Big Brains, Small Impact

20 years ago, the author chided his peers for their academic insularity. They roared in outrage. Of course, no one heard them.

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By RUSSELL JACOBY

Twenty years ago, I published The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, which put into circulation the term "public intellectual." I offered a generational explanation for what I saw as the eclipse of younger intellectuals. Why in 1987 had the same intellectuals dominated for more than 20 years, with few new faces among them? Why was it that the Daniel Bells or Gore Vidals or Kenneth Galbraiths seemed to lack successors? Professionalization and academization appeared to be the reason. Younger intellectuals were retreating into specialized and cloistered environments.

Earlier 20th-century thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at arm's length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straightforward prose and gained a nonprofessional audience. As his reputation grew, Wilson printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or introductions, does not give interviews or appear on television, and does not participate in symposia.

Later intellectual generations, including, paradoxically, the rebellious 60s cohort, do give interviews; do write articles on demand; and most evidently do participate in symposia. They grew up in a much-expanded campus universe and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors who geared their work toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this generation — my generation! — advanced into postmodernism, post-Marxism, and postcolonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile. It neither wanted to nor, after a while, could write accessible prose. The new thinkers became academic — not public — intellectuals, with little purchase outside professional circles. While a book by Edmund Wilson could be read with pleasure by an educated citizen, a volume by an academic luminary such as Homi K. Bhabha or Fredric Jameson would give him or her a headache.

With some exceptions, the campus natives cried foul when my book appeared. Gray academics turned purple. The historian Thomas Bender judged the book "careless, ill-conceived, and perhaps even irresponsible." According to my critics, I missed the plethora of younger intellectuals outside the limelight; I overlooked the Foucauldian radicals who occupied academic crevices; I ignored the new forms of intellectual contestation; I prized an anti-intellectual simplicity; I pined for 1950s intellectuals and old white guys like Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling. In an era of theoretical advances, I championed the rear guard.

Have 20 years clarified this argument?

To be sure, the assumption that the passage of time itself resolves cultural controversies is questionable. My book challenged the idea of linear progress. Perhaps the new generation, I suggested, thinks less boldly than the preceding generation. History has known periods of reversal and confusion. We could be in one such period. While advances in science and technology cannot be doubted, the humanities do not necessarily keep pace. Today we may be no better positioned than 20 years ago to appraise our intellectual situation.

Of course, few like to believe that we live in an era of mediocrity. A working title of my book was "The Decline of Public Intellectuals." The agent who read my manuscript — he eventually dropped me — declared that my title would kill sales. The word "intellectuals" would bewilder consumers, he said, nor would "decline" win them back. He wondered if I could at least recast the manuscript as a story of achievement, maybe calling it "The Rise of American Intellectuals." That might sell!

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.

Moreover, in The Last Intellectuals, I did not even allude to computers and the Internet. I wrote my book on an electric typewriter. Wite-Out was my trusty companion. "Cut and paste" still referred to scissors and tape. One does not have to be a cheerleader to believe that the Internet has altered cultural realities. Writers — including professors — can escape censorious editors and referees by establishing their own blogs. The Internet gives anyone an electronic pulpit. All ideas are game. The old-fashioned intellectual writing a book or an essay may be as outdated as a horse and buggy.

Yet the role of the Internet and blogs in the United States may differ from that in, say, Myanmar or China, where postings have real consequences. In Myanmar the Internet threatened the state with news of bloody antigovernment protests, and the government shut it down. China regularly monitors blogs and news sites, allowing only tame dissent. Certain terms like "human rights" or "corruption" block a site.

In the United States, however, blogs are not so much about challenging an authoritarian state as about adding to the cacophony. Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones than reasoned contributions to public life. Michael Bérubé, who teaches American literature and cultural studies at Pennsylvania State University and is an accomplished blogger, admits as much. "One day I'll have an analysis of the hockey playoffs," he wrote about his own blog, "the next day a story about the night my band opened for the Ramones, the next day an account of a trip with my younger son, Jamie."

Of course personal sharing is not all he and others do in their postings, but what is the net result? The Internet provides instant communication and quick access to vast resources, but has it altered the quality or content of intellectual discussions? Too many voices may cancel each other out. Bérubé himself has given up regular blogging to write books instead. Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up to get the author's autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue, but authors line up to see "The Reader," who sits behind the table. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.

The fate of public intellectuals today allows no neat and certain answers. Even the effort of the indefatigable Richard A. Posner, judge, professor, and conservative, falls short. In his 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Posner sought to finally give precision to this topic. He wanted to nail down the species and measure its worth, which he found inadequate. Enamored of, if not blinded by, a market approach, Posner found an absence of quality control in public intellectuals. He tabulated Web "hits" and scholarly citations, not only to identify leading intellectuals, but also to indicate their defective quality. Public intellectuals, he concluded, gain attention as they lose scholarly credibility. The more they address public issues, the less their professional colleagues refer to them — for good reason, according to Posner.

As public intellectuals step outside their specialties, they offer substandard information, Posner argues. For example, Stephen Jay Gould attacked (in The Mismeasure of Man) the notion of IQ, but Posner declares that the late Harvard professor lacked expertise on the subject. Gould was a paleontologist, not an authority on intelligence. The scientists who objected to a national antimissile defense system, the lawyers who protested the Clinton impeachment, and the professors who questioned the invasion of Iraq did not know what they were talking about. None possessed the requisite professional knowledge. Posner uses the stick of specialization to dismiss those with whom he disagrees. The decline of public intellectuals correlates with the rise of Richard Posner.

Other conservative commentators may be more on target, although they draw the wrong conclusions. Some years after the publication of The Last Intellectuals, a few critics began, and have not ceased, to bemoan an overrepresentation of liberals and leftists in academe — the so-called tenured radicals. The argument and its evidence seem defective. For starters, how are such political animals identified? And how much does it matter if a Republican, Democrat, or Naderite teaches "The History of Ancient Greece"? Moreover, what does "overrepresentation" in the university mean? Compared to what? The post office? The State Department? Wall Street? Who says all of society must be statistically homogeneous? Finally these aggrieved conservatives seemed supremely uninterested in the political cast of the more-substantial faculties in fields such as the sciences, medicine, and engineering. It is their poor cousins in the humanities who drive them to distraction.

Yet let us accept, for the moment, the argument that humanities departments house more leftists than Home Depot or the police department. Shouldn't this be something that conservatives celebrate, not decry? Doesn't this mean that the system works elegantly, not poorly? Are these professors the successors to the last generation of intellectuals? If so, society has successfully insulated them. They inhabit a protected environment where they can neither harm each other nor reach outsiders. As academic intellectuals subvert paradigms and deconstruct narratives in campus symposia, conservatives take over the nation. Brilliant!

Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. A columnist for The Chronicle Review, he is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).