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Thursday, June 12, 2008
Professors and Intellectuals
Frank Donoghue has just published The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. He’s interviewed at Inside Higher Ed:
For a hundred years, humanists claimed to follow Matthew Arnold’s exhortation to promulgate the best that has been thought and said. As universities have more and more come to function as occupational training centers, places where students come for vocational credentials, this charge has been emptied of any real meaning. It’s no longer relevant to the mission of most universities. And at those institutions where the liberal arts still flourish, prestige has taken the place of the Arnoldian mottoes. That is, the best universities now steer prospective students away from the content of the curriculum (literature, philosophy, history) and toward the signaling power of the institution itself.
Over at the NYTimes, Barry Gewen blogs about Daniel Drezner’s recent essay, “Public Intellectuals 2.0” (doc file download) on the current flowering of public intellectuals:
He argues that contrary to what has become the conventional wisdom, there has not been a decline in the quality of American intellectual life from the postwar glory days of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy and others who constituted the circle now known as the New York Intellectuals. Drezner goes on to list a battalion of contemporary public intellectuals to prove his point, everyone from Barbara Ehrenreich to Tom Wolfe to Samuel Huntington.
Gewen objects, arguing, for example:
Drezner includes, for instance, Fareed Zakaria and Samantha Power. I yield to few in my admiration for these two writers, but for them to be considered public intellectuals in the old New York Intellectual sense — with its commitment to cultural “centrality” — I think they would have to demonstrate greater breadth than they have so far displayed. Zakaria would have to write, say, a thoughtful essay on the novels of Philip Roth and Power a book on the history of the blues.
So which writers today have this range, this moral, almost religious, even monkish, commitment to the life of the mind?
Comments
The documentary “Arguing the World”, though it focuses on some of the more conservative intellectuals, is an interesting look at the New York Intellectual scene. It focuses on Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer, all former radical leftists. Just to see some of these intellectuals return to City College in Harlem and talk about the CUNY system in its heyday is worth putting it in the Netflix queue
Also Norman Podhoretz’s Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer is an interesting read. I remember Norman Podhoretz recalls a fight with Allen Ginsberg and Ginsberg screams “We’ll get you through your children!”
Which writers today, you ask?
I really can’t think of a person who puts themselves out as a public in intellectual. Michio Kaku (from City College) tries to be the next Carl Sagan for the hard sciences. Richard Dawkins also is focused on science. I think a public person with a broad intellectual inquiry of the likes of the New York School of intellectuals is not matched. These folks combined political science, sociology, science, and literature and were also respected in the media. But these are different times.
The Blogosphere is a place to look for opinion but as for public intellectuals, I would have to say John Stewart and radio talk show hosts are our public intellectuals.However these figures are hardly “almost religious, even monkish, commitment to the life of the mind?” There are many people like this, I’m sure. They are hiding in the university. They write blogs that get lost in a sea of YouTube videos and social network chatter.
I agree that we need more public intellectuals in literary studies. We need a Trilling. We have enough foxes. We need a hedgehog.
Hmmmm..."The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
There’s a name absent from Drezner’s paper. It’s not absent from Posner, for example, though counterfactually and perhaps somewhat resentfully deployed there.
Also, pay attention to false parallelism in the footnote mentioning Buckley and Galbraith, in which he claims that obituaries failing to mention Buckley’s support for segregationism, a fact about the world, is the same as eulogists passing over in silence the presumed ‘off-baseness’ of unspecified Galbraithian predictions, a (mistaken) interpretation.
Oops. You are right on that point, Bill. The “one thing” to me was broad ntellectual inquiry. I was thinking mico versus macro, but I’m misreading Berlin. Thanks for that.
Dresner’s Dresner’s paper points out some positive trends but I still think there are no standout broad minded intellectuals. Malcolm Gladwell, is well known but still he is limited to social science. I think its difficult to have a real public intellectual in such a dense information ecosphere.