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>From Slate.Com
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The Next Intellectuals
By: Judith Shulevitz
Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 1999, at 10:49 a.m.
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Should there be a Ph.D. program for public intellectuals? The response to the
news that one has been created has been knee-jerk and mocking. Playboy called
it a "Hot Air Doctorate"; Camille Paglia declared in last week's Chronicle of
Higher Education, "They're going to groom people--what? To be me? That's not
the way to do it." It's true that the Public Intellectuals Program--didn't
anyone notice that the acronym is PIP?--offers its own butt up for the kicking.
The courses for its 23 students could have been ripped out of a Modern Language
Association catalog, circa 1995: There are classes on feminism, "new
spiritualities," environmentalism, postcolonialism, gender, race, media,
dissidence, and, of course, pop culture. The host institution is Florida
Atlantic University, an undistinguished university in Boca Raton evidently
looking for an excuse to lure name-brand talent to its campus--and who would
refuse a Florida gig, especially if they make it in, say, February?
The talent is name-brand--among the stars scheduled to shine there briefly at
some point in the future are Harvard theologian Cornel West, Harvard
philosopher Anthony Appiah, Parisian semiotician Julia Kristeva, feminist
psychoanalytic critic Juliet Mitchell, and even, interestingly, that elegist of
public intellectualism lost, Russell Jacoby, author of The Last Intellectuals--
but all of them are of a political inclination (leftish) that has been losing
the culture wars on campus of late. You can't help wondering whether its
graduates, trained in such ephemera as "Rhetoric and Principle," as one of the
core courses is called, will be able to hold their own in the substantially
more conservative--and possibly more substantive--public arena. "If we roll our
eyes," wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer's book critic Carlin Romano in an essay
in the Chronicle,
it's because we suspect that [F.A.U.'s] freshly minted public intellectuals
will find themselves cerebrally all dressed up with no place to go. Can you
imagine 'the Boca Raton intellectuals' exercising cultural clout in the
national media, with profiles about them to follow in the Times? Don't hold
your breath.
But it's not as if there's anything wrong per se with a doctoral training
program for public intellectuals. At its best, it would be an interesting
graduate program of general studies.
The main problem with the F.A.U. program, it strikes Culturebox, is the name.
It's pretty presumptuous for any professor to declare his students "public
intellectuals"; you would much rather they got their certification as such from
someone else. Otherwise, the whole thing sounds harmless. For one thing,
contrary to the popular wisdom, F.A.U. does not intend to turn out baby
Paglias. The program director, Max Kirsch, claims, at least, that its students
aren't looking for fame: "They are looking for some engagement with the
public." Kirsch is using code, but what he means is that what he's training his
students to be are behind-the-scenes activists and organizers--what Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci called organic intellectuals. Gramsci believed that
everybody, no matter what he does, participates in some kind of intellectual
activity--is a philosopher or artist or person of taste, has a unique
conception of the world and line of moral conduct, and therefore generates new
ways of thinking. The job of people who actually call themselves intellectuals
is to articulate such situational thought and put it to use for change. As
Edward Said put it in some 1994 lectures on the subject:
Today's advertising or public relations expert ... would be considered an
organic intellectual according to Gramsci, someone who in a democratic society
tries to gain the consent of potential customers, win approval, marshal
consumer or voter opinion. Gramsci believed that organic intellectuals are
actively involved in society, that is, they constantly struggle to change minds
and expand markets ... are always on the move, on the make.
In short, you could view the Florida Atlantic program as a version of Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government, except it's for left-wing activists rather than
centrist politicians.
Moreover, the ideal of the public intellectual is no newfangled fad. "Organic
intellectual" is not strictly identical with "public intellectual," of course,
and one wonders whether Russell Jacoby understands who exactly he's signed up
to teach, given his understanding of the term "public intellectual" (in The
Last Intellectuals he defines it as one who writes with "vigor and clarity,"
not as an activist or left-wing scholar). But the notion of the public
intellectual is much older than that of, say, the gentlemen-scholar, whom no
one sneers at, except perhaps organic intellectuals. Almost every philosophy or
political tendency worth mentioning, from Plato on, has held in special esteem
its version of the active thinker who puts his principles across well and
thereby commands a wider public. We might think the idea is newer because of
the phrase, which gained currency in recent years mainly because of Jacoby. In
his book, Jacoby deplores what he characterizes as a sort of fall, from the
Edenic condition of what he calls "classical American intellectuals" born at
the turn of the century--Lewis Mumford, Dwight Macdonald, and, inevitably,
Edmund Wilson--to the generation born after World War II, whose intellectuals,
he claims, have all retreated into academia, where they have lost themselves in
a thicket of specialized professional jargon.
Culturebox doesn't exactly buy Jacoby's argument that there are no public
intellectuals left. If anything, there are too many--every bright young thing
graduating from college these days feels compelled to publish his or her
particular social critique, whether readable or not, and there is a small
platoon of quasi-subsidized publishing companies (Free Press, Basic Books,
Public Affairs Press, etc.) ready to print them. On the other hand, why should
there be any limit to the number of baby public intellectuals out there? And
why shouldn't they be left-wing? Quite a few of the aforementioned junior
pundits get money and support from right-wing think tanks, which are the moral
and intellectual equivalent of the Florida Atlantic Public Intellectuals
Program, if that. So, Culturebox says: Let a thousand flowers bloom.
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