Goodbye Academia Part 5: The Public Intellectual

I think that what I've been hoping to become as a result of my education, often without knowing it, is a public intellectual, or even a man of letters. And, basically, I see a successful public intellectual as being someone with the chops of an academic, but the charisma of a public figure. I see it as someone who thinks (and can write) as deeply as a professor, but who is also involved in the translation of those thoughts into the public consciousness.

And, despite some negative aspects to working in academia, there are definitely things I like about it, which I'd like to couple with non-scholarly publication and other work.

My understanding of what it takes to become a public intellectual is probably naive and biased. However, as far as I know, most professors don't regularly write commentary for newspapers or TV. Their books aren't praised for walking the line between academic and popular works. They aren't tapped to serve with politicians, or transition back and forth between academia and industries like, say, consulting (which theoretically should have a lot in common with the critical study rhetoric and texts).

In other words, most professors that I know tend to work almost exclusively within academia. And that's great.

But there is also a different kind of professor. At NYU for example, film professors listed publications in The Village Voice and The New York Times. Some of the professors I researched at USC and UCLA routinely serve as judges at well-known film festivals. Some of the English professors that I researched had more "public" work listed alongside their scholarship. (Herbert Blau, for example, at University of Washington, has worked in theater and fashion, but now also teaches in the University of Washington's English department.) The point here is that there are some people who write or produce both for academics, and others. (Stanley Fish, Wendell Barry, and Nigel Spivey are examples of people who have done this to one degree or another. An while I don't agree with everything they say, I do admire the venues available to them to say it.)

Obviously, the people who become public intellectuals are those who have risen to the top of their respective fields (with a lot of hard work). And, they also typically don't have those opportunities straight out of school. Yet, the another thing they seem to have in common is that they studied at, and then often worked at, really good schools. My conclusion: to become a public intellectual it's helpful to have an elite academic pedigree. Also, one has to aspire to that position. I think a lot of people are happy to simply teach and publish within their discipline. Which is cool of course. But others definitely hope for a more diverse work load.

Like I said, this is probably an incomplete vision of what it means to be an intellectual. It's certainly romanticized. But ultimately I don't think I'd be content teaching three or four classes a semester at a remote state school and publishing in Western Humanities Review or The Journal of American Culture for the next 30 years. (Both those journals are great ones that I used in my thesis.) I don't expect to have a regular column in The New York Times, but I'd like a career path that at least includes the possibility of public work/writing in addition to submitting work to academic journals. For most professors—and for whatever reason—it seems like those doors aren't just closed, they often don't exist at all.

So the point, it seems, is that like becoming, say, an astronaut, becoming a public intellectual requires a pretty specific career path. Without that path, the probability of reaching that goal is minuscule.

In my case, it was literally not until I began writing this series of blogs that I began to understand my own ambitions and goals, but as I look back on the choices I've made and the people I professionally admire, it seems obvious that I was looking for some balance between academia and public work (because I enjoy parts of both). Not surprisingly I suppose, as I've gravitated away from scholarship, I've moved toward journalism, which is in many ways the flip side of academia. Instead of emphasizing specialized writing, it's more populist and very general. It has a clear purpose, and reason for existing. Obviously it has it's own problems too, but without a degree from an elite university a choice likely has to be made between public work and scholarship, and I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself gravitating toward the former.