(Warning: Self-indulgent post ahead.)

You all know the old joke about experts, which very much includes academics: We know more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing. There’s definitely some truth to it: As a very smart economist colleague once remarked, just because you understand economics doesn’t mean you’ll be good at investing.

But it’s not quite accurate to say that academics know everything about nothing. Rather, all academics know everything about one thing. That one thing being their dissertation subject, the thing they had to write and be examined on to be awarded their doctorate, their PhD.

That’s not to say we’re completely ignorant about everything else. In the social sciences at least, you learn how to critically evaluate and assess information and arguments. That’s much more difficult than you’d think. We’re trained to tackle problems systematically, to go through an argument, to poke holes in it, to recognize its weaknesses but also its strengths.

And in the Canadian system at least, Political Science PhDs students have to pass comprehensive exams in two subfields, in my case Comparative Politics and International Relations. This involves intense study of key texts, in the case of my program (Carleton University, represent!) over the course of an entire year, to such a degree that you end up internalizing the discipline’s ways of thinking, key concepts and issues.

Did I mention that it’s intense? It’s intense: My partner will tell you she lost count of the times I wandered into the living room, blurted out something arcane about Marx before heading back to my desk for another eight hours of study. Imagine living with someone who does that for 12 full months. Over that year I listened to so many 10 pm-1 am Vancouver Canucks radio broadcasts. And I’m not even a Canucks fan.

(Though this study routine did allow me the pleasure of once hearing the Canucks’ broadcast crew descend into what can only be described as giggles when they realized they’d won that night’s 50/50 draw.)

This training not only serves as the foundation for the research we undertake after we’ve completed the PhD. It also gives us the general expertise (which is still pretty specific) needed to teach courses in these fields, though of course you have to keep up with developments in the field. As one of my PhD advisors told me when I’d successfully completed my comprehensive exams, “Congratulations! You will never be this well-versed in your field again!”

The One Thing

A doctoral program teaches how to think in a particular way, in specific areas. But it’s the dissertation that makes you a Doctor of Philosophy. That’s because, done right, it involves intense study, not just of one issue area, but one issue, One Thing. By the end of it, because it has to be original research that nobody has done before, you will understand this one thing better than pretty much anyone else on the planet. Chosen correctly, your dissertation committee will be experts in parts of your topic — in my case, each of my committee had individual expertise in Mexican politics (and also Canadian policymaking), US politics and copyright law. But in the room, when I was defending my dissertation, I was the only one who could bring it all together. That’s not bragging or a slight on my fantastic committee: it’s by design. That’s how a PhD works.

To outsiders, your One Thing can seem esoteric and pedantic, even silly. This is the root of the slight “everything about nothing.” And it’s true that most of the time, most dissertation topics are probably not directly relevant to people’s everyday lives.

Until they are.

Because social science research (most of the time) is based in the real world, there’s always a chance that today’s intellectual backwater will become tomorrow’s object of intense interest. I first discovered that in 2005 when I began my dissertation. I thought that copyright policy would be a relatively staid field, stable enough to let me trace processes of North American governance. Within three months, copyright had been politicized, including via the first successful political use of Facebook to affect government policy.

Whoops.

I now find myself in a similar position. Because my One Thing — the thing I was using copyright to examine — happens to be: the conditions under which Canada and Mexico can exercise meaningful autonomy (i.e., sovereignty) in the shadow of the world’s most powerful country.

Thanks to the United States’ foolish and immoral re-election of Donald Trump, this is now the most important question facing both countries.

This is the Catch-22 of a political science doctorate. You always want your research to be relevant, but if people come calling to talk about it, it usually means that something’s gone horribly wrong.

I’m telling you all this to explain (as much to myself as to anyone else) why I’ve been so direct in my writing about what I think Trump’s re-election means for Canadian independence, and why I’ve been writing so many opeds. My research in recent years has taken me away from North American regionalism and toward digital regulation (which just also happens to have become super-relevant, since Elon Musk is now apparently the co-president of the United States. I sure know how to pick the quiet topics). In a sense, this focus on Canada-US relations is a bit of a throwback for me.

Alarmist overreaction? Or expert understanding?

When you spend years studying a topic as intensely as you tend to do when completing a doctorate, you come to know it intimately. You develop a level of understanding about it that’s unmatched by all but a handful of people, in the country, in the world. Again, this is not bragging. This is what all doctorates involve.

This intense focus, I’ve found, can lead you down some interesting paths. Intimate understanding often involves recognizing that the conventional wisdom on a topic is flawed, or more usually not quite right. Because you’ve spent so much time with your topic, you end up developing your own conclusions about it, based on your own research.

For me, this has never been more true than now. Everything I know about my One Thing tells me that the North American relationship has been shattered utterly and completely, and that Canadian independence was in extreme danger. I recognized this immediately after Trump’s re-election, not because I’m super-bright and intuitive, but because this happens to be the exact thing I spent six years studying, and thinking about for years previously.

The downside of getting so deep into a subject is that it’s easy to forget that not everybody will have the same understanding of your topic as you do. This can cause problems in getting your message across, because often your expert understanding, gained from deep study, will run counter to the conventional wisdom. A conventional wisdom that is often shaped by self-interested actors who are perhaps not really interested in the truth. This happens all the time in copyright discussions.

Think about how many times you’ve heard an expert talk and thought that they sounded kinda nuts. These experts are often imparting their own deep knowledge about their One Thing. The irony is that it’s the expert is often the one who’s actually in touch with reality, but the non-expert doesn’t realize it.

This dynamic can create pressure on academics not to go against the conventional wisdom, to pull our punches. Nobody wants to come across as a loon, or be thought of as overreacting when things don’t go as bad as we thought they might. That’s another pressure: predictions run the chance of being wrong, and nobody wants to look wrong, or foolish. Or sometimes it might take decades for a prediction to be borne out. Only now, decades later, are free-trade critics’ warnings about free trade’s potential to hinder Canadian sovereignty coming true.

This has definitely been an issue when talking about Trump. I’ve certainly felt this tension between the One Thing that you know and the desire not to sound unduly alarmist or lose credibility. I’m certain that back in November, highlighting the US authoritarian turn and arguing (as I did, along with several of my colleagues) that Canada was in danger of losing its sovereignty to an authoritarian United States sounded a bit, well, overly alarmist.

I will say that I’ve had a couple of people tell me that they thought I might’ve been overreacting to this or that, but that they changed their minds once they saw Trump in action.

That’s the challenge inherent in speaking based on your understanding of an issue, in advance of a crisis. Warn people about an incipient problem and you risk losing credibility, not just if you’re wrong, but if you’re seen as hysterical. But if you wait for the crisis to happen, it’ll be too late.

The obligation to write, the obligation to serve

The other thing about knowing your One Thing is that, often, you’re one of only a very few people who have a deep expertise in that issue. To be clear, “a very few” can range from one person to several thousand. The point is, on any specific topic, the pool of people with deep expertise is limited. And within that pool, there’s a good chance that even fewer people share your exact same skillset and expertise (in my case as it relates to our current crisis, my One Thing, a background in political science, economics (trade), professionally working in Parliament, and an appreciation of the policy process).

Consequently, if you, the expert, don’t weigh in on something, via a journal article, a conference presentation, a government report, an oped, a media interview or whatever, there’s a non-zero chance that the thing that needs saying won’t be said, or the thing that needs doing won’t get done. It’s a pressure I’ve felt in particular when it comes to Canadian digital policy. There are many experts out there, but I also bring a particular viewpoint to the conversation. Again, this is not bragging; it’s the same for pretty much every expert in pretty much every field. Very few of us are interchangeable.

So it is with the One Thing I know. I write not just because I love writing: There are other writing projects I’m neglecting because of all this. I’m spending so much time on this because I feel an obligation, both as an Ontario university professor and as a Canadian citizen, to share what I’ve learned with my community in Niagara, in Ontario and in Canada.

As for my insistent assertions about the nature of this crisis, and the hard choices ahead, which might at times come across as an overreaction: They come not from any political ideology, or anti-Americanism, or love of controversy. Rather, they are based in my research and my training.

That doesn’t make my assertions infallible. I could be wrong! My assumptions could be flawed, my assessment incomplete or inaccurate. I would so love to be wrong about how dire the threat is, about the quality of Canada’s response to date, about all of it.

It would be much easier, and less stressful to be honest, if I could claim to see an easy way out of this. But that’s not what my training tells me. And that’s all I have to draw upon.

If you made it this far, congratulations! Enjoy this delightful song about academic romance from Camera Obscura.