these metrics. It can’t be contained by the metrics. So I think that’s the pleasure of it. And you just do it, you just do it. I just want people to go back to their desks and start doing it.
T: So you’re hesitant to give it a definition.
M: Well, for me, the definition is very concrete. It’s about—for me—it’s about publishing. It’s all about publishing one’s work in mainstream media.
T: The mainstream media?
M: Yeah, and, you know, getting paid. It’s something that faculty are sort of nervous about, because if you get paid for a piece of writing, it means it’s not properly peer reviewed. It’s a different kind of peer review, right? An editor saying, ‘yes, I will publish this,’ or ‘no, I won’t publish this,’ is a kind of response, right? It’s not like you’re self-publishing, which has no peer review, but it isn’t part of that sort of academic publishing machine, and the fact that we get paid to do it in many cases makes it look even more suspicious—makes it look even more like, well, you’re not in it for the right reasons. You’re in it because you’re trying to make a buck, and not for pure research, which I think is really naive and almost kind of a lie about academic work, as if it were pure, as if this weren’t shot through with careerism.
T: Even more so.
M: I don’t want to sound like a cynic about research, but I think it’s a good healthy dose of realism around what motivates people to write and to think.
T: I’ve never thought about it that way. I think public scholarship does have an opportunity to, as you say, manage that realism and negotiate it. Was there a moment in your career when you felt yourself moving in this direction?
M: It was the moment when Chris [Christopher Schaberg] said to start looking at publishing in The Atlantic—that when you have a really good idea, that’s when you take it someplace mainstream, that’s when you take it someplace with a big readership.
T: What was your first response to Chris when he told you to publish in The Atlantic? Were you immediately on board?
M: No, I wasn’t immediately on board. I felt like I had to make a decision between something like the Olympics and then the kinds of outlets that I had been trained to respect, to chase after. I had to sort of hear him tell me, well, you can publish this in Critical Inquiry and have, if you’re really lucky, maybe five hundred readers. The odds of that are slim. Or you can publish that same idea in The Atlantic, and have in the tens of thousands. Right now, it’s of course in the millions. That’s just a completely different scale. And the fact is that we don’t think about that.
I mean, this was back in 2016, so almost a decade ago now, but then everyone sort of looked at it as still entertainment. I even had someone say that what I do is edutainment. We don’t realize that we’re actually looking at knowledge production when academics do this.
T: Right.
M: So I think we’re sitting on something revolutionary here, in the sense that it should change this world, the academic world, if academics thought of themselves as participating in the public sphere in this way. More people are reading now than ever before in the history of the world. So they can be reading your stuff, or they can be reading somebody else’s stuff. And I know that I’m doing good work. I know that my work is about the right stuff.
T: When you chose not to publish in Critical Inquiry, was there a part of you that felt that you were, at least at that time, giving something up, giving up something that was a part of you, that perhaps you were hesitant to give up?
M: Absolutely. But I know now that I could have published in them both [The Atlantic and Critical Inquiry]. I didn’t know that. At the time, I was still kind of led by these academic rules, that you can’t publish the same idea in both places, or you’re plagiarizing yourself. That’s completely not the case.
T: That’s fascinating.
M: I think the institution, I think we’re so far behind. We are so behind in academia. You can see that reflected in the whole ChatGPT panic, right? This public scholarship panic is another panic. It’s just because we haven’t caught up to other stuff, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
T: Well, we also haven’t caught up to what American academia was at one time, or American philosophy was at one time.
M: Not just American, right? All of the great academics were public intellectuals.
T: Absolutely, all of them.