The Role of the Public Intellectual

Hey, Jeff, I've got a pop question for you. Name one of your favorite authors on Substack.

Well, that's an easy one. Emily Oster. Her writing is always a topic of conversation in circles of fellow parents.

Yeah, you know me too. And that's good news, Jeff, because today our guest is Emily Oster.

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I'm Michael Horn.

And I'm Jeff Salinko. Our guest today is Emily Oster, a professor of economics at Brown University and the best selling author of two books, Expecting Better in Krishi, which take a data driven approach to decision making in pregnancy and parenting. Emily is also the author of a popular newsletter on Substack called Parent Data. Both Michael and I are subscribers and we highly recommend it. In the wake of the COVID 19 pandemic. In addition to providing a lot of helpful resources and information on how to think about reopening K12 schools and the risk to children, she helped start with a band of others, the COVID 19 School Response Dashboard. It tracks the incidences of COVID 19among students and staff and has helped fill the data void that exists with the federal government's lack of data. Emily earned her Ph.D. and bachelor's degree from Harvard University and has also taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Brown. Emily, welcome to Future you.

Thanks for having me.

So a question we often ask our guests on the show is how they made their way into higher education. So what led you to pursue a PhD in economics and become a faculty member?

So it's probably worth telling you that both my parents are economics professors and so relative to some other people, I was aware that this was a job, but I wasn't sure that this was the kind of job that I wanted. I was really into doing research. I've sort of always been into research, but when I came into university, I thought I would do more hard sciences. And then I had a very ill fated summer in which I had two jobs, one of which was dissecting fruit fly larval brains and the other was researching. Working with a professor who was doing higher ed research, actually an economist who was researching universities. And let's just say the fruit flies were not. They were not the winner. And then it was sort of all economics from there.

Fruit flies in higher ed. Interesting. I probably can make deeper comments on that indeed.

Go ahead, Michael. I was going to say resist your urge, Jeff. So, Emily, in recent months, obviously your name has been, you know, tightly connected to the decision to whether to reopen K12 schools and the health risks posed to children. But you're obviously a professor, of course, on a college campus at Brown, whose president made a lot of headlines early on in the higher ed world saying that it was imperative. Right. That colleges reopen. So I'm just curious, your take on that decision and as a faculty member surrounded by staff and so forth. And what's your take on how, of course, how Brown has done it, but more generally how higher ed institutions ought to think about this reopening decision from your, from, from the vantage point that you have.

Yeah, so I should, I should also say I actually was one of the co chairs of the committee about reopening Brown in addition to. So, so I have sort of some, some background on this. I mean, you know, I think, I think higher ed is in some ways more complicated, in some ways less complicated than K12. So, so I think K12 is actually a fairly low risk environment. Particularly the youngest kids are at, are at lower is a high risk environment because the sort of mixing with the community, the age of the students, there are a bunch of things that make it potentially higher risk. It is also the case that a lot of higher ed institutions have more resources that they can use to lower that risk. And so I think what we have done at Brown and I think what is basically emblematic of all the places that have done this successfully is that we have done a huge amount of testing and input, a huge amount of restrictions. We actually have a lot of kids back, which is not true of everybody. But we brought a lot of people back. We'll actually bring more people back in the spring. But we're testing everybody twice a week. Everybody is on campus. All the on campus undergrads, all the off campus undergrads, the on campus staff, faculty, all have a very elaborate testing infrastructure. Plus there's like everyone wears a mask all the time on campus. Classes are kept to small groups. So we've done a lot of the kinds of things that you would hope that places would do and I think that that has been pretty successful. You know, we've also seen evidence of much less successful versions of higher ed reopening. And I think some of that is sort of about the kinds of behaviors that students are engaged in and there's a sort of like lack of testing and then the behavior and they interact poorly.

I hear the Safety, lasagna, that theme that you've popularized popping in here as well.

So Emily, Michael and I are. We follow you on Twitter. We get your newsletter. You're part of a generation of faculty members who have really taken advantage of these new ways of communicating with the public as public intellectuals and just want to get your take on the role of today's faculty members as public intellectuals. What's the experience like on college campuses with your peers and students who obviously also hold strong views themselves? And how has that role shifted over time, particularly in the moment that we're living in right now when there's so much controversy, it seems swirling around every single issue out there. Some faculty members say, I want nothing to do with that. And other faculty members kind of dive into the public square in ways that move so quickly now, given social media and other ways of communicating with the public.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that I sort of struggle with both in my own sort of personal approaches to how public I am and how much of my work is in that. That space and in sort of how we think about evaluating other sort of people. So this, you know, this question comes up. So I chair the tenure and promotion committee here. So this issue of sort of how do we think about public engagement as a kind of piece of scholarship? Is that scholarship in what ways? It is scholarship. This is something I think we're all going to be grappling with, all of these universities are going to be grappling with in the next five to 10 years. And I think it's. I find it really complicated because on the one hand, there's kind of things that are scholarship and things that are obviously not scholarship. And then there are things in the middle. And I think as kind of citizens of the world, we have some responsibility to do some of those things. But how do we. Well, we don't have ways to evaluate them in the kind of standard metrics of academia. I also think for me, one of the things that's been hard is I've been collecting a lot of data on K12 schools. And the way we've been collecting data is very different than how I would collect data for an academic study. We have had to go. We're trying to go fast. It's an opt in sample, it's improving, it's changing over time. And we're trying to be upfront about how we're doing it. But ultimately, this is not how I would run a research study. But I think when people see the data, no matter how often I Say that there's a sort of imprimatur of kind of validity that's put on it because I am a professor, and also an expectation that is put on it. And it's therefore a challenge to say, well, this isn't really with my professor hat on. This is like a different hat. This hat is less interested in sample selection than the other hat. And so I think that's a challenge.

When I watch you and other professors who have kind of entered into this fray in a way of, like with newsletters and Twitter and articles, I'm thinking, wow, they're almost becoming like journalists in a way. Right. And writers in that way. Is this the few you talked about kind of how this is evaluated in things like tenure and promotion? Do you foresee this becoming more of a thing in the future? Again? I'm really kind of even fascinated just around newsletters, because, as you know, being on substack. Right. You know, there's all these journalists who are leaving their journalistic homes and going on substack as kind of freelancers, in a way. Do you foresee that happening more with professors who kind of have their, you know, it's not just about writing books anymore. It's not even just being on Twitter, but now you're going to have your own newsletter. Do you foresee this becoming almost like these brands that we start to have among professors?

I think probably not very broadly, no. I think we'll see more of it, and I think there will be some fields in which we'll see more of that. So can I imagine more of the kind of people at HBS having that as part of your public Persona? Absolutely. But I think it will mostly be people who kind of like me, already have a little bit of a sort of move in that direction. So, you know, the newsletter is like, I had the books and that was like a very. When I wrote the wrote expecting better in 2013, that was like a very unusual thing to do and totally not. I mean, not everyone's favorite thing. And then, you know, it's sort of like kind of evolved. Evolved over time. But part of why I went in this direction is that I was already sort of out there. And I think that we'll see some of it. But academia is slow to change, so

you're, of course, a professor in economics. Could you talk to us a little bit about your path to writing on questions of parenting? And now into this huge public health question we're facing around COVID 19 and what schools ought to do? What's the through Line from kind of economics to parenting to COVID 19 and public health.

Yeah. So, I mean, the sort of economics to parenting is really that I got pregnant and I found myself doing. I mean, I'm really like a data. A data economist, like, through and through. I'm not an economic theorist. I'm not a, like, person who studies the stock market. I like data. I like health data. And I was doing all this research in the service of my own pregnancy. And at the same time, I've sort of always been a person who liked writing for a popular audience and sort of trying to translate either evidence or, you know, economic theory into kind of things that people could understand. And so that sort of led to the first book, the book about pregnancy. And then I actually didn't write much. I mean, I did some sort of public writing, mostly about data, for a number of years. And then eventually I did write this second book. And I think for me, writing the second sort of choosing to write a second book, which was not an academic book, was a sort of, like, a very conscious choice to say, okay, I'm going to sort of move a little bit in this direction. And now I'm not just going to be like, a person who did this weird thing of writing one book. I'm now going to be, like a person who writes books. Or that's going to be like, a part of my professional identity. And then the newsletter, the sort of, like, then the path is very easy for me to see because my. My publisher told me to start a newsletter because, as you said, Jeff, everyone's on substats, like, thing now. And so actually they just told me, start a newsletter. And then Hamish, who runs Substack, had been calling me, like, every three months, being like, do you want to start a newsletter in substack? How about substack? Let's have a meeting. Should be on Substack. And so finally I was like, all right, I'll be on Substack. Which turned out to be an amazing decision because I did it, like, in January, and I had this like, oh, I'm just gonna, like, every other week I'll write something about, like, juice to study on juice and toddlers. You know, it'll be so relaxed. And then the pandemic started, and then I was just writing all the time, and it was, like, a very good opportunity to connect with people. And then I sort of started talking a lot about schools and realizing there was no data and kind of getting into my current situation.

And to that end, I mean, it's been Incredible through line, as you said in connection point for a lot of us out there who maybe came to you for another reason and then just to be frankly informed. So, so first, I guess. Thank you. But you know, the second part of that is obviously you're in the public eye. You've become a target for criticism. You've, you've grappled with this publicly a little bit about, you know, handling it and so forth in some of the articles. I'm just curious, you know, Jeff and I certainly grapple and struggle with criticism as well. And I'll say grappling with it has certainly changed my own orientation of how quick I am to judge others, but I suspect it's not something that our listeners have given much thought to. You know, what it is like to be out in the public eye as a faculty member getting that criticism. And I think it's an important conversation at a time when our national dialogue, when we should, you know, having civic dialog should be something that we strive toward. So I'm just curious to hear you sort of reflect on that a little bit to the extent you're comfortable.

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, so I think, I think I've been pretty public about how I don't, I don't like to be criticized, but I, and, but more than that, I mean, nobody likes to be criticized, but I find it like, it really, like brings, it really brings me down. Like, it really affects my mood. I am like quite thin skinned about people criticizing me. It's sort of like if you're a faculty member, you get visible. This is people. But when you get these teaching evaluations right from your students and you'll read them and like, most of them will be good, and then there'll be the one person who's like, you know, and sometimes it'll be very like, minor thing. I didn't like their shoes, you know, your pants are too tight. I mean, people say all kinds of crazy stuff in teaching evaluations. And that's the one thing you focus on, right. You remember the one guy who was like, I, you know, you sucked and this class was terrible. And that's like, for me, the sort of criticism is like that also like this sort of public criticism. And it's, you know, it's hard to like, sort of say, to go out and say things and then have people come back and say, like, you know, you're doing a terrible job. And I guess the thing I always sort of find odd about my own approach to this is like, I will feel terrible about something and then I will like, three days later do something else that I know is good. Like, it's not that I'm surprised. I know when I say these things that people are going to do this and then I kind of must know that I will feel terrible and then I do feel terrible, but then I just do it again. And so I. It's like probably something deeper to unpack there.

Did you do. Do you. Do you actually seek to read everything? I know when disrupting class came out, like, I sought every single thing that was written about it on the web and, and would debate people and get into it and it would rack my brain. Is that your mindset? Or it comes to you and you're sort of like, holy, you know, holy smokes.

I'm more in the first thing. I mean, people will definitely write to me and say, like, you know, I don't like, I don't like you. But actually that's not that common. I think more of this is that I seek it out. Like, I will read. I like to read things. And I actually live in. My daughter is. My nine year old, is like a really, really insightful person. Like, I just like has a much more like, import. Like, she's much better at emotional situations than I am.

I don't know why you act as though you're surprised, but.

Okay, no, I mean, it's like relative to me, it's like I, you know, sometimes I'll be like, I'm not gonna send this email until I vet it with Penelope because she a better idea about how to deal with the situation. And so I was explaining this to her once that like, I feel bad. And she was like, she was like, mom, do you have to read the things? Like when people tweet? Like, do you have to read them? And I was like, well, no. She's like, isn't there any way to block them? They do have that feature. And so I think that I maybe could like dial down how much I read of this, but I'm like, you

just curious, do you read your, do you read your goodread reviews and reviews on Amazon and so forth?

Sometimes, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I always debate whether to wade into that at any point.

Yeah, I mean, with my, with the Amazon, with the stuff on the books, actually, I'm like in some ways less sensitive because I'm. I think part of it is when I. In the, in the stuff I've produced for the books, I'm like, I've been so much more careful. Not that I'm not care. But, like, I've thought so much more about how to present the argument and you get so much more space when you write a book to, like, go back and forth. And so then people don't agree with me. But it's like, I rarely feel like, oh, I wish I could have said this and that would convince you. Sometimes it's just sort of like, yeah, this person doesn't believe in vaccinations. Like, I thought a huge amount about what to say about vaccinations and this person just doesn't believe in them. Like, there's nothing else I could have done. Whereas sometimes with these sort of shorter form pieces, I'll feel like, oh, I could have addressed that. Like, that isn't. I could have addressed that concern. Or you didn't read it carefully enough. And then I feel like I have to be like, well, didn't you read like paragraph nine? Or I could, like in this other thing. What about this other place? And so I get kind of like into it.

Although I always find these readers who say, I can't believe you didn't cover this or you didn't do this in the book. And I always want to say, well, go write your own book on that, on that subject. But I try to be. I should probably ask my 9 and 11 year old before I send messages back to people. Well, Emily Oster, thank you so much for joining us on Future youe Today.

Thank you guys.

And we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Future youe out of a great conversation with Emily that is timely given the work she's been doing on Covid and schools and her work at Brown. But I want to start in a different place, Jeff, because as you've covered higher education for a couple of decades. How have you seen the role of the public intellectual and higher education change over time?

You know, Michael, as she was talking there, I realized that I started covering higher ed before the rise of Twitter and the ease of publishing newsletters on your own and even writing on Medium or LinkedIn or even in national newspapers, which really seem to have a ton of opinion pieces these days. So it's just so much easier to be out there as an intellectual. So a few changes that I probably see in terms of trends. And the first is channels, right? So now we have all these channels, and I think the definition has gotten a bit muddled of a public intellectual. So, for example, as a professor who's active on Twitter and quoted in the news media, public intellectuals, should they get credit for that within the second? The great thing about these channels is that you don't need the university anymore, right? Especially at a time when I think public trust in institutions is declining. So perhaps these folks will actually end up helping institutions by being out there and being much more public. The other thing, though, I think, is that what is public and what is promotional, right? So, as Emily has discovered, like a lot of academics out there, that it's easy to become polarizing on a subject, and pretty quickly. Maybe that's fine at Brown, which has a lot of protections around it, but how does that play at a regional public college, for example, where it might put off lawmakers or potential donors, even at a smaller private, which is dependent on both enrollment and donations as well? Finally, I think we also need to better define it and this idea of a public intellectual and give credit for it within the university. I think sometimes people out there, professors, feel this pressure to make their research and teaching matter. But if you think about it, something like 80% of young Americans are in college at some point in their youth, and we have 20 million people in college this year. In some ways, you have the public right in front of you as a professor or as a researcher, and we have to think of that as a big impact here as well. So not everybody needs to be on Twitter. Not everybody needs to be writing for the Atlantic or the Washington Post. And I think that if we better define this so that it doesn't become muddled, there would be less pressure, I think, on some professors to be more public with their research. What are your thoughts on it, Michael?

Yeah, you just raised a couple things that I hadn't thought about before. The institutional point is an important one, the lack of trust in institutions. But really, as you and I have both discovered in Our own personal journeys, the importance of individuals as brands in their own. Right, right. And the power and trust that people put in individuals and sort of align with and listen to individuals. And I don't know if that will overcome the institutional gap challenges, but I do think it's emblematic that people, you know, they don't look to see what are the scientists at Brown University saying? They look to Emily Oster. Right. And so that's a first reflection. The second one is I do think what the rise of Emily and others like her shows is that good writing, though, does matter at the heart of this. And there's a lot of bad writing in the subject, especially in journals, especially in academics. Write in academia.

Yeah.

Right. And so just because you're an academic and gaining, you know, publishing in peer review journals doesn't mean you have to write poorly and it can't be more accessible. So I hear you. Not everyone has to be out there in all the channels, but I actually do think that it's a good push for academics to try to figure out, hey, can someone who maybe isn't intimately familiar with this topic, how can they read it? And making it more accessible. I think that's a good thing to communicate clearly just for everyone. The, the last thing that I thought a lot about before this was really the tension sometimes between the process of gaining tenure and sort of acceptance in your field and then speaking to the public more broadly and playing that role of public intellectual. And what I mean by that, and it's something that Clay Christianson spoke a lot about before he passed with me, was his sort of bemoaning that journals had become more and more and more specific and, and narrow and niche and that there were subdomains within domains within domains. And that ultimately a lot of the problems that academics were grappling with were actually very small in nature and sometimes not terribly consequential. And it was all about getting your P value to be a certain thing so that you could get published. And eroding sort of the wrestling with really interesting, important societal questions. You have that trend, I think, on the one hand, but that also, frankly, it splits apart people so that they become very domain focused and not interdisciplinary. And I think that's to the detriment of big breakthrough discoveries in fields is not having that crosstalk public intellectuals like Emily and frankly like Clay Christensen as well. Right. I mean, he wrote outside of his field, education, healthcare. Emily is certainly outside of her area of economics. You know, that's. That that I think creates some interesting opportunities but also some challenges, which I'm curious your take on, because Emily's taken a lot of heat about not being an epidemiologist, not being a health professional, and yet opining on this incredibly emotional question of schools and opening, because she's an economist. And I'm curious your take on the importance of academics staying in their lanes. Because it's not just Emily Oster, right.

It's.

There's a Stanford professor at the Hoover Institution, Scott Atlas, who's caught a lot of flack as well. Like, you know, he's been an advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, promoted what's usually referred to as the herd immunity strategy to deal with the pandemic. And then dozens of Stanford faculty members from the School of Medicine, his colleagues, signed a letter against a stance and another, I think it was more than 100 Stanford faculty members, you know, wrote a letter where it said he has no expertise in epidemiology and shouldn't be trusted. So these are, you know, these are consequential questions, I think, about staying in your lane or not. And I'm just curious how you think about that or how academics might think about it.

Yeah, And I think it's a really difficult line because academics are trusted for their discipline knowledge, Right. They go to graduate school and they have to defend their research and their thesis and before their colleagues and their counterparts. And I think once you get out of that lane, you become a little bit more like my career, right, which is rooted in journalism, where I go and I ask the experts for the answer and then curate those answers and translate that into ideas based on those facts. But like many journalists, I've also extended my reach, and I'm often called on to provide expertise, but I'm always clear that that comes from my reporting and my research. But I haven't dedicated, you know, I've dedicated more than 20 years, obviously, writing about higher education, but I haven't dedicated those 20 years to focusing on one particular area of higher education, for example, like some higher education scholars out there. So I just. I think it is harder for academics to get out of their lane because, you know, it's in their title. You're. You're a professor of economics, for example. Now, I don't think that should preclude them, but it does make it more difficult because of our expertise, our expectations, our expectations of expertise. And when they do get out of their lanes, I think they just need to be clear where they're coming from, just like journalists are, and be open to criticism. And in many ways, Michael, I'm glad that she opened up about how she handles criticism and how she even seeks out negative reviews and the like. And I found that fascinating because I'm in the stage after I've written the book now and it's been published and enough people have read it, you know, and the reviews now are coming in, or people write to me and they say something like, well, you didn't write about this, Jeff, or you forgot about this, or you ignored that. And there are moments where I have to bite my tongue. And I want to say, you know, go write your own book. You know, and I understand, but. But, I mean, you know, as, you know, when you're writing a book, there's a lot left on the cutting room floor, and you have a thesis going into it, and you have your research and you can't write everything. And that's. That's the part that makes the criticism so hard because you do have to.

You.

You do have to bite your tongue sometimes.

Yeah, no, it's. It's definitely true. You do. And you develop a thicker skin, I think, over time. I like to think I have. Although, you know, I know that sometimes the odd criticism still drives me up a wall and I can't sleep and I have to figure out how to respond. And then the best response is sort of the Abraham Lincoln, write the letter and don't send it. But I liked this topic, Jeff, because I think it reminds our listeners that people who do write publicly, they are human beings as well, and professors and public intellectuals, they are human beings. And even if you disagree with them, you don't have to be disagreeable as you do so. Right. And you heard Emily's sensitivity to it, and she's doing the best she can. And I think she does stand, you know, even as she's opining on questions outside of economics, strictly, she's doing it from the basis of her ability to analyze data. Right. And the techniques that she uses that. And that's what she's standing on. Right. As she addresses these other topics that I think is important for her to say, but also for us to recognize. And then, you know, you evaluated against. Against the context of everything else out there. But, you know, look, as we wrap up, Jeff, one thing I was really glad we talked about was getting her take on colleges reopening their campuses because it's sort of the perfect segue, frankly, into our next two episodes because we're going to dive deeper on this issue that's been fraught with controversy and shaming over the presidents that have decided to reopen in the media and so forth. And it's a really important topic, I think, for us to get deeper on.

Yeah. You know, the criticism of presidents in particular who have opened and not reopened it reminds me a little bit of the mass debate, although it's not quite like that, that you're either for reopening colleges or you're not. And so we're going to look from at this from both perspectives. We're going to have Boston University's president, Bob Brown on our next episode to talk more deeply about why this they decided to reopen this fall and how they've handled some some of the criticism of that on the on the next episode of Future Years. So thank you so much for listening. We'd love to hear from our listeners. So please send us your questions, your comments, your complaints and suggestions for topics or guests. And we look forward to being with you next time on future.

Hey, folks, Michael Horn here. Hope you enjoyed the latest episode of Future You. And just a reminder to please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you like the podcast, rate us so that others can find us and find out about the good conversations that we're having here. As always, thanks so much for listening.