The Wily Filipino

On "Public Intellectuals."

Here's Elaine Showalter on one of 2003's "most overrated ideas":

Intellectuals and professors who write for a general audience are always valuable, but the idea of the "public intellectual" as a specific role is now well past its sell-by date. Being a public intellectual has degenerated from a calling to a career. Aspiring public intellectuals can now get a Ph.D. to prepare them for this academic market niche, and some enterprising professors have already added the term "public intellectual" to Web sites. In theory, the public intellectual could address any subject, even — imagine! — teaching and higher education; but public intellectual purists reserve the title for social critics who take an exclusively oppositional stance to political policies in general, and American foreign policy in particular. The public intellectuals' lack of accountability — no bucks stop at their desks — and their remoteness from the world of difficult, flawed, risky, but necessary decision-making (the "tenured gadfly," as Richard Posner says in his updated "Public Intellectuals," is an oxymoron), makes their critical posture seem self-indulgent despite its virtue. Anybody can complain, blog and find fault; the real intellectual might try to solve problems.