What it's all about

I decided to start writing a blog because I think that sometimes I have good ideas. Maybe. We'll see. I've titled it "jumping off the ivory tower" because, I am an academic who is frustrated with academia. We've made ourselves irrelevant, and I'm hoping for a return to a time when people actually respected academics because they were out in the community, talking about issues and coming up with good ideas to solve real problems. That doesn't happen any more, at least not often, and instead, academics are forced to write articles and books about arcane material so they can get published and admired by a small group of other academics for how "smart" they are. It's much like a large middle school club, and to some extent, I feel as if the current negative view of academia is our own damn fault. Academia is there to educate, that is our job, yet most of us in the social sciences are stuck trying to publish on stupid irrelevant crap so we can keep our jobs - and our university administration doesn't care if we are good teachers, but only if we publish in high ranking journals that only other academics read (and students who might be forced to consult them and forget them for a paper). How ridiculous! So, in any case, my plan for the blog is to pontificate about things that make me angry, or interest me in general. Which has little to do with the title of my post, but I suppose I am just having one of those days on which I hate being an academic.