Talking Out of School

The Harvard professor stood at the podium, far from the laboratory that made him famous. George Wald had won the Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin A and vision. The medal sat somewhere in his office now, probably gathering dust while he gathered new causes. It was the 1960s and revolution hung in the air like cigarette smoke in a faculty lounge. Vietnam stretched across the headlines the way Lewinsky’s dress would three decades later. Civil rights marchers filled the streets. Students occupied buildings. Many professors couldn't resist joining the fray, and Wald was chief among them.

He'd become one of those celebrated big brains who decide their original field is too small for their genius. You see them today on cable news and Twitter, these Jason Stanley-style wandering scholars who trade microscopes for megaphones. They remind you of retired athletes who can't stop giving political opinions, or actors who lecture about nuclear physics. The talk is often so inane that it calls into question why you followed them in the first place.

The day Wald met I.I. Rabi, he was deep into another speech about American foreign policy. Rabi sat in the audience, a physicist from Columbia who'd won his own Nobel Prize for work on atomic nuclei. He watched Wald pace and pontificate, hands moving like conductor's batons as he shaped his arguments about Southeast Asia.

Wald had mastered the professor's trick of making every statement sound profound. He quoted philosophers and poets, dropped references to obscure historical events, drew sweeping conclusions about the nature of power and empire. Naive students loved it. Impressionable faces looked up at him, notebooks open, pens scribbling.

When question time came, Rabi's hand went up. He was older than most in the room, with the tired eyes of someone who'd spent too many years peering at equations. Wald nodded to him, probably expecting another comment about troop deployments or bombing campaigns.

"Professor Wald," Rabi said, his voice still carrying the accent of his Austrian youth, "I wonder if you could explain why homo sapiens originated in Africa rather than some other continent?"

The room went quiet. Wald blinked, thrown off his rhythm for the first time that afternoon. "But that was not at all the subject of my talk," he said.

"I know," Rabi replied. "But I thought it might be somewhat closer to your area of expertise."

A story like that should spread through academic circles like a parable. It carries the same warning as the tale of Icarus. But instead of melting wax wings, it's about melting credibility.

We live in an age of wandering experts. Linguist Noam Chomsky became more famous for his political writings than his groundbreaking work on grammar (which has, over time, gradually been buried by the weight of the evidence). Physicists lecture about dating. Psychologists write bestsellers about Russiagate. Everyone’s an expert on everything.

The internet makes it worse. Social media turns specialized knowledge into general pontification. A doctor who studies feet feels qualified to explain the mind of Xi Jinping. A mathematician who models cloud formations decides to solve society's problems with Donald Trump between equations.

These wandering scholars follow a pattern. First comes a certain degree of mastery in their field, hard-won through years of study or at least acknowledged  by their peers. Then success brings attention, speaking invitations, journalists asking their opinions on matters far from their labs or libraries. The temptation proves irresistible. Being right means getting more and more people to agree with you.

Sometimes they wander into courtrooms, where academic nuance meets legal combat. Take historian Alice Kessler-Harris, testifying under oath in a discrimination case against Sears Roebuck. She told the court that only employer bias, not women's choices, explained why different jobs attracted different genders. It was a claim so absolute it would’ve shocked her own students.

Later, she admitted the courtroom's pressure made her abandon the complexity championed in her academic writing. She stripped away subtlety and exceptions to make her point. The testimony contradicted her own published work, but she suffered no professional consequences because she was doing the work. Her colleagues praised her performance while ostracizing Rosalind Rosenberg, another historian who testified more cautiously.

The courtroom became another stage for the wandering scholar, where truth bowed to advocacy and expertise bent until it broke. The oath to tell the whole truth disappeared under the weight of what she might today call the work, a greater and much vaguer superseding cause.

They start small, maybe commenting on funding for science education. Soon they're writing op-eds about military strategy or monetary policy. Their credentials in one area become a passport to issue pronunciamentos in all areas. The mid-wit public, hungry for public intellectual content, laps it up the way I used to devour those big cans of Kozy Shack pudding.

Wald fell into this trap with both feet. His work on vision biochemistry was brilliant enough to win science's highest honor. But somewhere along the way, he decided that understanding how eyes process light qualified him to process the light and shadow of global politics.

Rabi's question cut through all that like a laser through fog. It wasn't cruel or angry. He didn't attack Wald's character or intelligence. He simply reminded everyone in the room that expertise has boundaries, that even Nobel Prize winners should remember where their true knowledge ends.

My source for the story doesn't tell us how Wald responded after that first startled moment. Perhaps he laughed it off, or got angry, or tried to answer the question about human origins. Perhaps he learned something that day about the dangers of intellectual wanderlust.

We do know that he kept giving his political speeches. The urge to expand beyond our proper territories seems coded into human nature, especially for those who've mastered one small corner of knowledge. We forget that true expertise is narrow, hard-won, and usually boring to anyone outside the field. A lot of it’s completely bogus, too.

The public bears some blame. We want our experts to be Leibniz-grade renaissance figures, equally wise about enzymes and ethics, particles and politics. We push them onto bigger stages, asking them to solve problems far from their training. Then we act surprised when they stumble.

Rabi's question still echoes today, a gentle reminder that even the brightest minds need to remember their limits. It suggests that real wisdom might lie not in knowing everything, but in knowing what you don't know.

The next time you see a famous scientist holding court about Covid transmission at protests, or a celebrated economist explaining the infield fly rule, or a noted historian solving climate change, remember George Wald at that podium. Remember I.I. Rabi's raised hand. Remember that expertise, like charity, should sometimes begin at home.