While waiting for the L train to attend the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting this week, I came upon Nicholas Kristof’s latest New York Times op-ed: “Professors, We Need You!” In his piece, Kristof portrays professors as out-of-touch intellectuals who study esoteric fields and hide their findings in impenetrable jargon. He also says that academia crushes rebels who communicate their science to the public. I admire Mr. Kristof for his efforts to bring awareness to injustices around the world and I agree that academic papers are often painful – if not impossible – to read. But my experience at the AAAS conference this week highlights how wrong he is, both in his depiction of academics and of the driving forces within academia itself.

AAAS is the organization behind Science magazine, ScienceNOW news, Science Careers, and the AAAS fellowship programs. Among the goals in its mission statement: to enhance communications among scientists, engineers, and the public; to provide a voice for science on societal issues; and to increase public engagement with science and technology. So yes, you would expect their conference to focus on science communication. Still, the social media sessions (Engaging with Social Media and Getting Started in Social Media) were full of scientists of all ages. Another well-attended session taught listeners how to use sites and services like Google Scholar, Mendeley, ORCID, and ResearchGate to improve the visibility of their work online.

Throughout the conference, scientists were live-tweeting interesting facts and commentary from the sessions they attended using the #AAASmtg hashtag. I saw a particularly wonderful example of this at a Saturday morning symposium called Building Babies. All five of the speakers at the symposium have accounts on Twitter and four of them were live-tweeting during each other’s presentations. Three of them (Kate Clancy, Julienne Rutherford, and Katie Hinde) also have popular blogs: Context and Variation, BANDIT, and Mammals Suck, respectively. After the symposium, Dr. Hinde compiled the symposium-related tweets on Storify.

I won’t claim that this panel of speakers is representative of scientists as a whole, but I do believe that they are representative of the direction in which scientists are moving. And contrary to Mr. Kristof’s claims, I would argue that their public visibility and embrace of online communication have probably helped rather than hindered their careers. Increased visibility can lead to more invitations to give talks, more coverage from the science press, and added connections outside of one’s narrow field of expertise. The first two of these can fill out a CV and attract positive public attention to a department, both pluses for a young academic who’s up for tenure. Moreover, while hiring and tenure decisions are made within departments, funding comes from organizations and institutions that typically value plain-speaking scientists who do research with societal relevance. For these reasons (and, I’m sure, others), it’s becoming obvious that scientists can benefit from clarity, accessibility, and visibility. In turn, many scientists are learning the necessary skills and making inroads to communicating with the public.

Of course, public visibility offers both promise and peril for scientists. As climate scientist and blogger Kim Cobb explained in her wonderful AAAS talk, scientists worry about appearing biased or unprofessional when they venture into the public conversation on social media. Science writer and former researcher Bethany Brookshire mentioned another potential peril: the fact that thoughtless or offensive off-the-cuff comments made on social media can come back to haunt scientists in their professional lives. It is also certainly true in academia (as it is in most spheres) that people are disdainful of peers who seem arrogant or overly self-promotional.

In short, scientists hoping to reach the public have their work cut out for them. They must learn how to talk about science in clear and comprehensible terms for non-scientists. They must be engaging yet appropriate in public forums and strike the right balance between public visibility and the hard-won research results to back up the attention they receive. They have good reason to tread carefully as they wade into the rapid waters of the Twitterverse, the blogosphere, and other wide-open forums. Yet in they are wading all the same.

There have already been some great responses to Kristof’s call for professors. Political scientist Erik Voeten argued that many academics already engage the public in a variety of ways. Political scientist Robin Corey pointed out that the engagement of academics with the public is often stymied by a lack of time and funding. Academics are rarely paid for the time they spend communicating with the public and may need to concentrate their efforts on academic publications and grant applications because of the troubling job market and funding situation.

Still, many academics are ready to take the plunge and engage with the public. What they need is more training and guidance. Graduate programs should provide better training in writing and communicating science. Universities and  societies should offer mentorship and seminars for scientists who want to improve the visibility of their research via the web. We need to have many more panels and discussions like the ones that took place at the AAAS meeting this week.

Oh, and while we’re at it: fewer misinformed, stereotypical descriptions of stodgy professors in ivory towers would be nice.

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Photo credit: Ian Britton, used via Creative Commons license