He stands slightly hunched over the pulpit, cloaked in his trademark three-piece black suit, his wide eyes staring out at the audience. His arms sweep through the air, reinforcing each word that he utters, keeping time with the cadence of his speech. Though he’s preaching in a church, on a Sunday afternoon, this man is no minister. His name is Cornel West.
On this particularly Sunday last spring, Cornel R. West ’74—the former Fletcher University professor who left Harvard last year for Princeton—was warning about the repercussions that could follow continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Cornel West is not an historian of the Middle East, nor is he a scholar of international relations. By training, he is a philosopher. What gives West the authority to speak on the Middle East is that he is a member of a special group of people who have been appointed—either by themselves or by the national media—to set forth their opinions and views on the pressing social issues of our time. West, some would say, is a typical example of a recently identified phenomenon: the public intellectual.
The problem is that it is nearly impossible to reach a consensus on what exactly a public intellectual is—even among a group of professors who are considered to fulfill this role. Ten “public intellectuals” interviewed for this story offered 10 different definitions of the term.
“A person who addresses issues that are high on the public agenda and writes in a way that his material or her materials are accessible to a broad audience” is a public intellectual, says Geyser University Professor William Julius Wilson.
Or, put less kindly: “A public intellectual is someone who shoots off their mouth publicly about something about which they’re not an expert,” says Winthrop Professor of History Stephan A. Thernstrom.
This ambiguity is beginning to cause problems on campuses like Harvard’s, as last year’s conflict between West and University President Lawrence H. Summers demonstrates. West has said that in a meeting last fall, Summers criticized the quality of his work and chastised him for not spending enough time on campus. West has said he felt he was being attacked for what he perceived as the very noble endeavor of making his scholarship accessible outside the ivory tower. He saw himself as a scholar who was not afraid to take a stand on issues of public significance.
Though he has never publicly commented on what happened in his meeting with West, one would suppose that Summers had some questions about the scholastic merit of West’s extracurricular activities, such as recording a spoken-word album, filming cameos for The Matrix sequels and advising the Rev. Al Sharpton on his potential 2004 presidential campaign. The conflict between Summers and West, among other things, was a clash between two different definitions of what it means to be a public intellectual.
This difference of opinions is mirrored throughout the academy, dividing professors and administrators alike. On one side are those who think public intellectuals should be scholars—both inside and outside the academy—who speak to the public solely about issues that fall under their particular field of study. On the other side are those who believe that they have a wider responsibility to address all of the pressing social issues of our time. And even within both of those camps, there are differences of opinion over the amount of time and energy the public intellectual should devote to the public sphere. Though most agree that professors can make a positive contribution to society, current circumstances—from a media tendency toward soundbite punditry to a lack of guidance from administrators—have contributed to a general dissatisfaction with the current state of public-intellectual affairs.
By all accounts, the term “public intellectual” dates back to 1987, when Russell Jacoby coined it in The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe to describe the type of scholar whose disappearance his book lamented. He argued that colleges and universities had coopted all of society’s great minds and shut them up in the proverbial ivory tower, where their ideas and theories were of no use to the general public.
In Jacoby’s mind, the true public intellectuals were a group of intellectuals who lived in New York City in the 1930s, dwelling in tiny apartments and earning a living whatever way they could in order to keep writing columns and books on the great social questions of the time. They addressed society’s most pressing problems—and offered solutions. Today’s academics, Jacoby argued, address highly specialized issues that don’t translate into practical solutions.
In his 2001 book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, University of Chicago professor and federal court judge Richard Posner argued that the public intellectual still exists, but in a weakened, cheapened form—a pundit professor rather than a public intellectual. Posner and Jacoby have a very particular definition of the public intellectual in mind. They do not consider people who simply write about their specialized fields for a general audience to be public intellectuals. On the contrary, they say, only those whose work contains an ethical or political dimension qualify for the title.
Many professors disagree. Gerald Early, a professor of African and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, says he feels that both types of public intellectuals serve a very important purpose. “I think a lot of the time in the university, some of my colleagues may get jealous of someone who is a public intellectual,” Early says, noting that general-audience books sell many more copies than those targeted only to scholars. If you’re one of those professors writing only to colleagues, “you’re lucky if a thousand people know your book,” Early says. “But Mr. West will write a book and sell a ton of copies. I feel the university needs both types of people.”
Whether speaking about one’s particular field or larger social issues, a central component of being a public intellectual is crafting a public image. But different intellectuals have different styles of cultivating this public persona. Some, such as Princeton economist Paul Krugman, develop identities through the press, as op-ed writers and columnists. Others, like Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz, give many public lectures and make frequent television appearances. Still others, like West, are known largely for their involvement in the political arena. Many use a combination of these approaches.
The media, most professors say, is all too eager to give professors a platform to express their views. “Having the title ‘professor’—particularly with a prestigious university attached to it—does convey a false impression” of expertise, Thernstrom says.
The demand for public intellectuals has grown so high that there’s now even a market for education that promises to produce public intellectuals. The University of Chicago offers a course on “Writing as a Public Intellectual.” If spending time in the Windy City doesn’t float your boat, you could earn a comparative studies Ph.D., advertised as a program “for students interested in...life as a public intellectual,” from Florida Atlantic University. “To be a public intellectual today is to be unafraid of contemporary theory,” the program’s description reads. “Our goal is to combine theoretical with concrete analysis and to strive for this integration in every core course, producing students who are theoretically confident and knowledgeable about the world they hope to understand...and change.”
It is the responsibility of the professors themselves to not be tempted by the limelight into speaking about issues that are out of their realm of expertise, says Homi K. Bhabha, professor of English and American language and literature. “Some people are only too ready to be seduced by the temptation to grab the public platform,” he says. This is not a problem to which Harvard is immune. “Clearly there are people at elite universities—including Harvard—who seem to spend a lot of time on TV and publish a lot of stuff I think is not rooted in scholarship,” Thernstrom says.
The problem, many of these professors lament, is that the media is quick to attempt to turn professors’ arguments into soundbites. “The media want pundits, and they want pundits they can be sure of,” Bhabha says, arguing that some journalists aim to turn professors into “narrowly representative figures,” since it makes it easier for them to know who they can call for the liberal soundbite and who they can rely on for the conservative reaction. “There are times when [the media] stereotypes and simplifies your views so that you become a recognizable icon,” Bhabha says. “Some people are only too ready to be seduced by the temptation to grab the public platform. You have to be very careful not to be a rent-a-quote public intellectual.”
Bhabha says he does turn down offers to lecture and comment in public forums. He says he has recently turned down three opportunities to do radio programs because he “felt there were people much better qualified to participate than I.”
Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 says many professors who go on TV face the risk of having their messages misconstrued, since they are used to making their case in a full-hour lecture and not a 30-second sound bite. “You have to keep in mind that most of the reporters are the equivalent of C students or worse,” he says. “They should remember what a C bluebook looks like—that’s what your message is going to be when you speak on TV.” Despite this, Mansfield argues that professors should still use television to get across their messages. “You mustn’t shrink from being labeled or given a persona, because that’s pretty much inevitable,” Mansfield says.
Dershowitz agrees. “I don’t believe a teacher’s job is to be in the classroom,” he says, noting that his name comes from the Hebrew darshan—an itinerant preacher who would go from town to town to teach. Dershowitz also bears in his professorial title the name of Felix Frankfurter—a law-school professor who was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, to serve on the Supreme Court and was once referred to by the Saturday Evening Post as “the most single influential person in the country.”
“Too many teachers remain silent about the great issues of the day,” Dershowitz says. “A shouting match on TV is occasionally a good thing,” he continues. “People get their news from television, and a professor who’s afraid to get on TV is afraid to get into the fray.”
But making all those television appearances and writing all those op-eds makes being a public intellectual a time-consuming affair. When FM contacted James D. Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, about an interview for this story, his assistant replied that he was all booked up until 2004. “With the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA fast approaching, Dr. Watson is swamped in production of a five-part TV series, three new books, and numerous appearances,” wrote Watson’s assistant, Jeff Picarello. “He has asked that we decline all media requests until early 2004.”
Being a public intellectual doesn’t seem to leave much time for tending to one’s scholarship—or one’s students. Though Cornel West once served as a faculty adviser to the Black Men’s Forum and taught a class that drew some of the largest crowds of any professor at Harvard, some students say he has not had as stellar a record on personal contact with students. Last fall, some reported having to sign up as far as two months in advance to get into the celebrated professor’s office hours.
And when the professor decided to leave Harvard for Princeton last spring, he did not notify students—including a handful of leaders who gathered 1,200 signatures for a petition urging West to remain at Harvard—about his decision before it was made public.
Some professors say they won’t let student contact be the factor in the equation that is diminished to make room for time for being a public intellectual. MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker, whom FM tracked down on the West Coast in the midst of a six-week tour to promote his new book, The Blank Slate, says he makes a point of answering students’ e-mails on the same day that he receives them. But still, as Pinker admits, in order to be an effective public intellectual, “something’s got to give.” Pinker says he spends much less time in the lab these days. Whereas he used to maintain a lab supported by four graduate students and two grants, he now usually runs his lab with two graduate students and a single grant.
Some professors say they find it necessary to refuse many speaking-engagement requests in order to maintain an appropriate balance between their work inside the academy and their work in the public sphere. “I say no more often than I say yes,” says Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law Laurence Tribe, “principally because such activities can distract from teaching and scholarship unless one keeps them under tight control.” Tribe, who helped argue the legal case for Al Gore ’69 in the Florida recount battle and has been mentioned as a prospective Democratic Supreme Court nominee, says he limits himself to one major public lecture outside of Harvard each year, despite the fact that he usually receives about 50 to 75 invitations.
The question that is often raised by the time commitment involved with being a public intellectual is whether university officials should impose restrictions on the types of public-intellectual work in which their professors participate. “[Administrators] can try having lunch with their local public intellectuals and try to shame them into doing a little more scholarly work,” Mansfield quips. “I understand that was tried at Harvard.”
The University has no official policies on the extent to which its professors should serve as public intellectuals, though it does mandate that no more than a fifth of a faculty member’s professional time be devoted to outside activities. Each school then elaborates on its own rules and policies for the types of activities and amount of time that professors are allowed to spend on such outside endeavors.
Summers says the University aims to encourage professors to make their work accessible to the general public, so long as such endeavors “contribute to the University’s objectives of seeking truth and advancing knowledge...In the vast majority of cases there is no conflict,” Summers says. “We don’t seek to proscribe what audiences our faculty should write for; we do take very seriously the obligation faculty have to focus on their academic obligations.”
The day that Princeton announced their coup de West, the professor was not available for comment, since he had spent the previous day serving time for an act of civil disobedience, arrested along with 20 others for blocking traffic outside the State Department in Washington, D.C., in protest of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. West has been criticized by some for spending too much time in the streets and not enough in the classroom. But in some fields, it is very difficult to separate activism from scholarship. In fact, the field of Afro-American studies is an ideal example of an entire discipline that lends itself to public activity. Founded during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the field sprung from extremely activist roots. Many black studies scholars to this day believe that a central component of the field is activism.
“The field of African-American studies enjoys a diversity of approaches, but to me the most sophisticated departments combine the principles of traditional scholarship with the commitment to expanding the world’s knowledge about the African-American community,” says DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is chair of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department.
Furthermore, some fields—mainly those in the social sciences that deal with socially-pressing issues such as race, poverty and inequality—produce a large number of public intellectuals. “I think there is a high correlation between being a public intellectual and working on issues that are high on the public agenda,” says Wilson, a sociologist. “One of the reasons black scholars are disproportionately represented among public intellectuals is because they address issues such as race.”
All the professors interviewed for this story say they feel there is an intrinsic value in escaping the Harvard bubble every now and then and taking work to a larger audience. “I think your teaching is very likely and indeed should be helped by what you learn outside the academic routine,” says John Kenneth Galbraith, Warburg professor of economics emeritus, who at 94 is a living example of a legendary public intellectual, having served as a top adviser to Franklin Roosevelt.
Galbraith says that one of the most valuable experiences of his life was the time he spent during the presidency of John F. Kennedy ’40 as ambassador to India. He tells the story of how he was welcomed to India by then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. “He greeted me, when I presented my credentials, as no ambassador in history,” Galbraith says. “He said, ‘I welcome you as ambassador, but I hope that this will not prevent you from being my economic adviser.’”
The experience of advising a nation on its economic policies is about as valuable an experience in public service as an economist could hope to have, Galbraith says. “You ask what is enjoyable about the public service—that is an example,” he says. When he returned to the classroom in 1963, Galbraith says he often drew on his experiences in India in his teaching.
Lecturing and getting involved in activities outside the academy also provide scholars with ideas and ways of thinking that they might not otherwise have considered, many say. “Our primary responsibility is teaching and research, but a certain amount of public engagement can enrich public work,” Michael J. Sandel, Harvard College professor and Bass professor of government, writes in an e-mail, explaining that serving on the President’s Council on Bioethics made him aware of a whole new range of ethical issues and concerns, which he now covers in Government 90rw, “Ethics and Biotechnology.”
Mansfield says he believes discussion and debate in the public sphere can help professors bring innovative approaches to their scholarly arguments. “You can, in preparing a political argument, learn things you wouldn’t learn if you were only trying to answer other professors,” he says, “so it forces you to sharpen your thinking and come to the point in a way that scholarly thinking cannot.”
Plus, a little publicity never hurt a university. “I attract students to MIT,” Pinker says. “They can truck me out at alumni and fundraising meetings.”
Harvard is no exception to this rule, having earned a great deal of its notoriety, over the years, through the significant role its professors have played in the federal government. “Harvard is normally the name that comes up when people talk about famous American universities, but so much of that was the accident of John F. Kennedy and the romance of the press with the Harvard crowd,” Thernstrom says. Henry Kissinger, former Dean of the Faculty McGeorge Bundy and Galbraith are only a few of many former Faculty members who served in the Kennedy administration and in presidential administrations since.
“The only thing of which I would be reasonably certain,” Galbraith says, “is that Harvard—which over the course of my lifetime has had a closer association with public life than any other university—owes some of its distinction to that fact.”
Some would even go so far to say that professors have a duty to serve as public intellectuals. Pinker says he does believe professors have such a responsibility—if for no other reason than the enormous amount of funding that American universities receive from the federal government, and hence, the people. “The public is paying for a lot of what we do in the form of government support of universities,” he says. “They paid for it—they should get it back.”
Assistant Professor of Sociology Jason A. Kaufman teaches a course on “Media and the American Mind.” Though he has not specifically studied the role of university professors in the media today, he says, the demand for media-friendly academics is a good, not a bad thing.
“The scholarly community must never forget that they serve at the behest of a non-academic public,” Kaufman says. “The more academics speak to public concern, whether through their scholarly work or merely as sometime pundits, the more the public will endorse the basic goals of the academy.”
