BOOKS 333
The Questions Public Intellectuals Usually Don't Ask
ANxIous
INTELLECTS: ACADEMIC PROFESSIONALS, PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS,
AND
ENLIGHTENMENT VALUES. By John Michael. Duke University Press.
$49·95·
"PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS" STRIKES ME as a spongy term, one lacking in
precise definition and fairly itching for trouble. The label started being
attached to certain writers at a time when most academic prose-espe–
cially in the humanities-had become so turgid, so packed with the jaw–
breakers of high theory, that general readers were frozen out of the
conversation
a priori.
Enter a disparate group of academic types who set
out to sharpen the public debate about all manner of hot-button sub–
jects: affirmative action, multiculturalism, hate-speech codes, and polit–
ical correctness. For the most part, the new class of public intellectuals
took a certain pride in being able to conduct their respective debates in
plain English and they tried, as best they could, to revive the old days
when a nervous, high-energy intellectual style was nearly everything,
and young writers dreamed about earning a seat at the table where an
older generation of New York intellectuals traded barbs.
That said, however, there are important differences between a loose
grouping of intellectuals deeply engaged in the defining struggles of
their day (Stalinism vs. anti-Stalinism, for example) and the lesser
squabbles that have, for some two decades now, garnered attention,
possibly
too
much attention, as the "Culture Wars." As George Orwell
once quipped, there are some things that you can only learn at univer–
sity. What was true then is (alas) even truer now-and apparent to any–
body who has ever skimmed a contemporary college catalogue. There
are, for example, whole courses devoted to TV sitcoms or dime-novel
potboilers, the "constructed female body or how to semiotically 'read'
a shopping mall." In such an anything-goes world it is hardly surprising
that Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida recently
announced its new Ph.D.-granting program in how to become a public
intellectual. The lucky ones selected will, we are told, learn how to write
articles for such mass-market publications as
Harper's
or even
The New
Yorker .
Leaving aside the larger question-namely, whether such publica–
tions are the proper venue for genuinely intellectual thought-the
smaller, but nonetheless crucial question is this: How do graduate
students read their way through a library of essential books they missed
