Universities are in trouble on both sides of the Atlantic. The Trump administration’s attack on universities is well set out in David Bell’s Substack. In the UK, universities do not face a malevolent government but do face enormous financial pressures.

One problem universities face is that, in times when public funding is under pressure, there is very limited public understanding of what they do, particularly in terms of research.

David Bell’s piece - which discusses health research - acknowledges the problem. His answer, though, of insulating the choice of what projects should be funded from all political pressure, is though one that - in a democracy - isn’t very satisfactory. And as he rightly accepts, questions of the overall amount of funding are and should be subject to democratic politics.

I know very little about US universities. But in the UK, one problem is, I think, that there are very limited incentives for academics to explain their work to a wide audience. Career progression and funding follow peer-reviewed articles. Such articles are usually and inevitably written in a way that does not seek to engage the wider public, is typically incomprehensible to the wider public, and is published in journals inaccessible to the wider public. But if academics decide to explain their work to a wider public they get no professional reward.

To take my own area of law as an example, scarcely any of us who do law in the wider world, and who are pressed for time and attention, read scholarly articles in the law reviews with any frequency. What we do read though, with great appreciation, are blogs run by academics such as (in my case in public law) Professor Mark Elliot’s “Public Law for Everyone”. What we get from those blogs is a distillation of current academic thinking, clearly and concisely expressed. Not only do we read them, we also then use the arguments before the courts, from which they find their way into the case-law. Yet I suspect that Mark gets nothing in terms of either funding or career progression for doing it.

Nor, I think, are academics often trained in how to explain what they are doing to a wider audience. A few years ago, my old college - Exeter College, Oxford - organised an event for graduates in London in which current PhD students across the range of subjects from sciences to humanities gave five minute presentations on what they were doing and why it was interesting and important. That was a great exercise both for them and for us. But I’m not aware of that sort of thing being done with any frequency. Yet at their best end of the day - in a democracy - if you are working in an area that depends on public funding, then being able to explain to a non-specialist audience why what you are doing matters, and even better to engage and interest that audience, are and ought to be key skills, and rewarded as such.

When I was at university, several decades ago, there was a certain amount of academic condescension towards “TV dons”. Such snobbery was always wrong, and is now too expensive to afford. On the assumption that our democracies survive, in the long run universities will only survive is the wider public understands and values what they do. Nor should this be seen as an irritating distraction from “real work”. As anyone who has ever had to explain anything complicated to a non-specialist audience knows, one great advantage of the effort to do so is that it often crystallises your own thinking. There is often no better way to really understanding something than to have to explain it.