Do Not Write Advocacy or Prophetic Scholarship

My involvement in the Chicano Movement and the Raza Unida Party was what got me started on my scholarly journey. But while sympathetic and a promoter of Chicano/latino civil rights, I always resisted and felt uncomfortable by what I call advocacy and/or prophetic scholarship. I strongly believe in what I write but I do not feel I have any scholarly authority as a historian to put a conclusion or offer a solution to every historical narrative yet to be played out. This same reluctance should be embraced by other scholars of the social sciences and the humanities.

Most advocacy scholarship is driven by ideology and not research, analysis or even scholarly questions. Its interest is to promote a particular point of view that can only be validated through normally very narrow parameters. Now, there is nothing wrong with ideological writings but they are not scholarship per se. While I accept that none of us can write without advocating something or other, I do believe that we should not invent things outright or act like modern-day prophets who know more than they do.

One disclaimer here is that some scholarly work is meant to be advocated--some genres within sociology, economics, public policy, psychology, etc. But even those who do that type of scholarship should be cautious.

Caution should also be applied to what I call prophetic scholarship which is the type of scholarship in which we ascertain that something will happen because of how we interpret what has happened before.Recently, I had a friend who was waiting for an election to see if his several hundred page predictions would hold. His work ended up depending more on the efficacy of  a political campaign than on the "facts".While valuable--I read the manuscript--I did not consider the work scholarly writing in the best sense, though it might make him the next Karl Marx.

The problem with both advocacy and prophetic scholarly writing is that it is usually based on assumptions that have yet to be tested and it is difficult to test them before they are promoted. Since most of this scholarship is hardly earth-shattering, it is rarely put to a test. And often it is forgotten or, at worse, gives a scholar a reputation of doing shoddy work that is more astrology than scholarship.

When young scholars, in particular, start with advocacy scholarship it usually means they have skipped many a step. It is shameful that too many mentors and too many Ph.D. committees do not hold their students' reigns a little bit tighter. Advocacy scholarship if it is to be written and be presented as scholarship and not just as polemical or intellectual writing must be done when one has proven to know a topic well, to have researched it exhaustively and to have published extensively on it. To do otherwise is to try to pull a fast one on the public.

Does this mean that a brilliant young scholar cannot advocate something and be right--whatever right means--yes, that's probably what I mean. Even when they might get much of it right what they don't get is the process of how things evolve and how they reach the point they did, a crucial element in scholarship. You learn that not just by researching but by reading and writing about it, getting reviewed and criticized, and then responding to critics with more work.

To become a good "advocate" means seeing your own work and saying, "gosh, I coud have done better, or I didn't get it completely right". And doing it over and over again while seeing your ideas tested out over years. That is almost impossible for a young scholar to do in his/her first book, and even more impossible for the old scholar with no books in hand. Scholarship is partly about writing and if you don't write enough or haven't had the time to, you have little to say when you do. Are there exceptions? Yes. Are you one of those? Overwhelmingly the chances are you are not.

As scholars we make assumptions and even offer advice but we should be careful not to advocate what we have not proven ourselves. This is particulary true for the social sciences and humanities. Advocacy and prophetic writing is also a good way to have our work age almost immediately. I know of a scholar whose predictions of world calamity will prove him a prophet or discredit his scholarship within less than a year. Do we really want to be in that situation?

The function of scholarly writing can be to inform, to inspire and motivate, to correct an assumption or to critique, but it rarely works as a road map. There are always exceptions to this rule but they are exceptions which are often quite rare. And they come after years of writing, reflecting and testing out our ideas. When you are there then this doesn't apply to you.