#goodtoread

"Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

"Look at the birds in the air, they do not sow nor reap nor store away in barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?!"

Yet it is impossible to imagine today the kind of innocence about government-academic relations that allowed Soviet Studies to grow as it did. As the contributions to this forum indicate, scholars are wary of support from an external source with an interested in applying the results. And as the Minerva announcements suggest, immediate policy relevance (actionable scholarship?) is a top priority. Gone are the days when government agencies could support broad-based studies of Soviet society or a history of Party operations in the 1930s – and scholars central to their fields would seek such funding. The pursuit of relevance helped create these fissures between scholarly and policy-relevant worlds. A program, like Minerva, that harkens back to Kremlinology rather than Soviet Studies is unlikely to do much to heal them.