Forget the US model. British academics should aspire to offer more than just intellectual fig leaves for policymakers
First there was Francis Fukuyama's The End of History. More recently, we had Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Cass Sunstein's Nudge: for years, it seems, big ideas have been heading our way across the Atlantic. It is hard to think of many similarly catchy slogans that have gone the other way of late – Tony Giddens' notion of "the third way" may be one.
Some people think that is a problem. They are worried that Britain has been failing to produce big ideas that policymakers can use. They want to convert academic ideas into policy relevance and shake up the bureaucrats. Phillip Blond, who recently wrote a controversial article in Chatham House's magazine, is one of them. Francis Maude is another: he wants politicians to be able to appoint senior civil servants so that fresh thinking can enter Whitehall.
It is certainly true that in comparison with their US counterparts, British civil servants mingle relatively little with thinktank policy wonks or academics. In Washington, by contrast, yesterday's professor or analyst is often today's presidential appointee. Thinktanks play a powerful and prominent role in Washington life. Public policy institutes at such places as Princeton and Harvard attract not only students keen to break into government but professors whose worth is measured by their public profile.
And because every president since Harry Truman seems to feel the need to be associated with a doctrine, he and his advisers are always in the market for the next mantra to shape an era. So should British academics become more American? The real question is whether such a change is desirable.
The man from the ministry may not know best. But does the man from the thinktank know better? I doubt it. For one thing, the thinktanker is often young and inexperienced, without the resources to conduct serious research or the institutional memory that allows a deeper understanding of background.
And thinktanks are odd things. Most are funded by rich men's largesse and are therefore driven by ideology one way or another. This is why Thatcher and Reagan, at the dawn of the thinktank golden age, deployed them against their own civil servants. There is really only one test of value for money when you are bankrolling a thinktank and that is influence, and impact.
And are big ideas the kind of ideas worth having anyway? They age badly for one thing and quickly look shopworn. Moreover, it's hard to think of many scholars whose best work has been directed explicitly towards such a goal. Take the example of Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, who moved from the rarified world of international relations theory to the heart of Washington as head of the state department policy planning staff. Yet compared with her early, rather theoretical, articles in professional journals, the stuff that got her noticed was (at least in my judgment) thin gruel. Do we need more books like her The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with our Values in a Dangerous World? It was lavishly praised by two former secretaries of state and one former national security adviser, and it certainly did not stop her landing an important job in the first Obama administration. But none of that alters its superficiality or its short shelf-life.
The tendency in recent government policy here to demand demonstrable policy relevance or public "impact" from academics shows how far this mindset has spread. It may or may not produce some policy product. But what it will do is jeopardise British universities' ability to do what they have done so well for so long: world-class research. These days both government and business demand value for money when they fund academia, and this makes it harder and more vital to insist that there are many ways to demonstrate the value of ideas, not just policy relevance.
Let me not be misunderstood: most scholars see themselves contributing in one way or another to the illumination, and sometimes, the potential resolution, of the problems, anxieties and dilemmas of our times. And a good thing too. But to say that the test of a good idea is that policymakers pick it up seems hopelessly limited. An awful lot of policymakers would not recognise wisdom if it came up and shook their hand: they are extremely busy, partisan hustlers driven increasingly by the short term.
Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, the two US economists at the centre of a recent storm over the scholarly evidence behind austerity across the eurozone, have claimed, probably rightly, that those who enacted these policies would have followed them anyway: their articles, in other words, provided a kind of intellectual fig leaf. But there was a time when intellectuals aspired to offer more than fig leaves, and those who still do should be supported, not trashed.