Wither or not the academic public intellectual across the spectrum of U.S. colleges and universities

Abstract

The academic literature on public intellectuals would argue that the days of scholars playing the role of public intellectuals are long behind us, and that the role is in decline. This chapter examines the extent to which that may or may not be the case. It defines what it means to be a public intellectual, catalogues the literature related to the thesis that public intellectuals are in decline, discusses data about the prevalence of faculty who exhibit behaviors consistent with public intellectualism and how this varies by institutional type, and then discusses whether public intellectuals are a dying breed across all of American higher education, or just in a few institutional contexts, and then determines possible reasons for the decline in public intellectualism.