James March, who along with Dick Cyert and Herb Simon, opened a new era in management studies at the Tepper School in the 1950s and 1960s, recently reflected on his career for the Harvard Business Review and observed that professors often don't make great consultants because they lack daily, detailed experience of business problems.
But that does not make academic knowledge useless or irrelevant. On the contrary.
"It is the combination of academic and experiential knowledge, not the substitution of one for the other, that yields improvement," says the thoughtful Professor March.
That same divide exists in the world of public policy. Those in the trenches of public life—buffeted by opinion polls, sound bites, daily numbers, Fox/CNN, and politics as usual—face constraints that professors are free to ignore. Those practical policy analysts may dismiss professorial ideas as impractical, idealistic or worse—irrelevant pronouncements from an ivory tower.
Yet it is precisely this distance and freedom that allows professors to make their contributions.
Academics have the time, the knowledge, and the imagination to look at things from fresh angles, says Marvin Goodfriend of Carnegie Mellon's Gailliot Center for Public Policy (see Minding Monetary Policy). They clarify the lessons of the past and point policy makers toward productive ideas.
That fresh thinking, and that of the dozens of other Carnegie Mellon faculty engaged in research relevant to policy decisions, contributes to dialogue on public issues.
In this issue, faculty discuss their ideas on a range of topics—from technology and the global economy to the war on drugs to economic policy.
They are also teaching tomorrow's leaders to evaluate options and to be innovative and entrepreneurial about solving problems—teaching about"intelligent action to change the world," as Heinz School Dean Mark Wessel puts it.
Professors are not policy makers, but as a nation and as a world, we need creative "academic knowledge" more than ever.
