Philip Cohen on How “Citizen Scholars” Can Engage with the Public in Uncertain Times

Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the founding director of the open social sciences platform SocArXiv, recently published his latest book, Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists (Columbia University Press). The book is a guide for scholars who want to communicate their research and ideas to audiences beyond the realm of academia, and is full of practical advice for how to balance professional and activist goals, navigate social media, and lead the life of a public intellectual — illustrated by many examples from Cohen’s own career, such as his successful lawsuit against Donald Trump for blocking him on Twitter during the president’s first term.

Cohen spoke to the Stone Center about his book in early April, a time of escalating threats and actions against universities and students by the Trump administration. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Your book came out on January 21st, the day after Trump’s inauguration. So much has changed since then, and individuals who might be considered citizens scholars are facing a very different world. What’s your take on what we’re seeing now?

Cohen: That’s the question of the day: What is happening? I wrote the book during the Biden presidency. I started right after he got elected and I finished right as Trump was beginning to mop up the primaries in 2024. I had already thought a lot about where we were heading in broad terms and where we were, but I did not anticipate how bad things would get, how fast. And I think I am not alone in that, but I still don’t think it’s really set in with a lot of observers.

What I think is happening now is in some ways normal for authoritarian regimes. They attack academia and universities. They attack the media and they try to consolidate governmental power while creating a sort of knowledge vacuum in the public. They want there to be no shared reality, so they can replace it with their own. And especially in the case of a leading personality model like we have now, the idea is that his common sense will prevail. [Trump] said that in his inaugural address: an era of common sense. He said it when asked how he knew that DEI caused the plane crash in D.C.: Because I have common sense. He can only say that if he is degrading actual knowledge in the public sphere. So that is what they’re doing.

The noise is all about budget cuts, but the reality is all about weakening the power of alternative sources of knowledge and information, especially universities, science, the CDC, NIH, and everything else that follows from that: the whole post-World War II arrangement between universities and the federal government. We designed a system that allows us to compete for grants; we administer that system and manage the competition. And the result of that is federal support for universities writ large. They’re attempting to break that, and a lot of our knowledge-generating capacity, whether it’s in public health or science, even the weather — they’re breaking a lot of things. And the idea is to undermine our sense of shared reality.

That’s pretty bad. That’s a pretty big swing from the way it could have gone if the election had turned out the other way, when we would have just still had a kind of mildly dysfunctional democracy that was not really responding to the urgent problems of the day. That’s what we’re used to. If what we’re experiencing now is more like somewhere between Orban and Putin, that’s quite bad. My book in this context feels pretty small. It’s career advice for how to have a career as a social scientist and speak with various publics and build trust and generate new ideas and meet friends and influence people. And the model may or may not really apply as we go forward. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, but I hope the book is still useful. People tell me they still are finding it useful, but the situation has changed a lot.

We’ve found it very useful, and I think it’s actually heartening in many ways. But I’m wondering if you have any advice for how should universities respond to attacks on free speech by their students and their faculty, and even attacks on their curriculum, while their funding is being threatened?

Cohen: I have so far been lucky enough to avoid having responsibility for university administration. So I don’t have specific advice, but I certainly feel that just like we would not accept funding from anybody else who set unreasonable terms, terms that violate our principles, which include free expression, which include the right to pursue ideas openly, which include the right to criticize the government, to criticize other governments — those are all bedrock principles for functioning universities and intellectual life. There can be no compromise on those if we want to maintain our system. So we might have to lose a lot of money, basically.

I don’t think the question is: How can we maintain our federal funding? The question is: How can we maintain our principles? And we may need to find other sources of funding. It may be the states — we may have a more regional system where blue states fund universities and red states don’t, or people cut deals individually and the system that we had breaks down. But we can’t take the position that we can negotiate with the authoritarian regime. You really cannot.

And we have a lot of problems in academia, and in social science in particular, and you sometimes hear, Oh, there are reasons why people don’t trust us. We’re so biased, we’re so leftist, we’re so woke, whatever the complaint is. And those are perfectly reasonable complaints. But they are not the cause of this situation. If we had fired all of the leftists, [the administration] would still be doing exactly this to the universities. And we really have to keep that in mind. It is the university system, the system of academic knowledge production, that they’re really intent on curtailing. And so we shouldn’t blame ourselves. We can’t recover trust by firing the radicals and hoping that that will bring us back into some kind of equilibrium. That’s not how we’re going to get out of this.

As you said, the book contains a lot of career advice. What made you decide to write it? Were you getting a lot of questions from students and established academics about how they should balance scholarship and activism in their professional lives?

Cohen: I’ve made some choices in my career over the last 20 years that kind of put me in this position. I started a blog back in the blogging days. I wrote more than a thousand blog posts. I wrote a textbook, which now I’m four editions into, and I started SocArXiv, a public archive of social science. So I’ve been doing things that have essentially taken some of my research time, and applying them into these more public areas, whether it’s directly speaking and writing to the public through op-eds and essays and blogs, or to the public of undergraduate students with my undergraduate textbook, or trying to build our communication infrastructure apparatus for social science with SocArXiv. I had built this career and I have made compromises. I could have worked harder and gotten more federal grants instead of doing all this stuff. I’m not suggesting that everybody should do that, and it’s great for people to work really hard on their research and get grants.

Also, I got involved in politics. I was part of a group of people who sued President Trump when he blocked me on Twitter. And so I got roped into a bunch of public arena stuff and went to court and appeals court — that’s a whole story that’s in the book. But having put all these pieces of my career together, it reached a point where it seemed like I might have something summative to say. And when the pandemic arrived, I was sitting at home, trying to think about what I have to offer the world, and I put a lot of things together, including how do we really work across disciplines, how do we really think about responding to the events of the day. The Trump-Pandemic-Black Lives Matter conflagration, while I was sitting at home, is what led me to write the book.

Even before you wrote this book, you’d decided that teaching and communicating and responding to issues were more important to you than just doing research all the time. Why did you feel it was important to have a public-facing role?

Cohen: Well, different people have different things that excite them about their work. And I am certainly not holding up the citizen scholar model as prescriptive for all social scientists. And some people thrill and delight at more basic research/puzzle-solving/deep theoretical questions all the time, and God bless them. I felt like at some point the world was not ready to act on deeper knowledge on the problems I was interested in. The world needed to act on the knowledge we already had. We know we can eliminate child poverty with relatively straightforward policy changes. We know a lot about racism and sexism and how these things work and the kinds of approaches that are effective — but when I say “we,” I don’t mean everybody. I mean people who’ve studied these things. And how to go about turning those things into reality in the world just kind of rose in importance for me.

One of the chapters I have in the book is about descriptive research, and one of the things you realize at a certain point, depending on the training you’ve had and the kind of work you do, is the literature review and the Descriptive Table 1 in our paper already puts us way ahead of the average person on what we know about a problem. And we should be able to use our skills with data, with reading and synthesizing the literature, with writing and speaking, and we should be able to communicate descriptively what is actually happening in the world. And so I’ve put a lot of work into training myself to do that, and I think that’s something that social scientists should do more with our students and our junior colleagues — encourage just telling people what’s happening, including each other.

There’s been a causal revolution in social science — largely driven by economics, but also experimental work like psychology — to really try to tailor our work around strong causal statements. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that kind of work, but I do think that it skips over the important work of describing reality. In some cases, what we really need first is a solid, empirically grounded, rich description of reality. And so I am encouraging people to do that, and I hope our academic overlords will find ways to reward that kind of work more than they do now, which is to diminish descriptive work as close to journalism. It’s ]like, Oh, this is journalistic, this is descriptive. It’s not real science. I think that’s an unhealthy stance for academic social science to take.

You’ve mentioned SocArXiv, which is dedicated to expanding access to open research. As you know, we’re big fans of SocArXiv here at the Stone Center — it’s where our working papers are archived. I wanted to ask about open scholarship in general. You describe openness as being very important in building trust, but are there any potential costs to making research freely available?

Cohen: Well, yes, but that’s the second order question. First we have to consider the cost of not-open research so then we can compare them. I do think, especially if we’re engaged in the public sphere at all, one of our superpowers is our norms and practices of transparency and openness. That is, if we speak to the public as scholars, we may be activists or not, but we’re different from some activists in that we subject our work to criticism, we open up our methods and data, we encourage, not only allow, but encourage people to test and check our work. That’s part of who we are and what we do. In fact, the very idea of publishing scientific research is that openness. We could just declare the results, but we don’t. In the paper we say, This is how we did it, this is the data I use, this is the method. So even just regular publishing is the practice of openness and transparency.

That’s part of who we are and why anybody should trust us. We have a whole system of peer evaluation built into everything we do. Peer review is also an open practice. I’m showing my article to three people and they are deciding whether or not they think it’s good. We do that before we put the stamp on it that says this journal approves this article. But now we think we should go further than that, and we should open up our data and methods more, and we should make sure our publications are freely available.

You’re absolutely right to consider the risks and downsides. There are a few. One is just the resources and time, and especially junior scholars may feel, Why should I devote my time and energy to essentially preparing data and research materials for somebody else to publish work that I might do next year?

And the challenge for us is to realize that that is essentially an antisocial-attitude problem. Not that it’s an individual problem; it’s built into our incentives and structures. If you say, I don’t want to share my work because somebody else might use it to publish research — well, that’s what we actually want. That’s how science works. We advance. And it’s a collective endeavor. So we have to find ways to make sure that the people who do the work get credit and get recognized and build their careers and so on. The hoarding impulse is really, really bad. So we have to find better ways.

Another risk: if I say on whatever social media app is current at the moment, Look, I published this article, here’s all my methods and my materials, and here’s the peer reviews where people criticized it, then trolls and opponents of various kinds will go through that and they’ll pick it apart and they’ll criticize you. Or even if you just have some result showing that there’s a lot of racism, or that transgender people exist, then some people may criticize or attack you for that. And I don’t want to diminish that, but we have to find ways to deal with that rather than just avoid it. We need our universities to support us.

The first thing the trolls do is they send a letter to your dean saying, This person should be fired, this person is terrible. And we need our universities to say, No, we’re not doing that. This person is a scholar in our community and they’re practicing their work according to our norms, and we’re going to stick up for them. We have to support each other. But also, I don’t want people to make their lives miserable. If you hate [social media] and it makes you sick every time you pick up your phone, then take a break or don’t do it. I’m not insisting that everybody go out there and fight with Nazis on social media all day.

This takes us back to how we started this conversation. The book urges scholars to fight back, to speak truth to power on social media. Given what we’ve seen in the past few months, would you change that advice in any way?

Cohen: We have not figured out the reflexive habits of our particular authoritarian moment. When you read histories of societies under authoritarian governments, you see that people learn how to handle this, what they can say and what they can’t say. In China, you have this whole proliferation of poetry with homonyms and double meanings, and there’s a way that people manage the appropriate level of criticism without getting into the wrong kind of trouble. We don’t know what that is yet. It certainly is the case right now that an international student who walks by a Gaza protest is at risk of being deported. And I have no special insight or wisdom into that, except I absolutely would not demand that people take risks for the sake of speaking truth to power. If the odds are stacked against you and it’s a losing battle, there is nothing to be gained by doing that unless you absolutely cannot keep quiet. That’s an unreasonable sacrifice. But if you’re willing to face that consequence, I also wouldn’t also tell you not to do that.

But I don’t think we should be naive, and we’d have to figure out what the norms are. Can we work with NIH grants without mentioning diversity or gender identity? Will we learn to use different words and still do the research we need to do? Maybe. Maybe we’ll have to say that’s not a legitimate source of funding anymore, and we have to find some other way, but we don’t know what that is yet. One of the real differences between this authoritarian moment and previous ones is the technology they have. The ability to turn off somebody’s funding with the press of a button if they say something that annoys Trump on social media is really a new situation. We’re more accustomed to something like, They proposed a bad bill, they would have bad policies. Now we’re talking about highly targeted high-speed retribution, and we just don’t know how to deal with that yet.

And I should have mentioned this more in response to your question about what universities should do. The way that they targeted Columbia and other institutions is strategic, and it suggests it’s a terroristic strategy of preventing people from speaking out because the consequences could be so great. The answer to that is collective responses. Our academic societies can be very important for that. Our institutions can work together.

I’m a big critic of the American Sociological Association and had previously quit because I didn’t like their policies on publishing and open science. I rejoined. I think we have to have an ability to speak collectively. It’s safer and more supportive to do that. It’s absolutely one of the principles going forward: finding ways to generate collective action so that people are not just taking individual risks.

Read the Book:
Citizen Scholar: Public Engagement for Social Scientists