Every morning, over a million college teachers and scholars in America get up and go to campus to do their jobs with allegiance to the higher purpose of universities. Scholars ask new questions, vet ideas rigorously, and produce new insights. They impart knowledge and skills to the next generation of innovators, and sometimes share their insights for practical applications or public understanding.

They do this by adhering to the methods of their disciplines—yielding to the evidence rather than to the politics of activists or wealthy donors—in a search for truth rather than a grab for power. They disseminate their scholarship as a gift, with a sense of responsibility and humility, comfortable in the knowledge that better ideas might replace their own.

These disciplined intellectuals are driven by an unending curiosity and the hope that, in doing this work diligently, they might contribute to a body of knowledge, help solve a mystery or problem, or catch a glimpse of something enduring or sublime.

Except for the scholar-activists.

In contrast to the majority of faculty, this small subset rejects the separation of knowledge from politics as either unsound or undesirable. Their raison d’être is promoting a particular agenda. It might be social justice, a free market economy, or other social ideals. (Yes, scholar-activists can lean right as well as left.)

Under the banners of their chosen causes, scholar-activists champion making a difference, changing the world, “participatory advocacy,” “academic activism,” and even “bullying back.” Some scholar-activists describe their work as “making politics our job description,” deriding the rest of us as “policing the border between activism and scholarship.”

Of course, politics and scholarship can never be completely separated. But striving to keep them separated—even when studying pressing social and political issues—is central to a scholar’s intellectual autonomy. How, then, did “scholar-activist” become an identity embraced by any self-respecting academic? And what might be a better way to make meaning in an academic career?

Stanley Fish once offered a theory about why academics drove ugly cars, one which I think can also explain why academics wear shabby clothes. Fish said many of us felt guilty for being paid to lead a life of the mind.

I remember that feeling. As a young professor in the 1990s, I felt pressured to justify my academic work as practically valuable, as if intellectual inquiry without immediate outcomes marked an unconscionably privileged existence, a drain on taxpayer dollars.

Perhaps this is why so many of us welcomed Ernest Boyer’s 1990 report for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, “Scholarship Reconsidered.” The report’s identification of “the scholarship of application,” in addition to the scholarship of discovery, integration, and teaching, celebrated the application of scholarly insights to solve societal challenges.

Back then, I didn’t question the desire to show how scholarship contributed to solving social problems, meeting community or economic needs, helping make Americans civically engaged again, or benefitting underserved populations. After all, I didn’t want my university to lose even more funding. Besides, this framing offered a way to experience academic work as meaningful and important in ways non-academics can more immediately recognize.

And yet the quest to prove the relevance of our work quickly moved, among a small portion of scholars, beyond explaining the applicability and possible impact of our scholarship. Whether catalyzed by postmodern critiques of truth, nihilism, identity politics, the corporatization of universities, or elite overproduction, some professors proceeded from outreach and engagement to framing their work as “scholar-activism” in ethnic and gender studies, “museum activism” in museum studies, “library activism” in libraries, and “intellectual activism” in business schools. Scholars also became increasingly vulnerable to serving the political interests of external groups willing to fund their work.

Meanwhile, campus life staff effectively put universities’ engaged turn on steroids, often seeing themselves as the real arm of the university’s commitment to social responsibility. Both their graduate training and professional associations now frame social justice as the point, rather than a secondary outcome, of the university (citing Boyer). Some student affairs professionals—whose roles are distinct from faculty positions tasked with teaching and research—even consider themselves scholar-activists, using the imprimatur of scholarship to justify their on-the-job activism.

Campus life staff effectively put universities’ engaged turn on steroids, often seeing themselves as the real arm of the university’s commitment to social responsibility.

The scholar-activist framing has become popular enough that some scholars who are not even striving to produce political effects in their capacities as faculty members adopt the label just as they would other academic vogues, like mindfulness and the flipped classroom. A lot of those who are self-identifying as scholar-activists don’t even seem to be what the label implies. Consider a 2022 online panel discussion at Harvard featuring scholars who said they are scrupulously “driven by data” but who identified nonetheless as “scholar-activists.” One panelist described wanting to be “a footnote to the movement,” producing factual information to be used by people engaged in extramural freedom struggles.

But being a scholar whose work winds up being cited or used is merely being a scholar. Likewise, curating an exhibition on the Holocaust is simply being a museum scholar, and designing a management curriculum that prepares students for a global business environment is just being a management instructor.

Scholars might hope their work will help to cure cancer, detect financial fraud, improve crop yields, compose a beautiful symphony, keep our water supply clean, contribute to downstream product applications, and so on. They might share their scholarship with public audiences, testify before Congress, or engage in applied, advisory, or consulting work that benefits decision makers outside academia. But they do this as scholars whose credibility rests on intellectual, rather than instrumental, engagement.

In contrast, performing one’s activism in or as part of one’s role as a university teacher or scholar is like breaking the law under the guise of enforcing it. The rogue cop and the scholar-activist both treat the immediate result they pursue as more important than the institution and its integrity.

When scholars are not seen as producing credible information free from political interference, we all lose the ability to challenge power, irrationality, bigotry, groupthink, quackery, and superstition. We also lose the ability to resist extramural forces that would have scholars bend academic research agendas, conclusions, instruction, or professional service to suit political interests.

Scholars are now scrutinized by watchdog groups reporting on radical professors or departments (with the chauvinistic judgment one would expect from such targeted surveillance). University trustees and state legislators invoke scholar-activism to justify their attempts to close down academic units, terminate tenure, and “balance” the ideologies on campus. And scholars doing legitimate research find themselves cleverly, quietly undermined or openly harassed by special-interest outsiders who find their work threatening.

Academic freedom and tenure are designed to protect scholars from these scholar antagonists. Unfortunately, some scholar-activists have begun to frame academic freedom as a sword instead of a shield. But protecting against scholar antagonism requires keeping the university a place for scholarly inquiry and integrity.

This does not mean that a scholar can’t be a political activist when speaking and acting as an ordinary citizen. That said, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) explains that such freedom in extramural utterances includes the responsibilities to “at all times be accurate,” “exercise appropriate restraint,” “show respect for the opinions of others,” and “make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.” In other words, scholars are expected to act like scholars.

Unfortunately, some scholar-activists have begun to frame academic freedom as a sword instead of a shield.

Scholar-activism wrongly presumes individual scholars choose a virtuous career path by becoming principled partisans or staunch superheroes. Instead, the commitment to methods that protect inquiry and promote truth help society make tangible improvements. Scholarship can improve the world—but it does so on a pace and in unpredictable ways that cannot be reduced to individuals’ contributions.

Realizing that we need an alternative to scholar-activism that honors scholars’ legitimate desire to make meaning, I offer the term “scholar-optimism” to better capture the faith in the cumulative power of rigorous scholarship as a force for social progress.

Scholar-optimists need not be passive, indifferent, or naive. A scholar of, say, wildlife ecology might legitimately share their assessment of the research on whether hunting helps protect an ecosystem. Scholar-optimists like this can share their results derived from scholarly methods even when those results are rebuffed, as scholars did in 2015 when their studies found toxic water in Flint, Michigan. Aron Sousa explains that those scholars couldn’t declare a public emergency or order pipes to be replaced, but they could “find and show the truth, and [thereby] try to take care of the people being harmed.” They could and did put truth first.

Scholar-optimists like these proceed hoping that their work serves the common good, even when—not because—sharing the truth draws contempt or harassment. They’re not there for a battle, like scholar-activists; they’re conscientiously there to generate and share knowledge.

You don’t become a scholar-optimist simply by doing the opposite of what the stereotypical scholar-activist does—for instance, shifting from the politicized teaching of scholar-activists to acting as if classrooms are mere forums for the exchange of uninformed, intellectually vapid opinions. Neither presenting the claims that a pressure group finds acceptable nor presenting claims in a relativist fog of alternative facts upholds the scholar’s responsibility to employ disciplinary methods to vet ideas and disseminate credible knowledge.

Scholar-optimists should not eschew ethical considerations in research. Nor should they embrace some naive optimism where they retreat from possibilities to apply their scholarly insights. Scholar-optimists can help others in industry, government, nonprofits, healthcare, the arts, journalism, or community groups.

But we should recognize that hoping one’s responsibly produced scholarship can be useful or applied to solving a problem is optimistic, not activist. And while scholar-activism ultimately invites scholar antagonism, scholar-optimism could well protect us from it.