On the “public” in public intellectual
As a professor—especially one at a public university—I am ostensibly a public intellectual. For some, this phrase recalls a golden age of American intellectual life in which a small group of individuals in society had the power and privilege to guide, inform, and sometimes define public debate about civic, moral, and economic issues in society. Public intellectuals could be anyone: writers, journalists, philosophers, professors, and in today’s new media, even some bloggers and vloggers, and most would argue they have played an important role in guiding society with the power of ideas.
Recently, many journalists have written about the decline of public intellectuals in public life. Ta-Nehisi Coates fear the effect of public intellectual’s inaction on injustice. Some question whether it’s even possible to be a public intellectual anymore, with the press and the wealthy elite taking a more active role in shaping public debate. A much deeper well of scholarly writings have analyzed what has allowed public intellectuals to thrive, and what has since led to their decline. There’s a suggestion in these writings that the declining influence of public intellectuals has risen primarily from the growing wealth and power of money.
I’m here to argue that while money and the power it buys is no doubt a factor, public intellectuals like myself are at least half to blame.
I’ll pick on myself first. Here are some things a public intellectual ought to do that I don’t do:
- I don’t write popular books disseminating my ideas to the public.
- I don’t write newspaper editorials to shape public opinion.
- I don’t give public lectures, except at other universities.
- I don’t seek ways to inform public policy.
- I only teach those privileged enough to join my institution.
- I give most of my scholarly attention to 5 or 6 doctoral students.
- I only share my strongest opinions with my family.
Yes, I blog. Posts like this are a kernel of my effort to be a better public intellectual. But is blogging really public activity when it only reaches my scholarly community? You, dear reader, are most likely my peer, which makes you part of the public, but not the public at large.
And it’s not just me. I have many outstanding colleagues in academia who do many of the things in the list above. They are the exceptions. Most of my colleagues, despite being excellent researchers and teachers, do none of the things above, despite their defined academic role as public intellectuals. This failure to meaningfully engage in public life is as much a cause of the decline of the public intellectual as money and power. In fact, academia’s slow retreat from public life may have created the vacuum that money now fills.
Why did academia retreat? The reasons are abundant.
First, we academics have evolved our institutions to incentivize a very narrow form of public intellectual life: discovery. We value new ideas, new evidence, new perspectives, new arguments. We value the container for these new things, the publication, and all of the processes and principles that shape these documents. This shallow view of being intellectual, as only involving discovery, means that all of the powerful, important, stable ideas that we’ve collectively shaped over the past centuries—the ones that ought to be shaping public debate here and now—are of little interest to us. They are 101, large lecture classes, a distraction from what really matters: the next new idea.
And this focus on novelty stems from a related value in modern academia: curiosity. We devote our institutions to protecting, cultivating, and supporting the curiosity to support discovery. We grant tenure to provide the intellectual freedom necessary to follow our curiosity. Curiosity and discovery of course are not bad things, but by encouraging only curiosity, we overlook other important values, such as influence and impact on public life. To spend time as an academic shaping public debate with well-worn ideas is also important. We celebrate impact through through education, but only as a secondary goal, and only for those people who gain access to our institutions.
Finally, many academics are simply driven by fear. When we consider contributing our ideas, opinions, and arguments to public debate, tenure protects us from losing our job (usually), but not from the vast array of other assaults. We fear failing at public engagement we haven’t practiced. We fear public criticism of our ideas. We fear the messy, violent, personal world of politics. We fear losing time, which is already scarce in our overfull lives of research, teaching, and service. And sometimes we fear being wrong, and being publicly shamed for it.
And yet, as public intellectuals, engaging in public life is our responsibility. Here’s why: this freedom we have to follow our curiosity, to pursue discovery, to champion scholarship, and to share what we learn does not come free. Through taxes, but also cultural commitment, the public continues (for now) to grant us more freedom than anyone else in society has. Freedom to ignore markets, history, beliefs, and politics, and use that freedom to define the future, to shape how people think, and ultimately, to disrupt the status quo for humanity’s eventual benefit.
And so with this massive freedom comes solemn duty. And so I call upon my fellow academics to be publicly intellectual in the following ways:
- Don’t just teach the students at your institution. Teach the entire world.
- Seek ways to risk the reputation you’ve worked so hard to earn for the benefit of humanity.
- Pursue civil debate (in both senses of the word), both to drive public opinion, but also model effective dialogue about ideas.
- Remember that your role in society is to serve society, not yourself.
- Reach beyond your social network, finding or creating new channels to disseminate ideas.
- Evolve your institutions to encourage, incentivize, and celebrate the above.
I don’t know how to fit most of the above into my academic life. And I don’t yet know how to excel at most of the above. But I do know that the public has granted me the freedom and responsibility to learn how. Join me.
