The Disaster of Knowledge Disconnect

Most the American brain trust labors in Academe and under funded non-profit organizations. Only a part of that brain trust is sufficiently resourced by their institutions to provide an immediate connection between their expertise and real-world situations. I am talking about resources like decent living wages, offices, laboratories, and contact points where those in need of their expertise can locate them. Because fifty percent or more of American scholars and scientists teaching in our colleges and universities work under "have not" conditions, their expertise is invisible to those charged with planning for and responding to the many challenges that we face in the 21st century world. This sorry situation exists because postsecondary administrators are allowed to operate American Academe according to the "Sweatshop University, Piecework Professor" model. They now use funds that used to support professors for other gorgeous projects on their campuses. This magnifies government's tendency to approach large-scale events that can wipe out great numbers of people and destroy cities through political "old boy-ism," committees that never leave the comfort of their conference rooms, and viewgraph presentations that bear little resemblance to what actually happens out there in the real world.

I spent my early career life being educated and working in extreme situations and environments. When I returned to earn my doctorate at the University of South Carolina, I worked on issues like oil tanker spills and hurricane disasters. However, trying connect up with emergency preparedness jobs, I found the system of hiring more along the line of political appointments than the acquisition of new expertise, such as only a real natural or social scientist can provide.

Clearly, folks with my expertise were not available to the South Carolina emergency preparedness effort in 1999 when the Hurricane Floyd evacuation was miserably botched in front of the national eye. South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges defensively responded that such an evacuation had never been attempted before. But, were the "lessons learned" from that botched event applied? I doubt it because, later, during snowstorms and severe power outages, I watched parts of South Carolina practically devolve to the Mad Max Scenario. I made fruitless phone calls to state officials, trying to explain the connection between emergency preparedness and the national security.

Years before 9/11, colleagues and I were working on terrorism issues. Governmental organizations showed little interest in funding our research. After 9/11, I wrote to U.S. senators who were vocal in the media about the paucity of preparedness to 9/11. I wrote to Governor Tom Ridge immediately after he was selected to head up the Homeland Security Agency. I got no response at all. By the time the Homeland Security Agency got around to funding scholarly experts, I didn't see their advertisements and no one bothered to give me a heads-up about these funding opportunities, even though by that time I was in the Presidential Appointments database for my expertise!

However, one reason that I never saw the Homeland Security Agency advertisements was the fact that I didn't have a sufficient level of university resources to make the connection from my side of the Information Highway. Despite my expertise, I am one of those under-resourced professors whom I mentioned before.

This is not the way it used to be in America. It used to be that expertise in Academe was readily available to community authorities. Nowadays, people do not know what expertise resides in their communities. The local authorities try to depend on paper plans that they presume have been authored by "the experts." The thing is, those so-called experts usually means a committee back in Washington, D.C., advised by well-paid political wannabes who came up with their plan from googling off of the Internet. Dr. Irwin Redlener of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness recently told CNN's Aaron Brown on the air that billions have been spent on preparedness after 9/11 but no one knows what has been done and how the money has been spent.

If Americans want to be safe in their homeland and abroad, the real knowledge experts must directly connect with government authorities. Colleges and universities need to stop being operated like sweatshops. Piecework professors must be converted into tenured or tenure-equivalent postsecondary teachers who have the resources to cross the Information Highway to provide help when and where it is needed. Clearly, the "smarts" weren't there for the Gulf Coast to prepare it for Katrina.