Blogs, public intellectuals and the academy

Dan:

Right on!

I have been writing and saying the same things for years:

http://www.sivacracy.net/2008/01/reflecting_on_jacobys_the_last.html

"Reflecting on Jacoby's 'The Last Intellectuals'

Ever since I read it 16 years ago or so, I have thought Russell Jacoby's book, The Last Intellectuals, was intellectually thin and historically wrong. And I thought for sure that the loud flock of young public intellectuals at work today would have drowned out any lingering affection for it.

Not so. Jacoby still believes that there are none of us out here.

How does he know? Because he has never heard of any of us. Here is what Jacoby wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week:

... Yet valid criticisms have been raised about my argument, and only the obtuse could claim that nothing has happened in the last two decades that might recast the terms of intellectual life. For starters, a new group of African-American intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gerald Early, and Cornel West, as well as several tough-minded women columnists like Maureen Dowd and the late Molly Ivins, emerged. Yet their appearance may qualify my argument, not refute it. Perhaps beyond the stage lights, a new group of younger intellectuals has taken shape. That is what one of my angrier critics, the New York-based freelancer Rick Perlstein claims. "A well-stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen" bright, talented, gutsy public intellectuals, he claims. But who are they? He doesn't say. ...

Rick didn't have to. We all know who they are. Rick Perlstein leads the list, in fact!

Also on that list would be Scott McLemee. And those are just the freelancers, the non-academic public intellectuals. The academic list of significant public intellectuals under 50 is probably a couple dozen people long by now.

Academia rewards public work, relevant work, folks. It actually rewards good writing and broad thinking. That's not to say that one does not have to resort to undignified, specialized, jargon-filled writing along the way to success. But please. Check out the book ads in the NYRB and see all the publicly relevant work being published by academics writing for Yale University Press, W.W. Norton, or Basic Books. There are too many to mention. How many academics had op-eds in the NYTimes, WaPo, or WSJ in 2007? Again, too many to count.

In fact, I would say that today the biggest problem a public intellectual has influencing public debate is that there are too many damn public intellectuals competing for too few outlets! That's why Crooked Timber and the Volokh Conspiracy exist. "

And here is another one:

http://www.sivacracy.net/2006/12/another_decline_of_the_public.html

"Such declinism and nostalgia is ahistorical and simply wrong. Your evidence that historians fail to engage with the public comes only from some choice titles of journal articles. That does not cut it.

Just for a lark, here is a list of current academic historians -- some quite young -- who engage with the public through books, magazine articles, and media interviews on matters of history and public interest:

• Gary Nash
• Eric Rauchway
• Niall Ferguson
• Jonathan Zimmerman
• Tony Judt
• Sean Wilentz
• Patricia Nelson Limerick
• Ed Morgan
• Eric Foner
• Susan Douglas
• Richard Pells
• Juan Cole
• Robert Dallek

I could go on. It took me about 45 seconds to come up with that list.

So what's the problem? Publishers still want good writers. Publishers still publish good and well-written history books. Historians still show up on talk shows and NPR. People have always misused history and they always will. Most academics have always and will always decline or fail to engage with the public.

What, exactly, as changed?"

[...] W. Drezner, a political economist at Tufts University and a veteran blogger, has posted a provocative essay about public intellectuals on his [...]

Another major factor which will affect public debate online: accessibility of diverse blogged opinions as they would be presented and organized by Technorati, Google or other search engines. These will in turn effect the quality, structure and appearance of content that is relayed and deliberate over within this so called new Republic of Letters. If the methodology of searching content continues to draw upon interlinking and readership, then this arena will mirror enough traits belonging to the traditional academic public sphere.

Could you put the document in HTML online?

[...] Budapest-møtet representerer en av de største gevinstene ved internettrevolusjonen: den radikale demokratiseringen av den globale flyten av ideer. Teknologien, ideene og prosessene som har gjort blogger, sosiale nettverk og samarbeidsbaserte prosjekter som Wikipedia mulig, gir også mange ukonvensjonelle tenkere en plattform som lar dem bli hørt av et trofast, om enn ofte lite, publikum. Forskeren og bloggeren Daniel W. Drezner har kalt denne nye generasjonen, frigjort fra akademias vanlige begrensninger og væpnet med Google-søk, for “Public Intellectuals 2.0″. [...]