Public intellectuals, public life, and the university.

• Author: Brouwer, Daniel C.

In 1999, Florida Atlantic University (FAU) commenced its "Public Intellectuals Program," an interdisciplinary, Ph.D. degree-granting program in Comparative Studies. Writing about the new program in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Alison Schneider remarked: "Starting a Ph.D. program for public intellectuals is a little like hanging a target on your back during hunting season" (1999). The analogy was apt, for educators, academics, activists, and lay people alike leveled potshots at the program. Some took offense at the hubris of the program and its goals, claiming that classroom instruction cannot adequately nurture public intellectuals and that, besides, public intellectuals might be nurtured but cannot be manufactured in any academic program. Others criticized the program's overly narrow conception of "public" and its redundancy. Skepticism toward the program even took a geographical bias, as Schneider noted the perception that one is much more likely to find a palm tree than a public intellectual on a Flo rida campus.

This adumbration of the controversy engendered by the FAU program draws attention to the nexus of universities, public intellectuals, and public life. In this and similar controversies, participants express concern about the health of society, about the proper goals and means of education, and about the relationship of education to public life. Prominent in discussions of this nexus are voices of skepticism about the animating and ameliorative capabilities of educational institutions. From the Right, critics of educational institutions and practices decry fragmentation, the emphasis on identity and marginality, and the collapse of normative standards. From the Left, critics of education rail against capitalist principles that under-gird education, corporate colonization of the university "lifeworld," and the marginalization imposed upon radical forms of scholarship. From multiple directions, folks wonder if scholarship produced in higher education can be counted on to have measurable impact on social well-bei ng. These concerns congregate in anxieties over the lives and works of public intellectuals.

In this essay, we examine the dynamics of commentary and controversy about public intellectuals in the mainstream press from 1987-2002. (1) Commentary about the relationships between public intellectuals, universities, and public life has been especially robust since 1987. In that year and since, book-length treatises such as Allan Bloom's (1987) Closing of the American Mind, Russell Jacoby's (1987) The Last Intellectuals, Richard Rorty's (1998) Achieving Our Countiy, and Richard Posner's (2001) Public Intellectuals have spurred and influenced much public commentary. While not every debate about public intellectuals since 1987 draws exclusively from these authors' theories and agendas, these books demarcate a flurry of scholarly and lay activity concerning intellectuals that meshed with other widespread public controversies: the "culture wars," affirmative action, and reconstruction of the welfare state, to name a few. As such, the publication of these books and the implementation of FAU's program provide a t imeline for exploring the contemporary meanings and debates surrounding the figure of the public intellectual.

Study of this widespread commentary and controversy has the potential to tell us much about "the public" and about the relationship between higher educational institutions and public life. The ways in which journalists and critics defined public intellectuals necessarily invoked particular understandings of what is "public." In turn, these variations provided competing normative models for social life. For example, definitions of public intellectuals in which they were positioned outside of the academy exposed a manifest, sometimes latent, skepticism about the social functions of universities. The comments that we unearthed generally assert that public life is in poor health, that public intellectuals are non-existent, ineffectual, or inscrutable, and that universities are poorly equipped to affect positive change on these fronts.

In the remaining pages, we briefly chart the historical development of the notion of "public intellectual" as context for understanding the contours of the contemporary controversy over such figures. We next delineate themes, or topoi, about public intellectuals in popular publications and demonstrate how these themes are linked to narratives of the decline of universities and of the public sphere. In our third major section, we mine John Dewey's major writings for his remarks about the relationships between education, public intellectuals, and public life as a way of trying to make sense of the contemporary debate. The recent iteration of debate about public intellectuals post-dates, of course, Dewey's writings, but Dewey's emphasis on "social intelligence" and associated living and his normative models for the ways in which knowledge production should assist the modem society resonate with and can speak to the contemporary debate over the roles, relevance, and existence of public intellectuals. Finally, we offer a framework for understanding--and practicing--public intellectualism in the 21st century.

THE ORIGINS OF "PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS"

The term "public intellectual" seems to be a modem invention. Many scholars locate its earliest iteration in late 19th century France, when the term "engaged intellectual" emerged in the wake of the Dreyfus affair to describe the intellectuals who were vocal in their criticism of the state's conduct around the trial and the reaction of civil society (Sadri, 2000). Such engagement with political affairs was, apparently, new for intellectuals who were supposed to be concerned with only abstract philosophical ideas. In the United States, the term "public intellectual" has been attributed to a 1958 statement by C. Wright Mills (Jacoby, 1987), although in recent years some writers have erroneously credited Russell Jacoby with coining the term in his book, The Last Intellectuals. Although 1958 is the date most often cited, Mills' earlier essays showed a concern for the role of intellectuals in public life. In 1944, he wrote the essay, "The Social Role of the Intellectual," building on John Dewey's (1935/1963) pragm atic challenge to liberal and Leftist intellectuals to convert their social scientific work into publicly available and useful knowledge. Although he believed in the necessity of intellectual and artistic involvement in public life, Mills was pessimistic about the institutional and political barriers faced by intellectuals. Specifically, his essay cautioned that independent artists and intellectuals were less and less in a position to access wider publics due to the growing influence of universities and commercial mass publishing on "how, when, and upon what ... [intellectuals] ... will work and write" (Mills, 1944/1963, p. 297). Despite these limiting influences on intellectual expression, Mills proclaimed that it was the duty of intellectuals to become engaged and to "be aware of the sphere of strategy that is really open" to intellectual influence (p. 300).

In a later essay, "On Knowledge and Power," he outlined the role of the public intellectual as one who is "the moral conscience of his society" (Mills, 1958/1963, p. 611). One comes to occupy such a role through the deployment of individual knowledge to the benefit of society. In a tone strikingly similar to Dewey's comments on social intelligence, Mills wrote that "what knowledge does to a man [sic] (in clarifying what he is and setting it free)--that is the personal ideal of knowledge. What knowledge does to civilization (in revealing its human meaning, and setting it free)--that is the social ideal of knowledge" (p. 606). The characterization of knowledge as a means for clarifying one's subjectivity and the possibility of freedom through knowledge underscore the modern--more specifically, liberal--principles undergirding this version of public intellectualism. To occupy the grand role of moral conscience requires the grand liberal theme of the sovereign subject and the ability to imagine a broad, coherent public in the manner of John Dewey's "Great Community."

In 1987, Jacoby brought the term "public intellectual" back into general parlance. Journalists and critics took up and circulated the term in their commentary about "culture wars" and a new generation of vocal, media-friendly scholars, artists, and writers. In the academic and popular presses similar questions arose about these new public intellectuals: can university-trained specialists and/or avant-garde thinkers speak to general public issues with authority? Is academe a sufficient locus for public thought? And, finally, could the new crop of public intellectuals whose work centered on issues of identity speak to and for heterogeneous publics or only that public from which they ostensibly emerged? In the writings that we examined, responses to these questions varied, but the responses congregated around three major themes.

POPULAR COMMENTARY ON THE "PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL"

We amplify three major topoi about public intellectuals: breadth, location, and legitimacy. We confess outright that the topoi share some conceptual overlap, but we believe that our mapping of the controversy over public intellectuals elucidates the contours well. Each of these topics is accompanied by narratives about the decline of public life and universities. A consistent refrain, for example, is that today's public intellectuals pale in comparison to their early 20th century counterparts or at least are in need of revitalization to become as great as their predecessors. Yet inevitable decline and incorrigible malaise compete with threads of optimism about public intellectuals. Central to this optimism, for example, is a reconsideration of "authentic" modes of publicness. In the next several pages, we summarize...