THE ACADEMIC-PRACTIONER GAP

One of the goals we have for our website content is to give academics the opportunity to communicate their significant findings with practitioners. We’re rather zealous about this, because we see the gap between the work that comes from universities and their actual use in the public sector as one of the biggest missed opportunities for governments.

So, for example, in just the last months, we’ve featured Guest Columns from professors at Kean University, Augusta University, University of Nebraska, California State University and more. Additionally, we feature Management Updates that highlight studies and reports that come from academics practically every week or so.

Obviously, as much as we try, we’re a tiny bit of linkage between the two groups and the disconnect is extremely large.

We don’t believe that government officials genuinely want to eschew the work of academics. But there are dramatically different incentives, timelines and ways of communicating that stand in the way of working together for the benefit of all.

For one thing, universities tend to reward faculty members for getting published in lengthy, well researched journal articles. These simply aren’t the kind of thing that practitioners read – and even if they tried to do so, these publications are expensive for individuals without a university connection. What’s more, the articles are often long and complex. The abstracts that are available are limited and even when article access is possible, only a handful of public sector employees (including legislative staff) have the time to read through them.

What’s more, many academic papers don’t make an effort to boil their findings down into the kind of practical useable guidance that practitioners need to deal with the seemingly endless litany of problems they’re trying to solve.

Then there’s an unfortunate mismatch in timing. Truly rigorous academic papers can easily take years to complete, and many of them are based on data that is remarkably out of date. We frequently find ourselves unable to use the conclusions reached in academic literature when we discover that the information upon which it’s based is years or even decades old.

One of the issues we run across most frequently is the fact that peer-reviewed literature is (in the words of a long-time friend) “gritty with numbers.” They’re full of regression tables. We know what regression tables are supposed to accomplish, but we can’t really understand many of them, and we don’t think it’s presumptuous to assume that the folks who make cities, counties and states function well, don’t understand them either.

This is often driven home to us when we attend conferences in which many of the presenters are academics who are interested in getting attention for their work. But when the slides that pop up on the screen are full of formulas, we have to force ourselves to be polite and not sidle out of the room.

Even the writing style is an obstacle to comprehensibility. Paragraphs run on until readers’ eyes grow bleary. Jargon and acronyms are everywhere. In collaboration with the highly-esteemed academic Don Kettl (who is exceptional in his ability to write in prose that can be comprehended), we wrote a book in 2024 titled “The Little Guide to Writing for Impact.” Our fantasy was that this would help academics reach out to practitioners in approachable language that keeps people wanting to move forward to the next paragraph.

We know we’re hardly alone in wanting to see the practitioner-academic link strengthened. Several years ago, we wrote about an executive branch initiative in North Carolina that actively connected state researchers with academics at colleges and universities (and with links to foundations, as well). Sadly, the North Carolina model didn’t live past the change in the gubernatorial administration.

There may be failures to communicate on the academic side, but it’s not clear to us that states and localities are clamoring for more great ideas generated by institutions of higher learning. At least they don’t seem willing to spend the cash in order to smooth this process. If they really wanted, they could hire dedicated policy analysts trained as academic-to-practitioner-translators. We haven’t become aware of any positions like that.

If readers of this column are aware of promising efforts to close the academic-practitioner gap, please let us know. We’d be happy to give them some publicity.

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