Does the Public Intellectual Matter?

Tupac Shakur’s posthumously released song, “Changes” (1998) – perhaps his most thought-provoking and certainly his most uplifting anthem – is a moving indictment against the plight of the urban (black) poor. The song is rife with moving anecdotes and references to political and social issues (“and although it seems heaven sent/ we ain’t ready/ to see a black president” being perhaps the most striking of these). One brief moment in the song, however, strikes me as a hidden (and perhaps unintentional) reference to the purpose and place of the public intellectual in society:

Give the crack to the kids who the hell cares/ One less hungry mouth on the welfare

First ship 'em dope and let 'em deal the brothers

Give 'em guns/ step back and watch 'em kill each other

It's time to fight back/ that's what Huey said

Two shots in the dark now Huey's dead

I got love for my brother/ but we can never go nowhere

Unless we share with each other

This may seem like quite an arcane reference to the question of whether the public intellectual matters. But it all hinges upon how we see Huey P. Newton: was he a public intellectual or simply a social activist? Does this distinction even matter?

Discussing whether the public intellectual matters requires us to arrive at a suitable definition of the term, “public intellectual.” We must also determine whether the term “public intellectual” means anything in its own right, or whether it is just a way for various like-minded academes to self-label themselves. In other words, is the “public intellectual” a type of flower with definable characteristics, or simply a bunch of people who all share the appreciation of flowers?

In her essay, “The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research,”[1] Dr. Ellen Cushman provides a primer of various conceptualizations of the public intellectual. Specifically, two of the definitions put forth by academics that Dr. Cushman discusses have value in our own discussion:

[The modern intellectual’s] goal would be to enact in one’s research an informed concern with specific questions of public value and policy. –Dominick Lacapra (p. 328)

And

A postoccidental intellectual [is] able to think at the intersection of the colonial languages of scholarship and the myriad languages subaltemized and banned from cultures of scholarship through five hundred years of colonialism. –Walter Mignolo (p. 328)

Academic wordiness and douchebaggery aside, both of these conceptions inform a possible definition for the public intellectual – someone who is concerned with the civic good and questions of socio-economic inequality. Dr. Cushman tends to agree with these conceptualizations. She argues that this tendency to quantify the public intellectual within the population of “middle and upper class policy makers, administrators, and professionals” is incorrect[2]. She believes that the public intellectual should be primarily concerned with inequality in society:           

The kind of public intellectuals I have in mind combine their research, teaching, and service efforts in order to address social issues important to community members in under-served neighborhoods. You know these neighborhoods: they’re the ones often located close by universities, just beyond the walls and gates, or down the hill, or over the bridge, or past the tracks. The public in these communities isn’t usually the one scholars have in mind when they try to define the roles of “public” intellectuals. (p. 329)

Dr. Cushman goes on to argue the importance of “service learning”: where enlightened individuals from the bucolic college environment spend time in poor, urban communities. In other words, she shares the foregone assumption that both Lacapra and Mignolo indicated in their conceptualizations of the public intellectual: that he is academically inclined and university-trained, probably holding a Ph.D. in some-such, and full of concern for the unlucky, downtrodden Common Man.

Elanor Townsley, professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College, thinks all the kind of elitism evident in Dr. Cushman’s portrayal of the public intellectual is bunk[3], and I am inclined to agree. The public intellectual, she says, is “an important political trope in contemporary U.S. culture and politics[4].” She believes the concept of the public intellectual is nothing more than a “figurative use of words, or a cultural shorthand, that holds, contains, and organizes moral tension about intellectuals and politics in the contemporary United States” (emphasis in original)[5]. She points out that intellectuals who make their work accessible to the masses are nothing new; they just have a new brand. The term “public intellectual” was not in use until some point in the early 1980s, when it began to appear in the pages of the New York Times and other publications. Other terms, such as “intelligentsia” and “literati” have been in use for much longer. What is unique about the public intellectual meme is that it has been used as a nearly universally positive concept. Whether this new “brand identity” for the academic elite was some sort of orchestrated conspiracy, or, more likely, it simply sprouted naturally from growing use is unimportant. What is important is the term has grown into widespread use in the journalistic and academic fields. Furthermore, in the New York Times, from 1987 – 2005, by far the greatest use of the term “public intellectual” appeared in the Book Review Desk[6]— in other words, intellectuals and critics talking about other intellectuals and critics (the second greatest incidence was the editorial desk – again, presumably intellectuals referencing each other). Because the term “public intellectual” has no specific, codified definition, anyone who lays claim to “public intellectualship” is a public intellectual. In short, the definition of a public intellectual is whoever people are calling a public intellectual.

A public intellectual is, therefore, more of a horticultural club than a specific flower. So, by defining who a public intellectual is, where does Huey P. Newton fall under its umbrella? In order to answer this, a bit of Dr. Newton’s personal history must be discussed. Huey P. Newton formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966 based upon “revolutionary humanism,”[7] because he felt disenfranchised from mainstream American society (p. 21). Newton and his co-founder, Bobby Seale, were greatly influenced by other revolutionary intellectuals, such as Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara[8]. Newton and Seale were undergraduates in college at this time, but they soon achieved recognition in the media as radical activists. As Newton became embroiled in legal battles such as his trial for the fatal shooting of Oakland Police Department officer John Fey and the murder of 17-year-old prostitute Kathleen Smith, he also began to write and speak politically. Eventually he received a Ph.D. in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. Despite all this, Dr. Newton did not seem to consider himself a public intellectual, and I found no evidence that anyone else laid a claim to his status as a public intellectual, either[9]. In fact, upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1980 he said, “My foes have called me bum, hoodlum, criminal. Some have even called me nigger. I imagine now they'll at least have to call me Dr. Nigger[10].” Although Dr. Newton certainly deserved to be called a public intellectual, no one saw fit to invite him to the party. Perhaps if he had not been killed in a senseless act of drug violence and had been a part of the intellectual club for a bit longer, he would have gained more acceptance as a public intellectual, rather than a radical activist.

But if Huey P. Newton was not a public intellectual, where does that leave all those who consider themselves to be public intellectuals? After all, Paul Krugman, Noam Chomsky, Richard Posner, et al. are all considered by various sources to be public intellectuals. They have written on all manner of subjects of public interest. They must all believe in the power of criticism to effect change, otherwise they would not be (or have been) writing in the public domain. And yet there are no Grammy-nominated, top-of-the-charts pop songs written about Krugman, Chomsky, or Posner. Much of their writing is targeted for public consumption, but the public doesn’t seem to be listening. And if someone like Huey P. Newton can have more of a cultural effect than these self-described public intellectuals, what is the point of their efforts?

The answer is the manner in which we think about public intellectuals – if we need to think about them at all. While there are many rubrics we might employ to define the public intellectual, focusing on defining who and what the public intellectual is provides little use beyond intellectual exercise. Stephen Mack, professor of writing at the University of Southern California, is on the right track. Conceptualizing the public intellectual, he says, needs to shift from thinking of “categories and class” to thinking about their “function”:

[O]ur notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is—and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it[11].

In other words, the public intellectual doesn’t matter. However, the mission of the public intellectual matters a great deal. Striving for change is the goal of both public intellectuals and ostensibly non-intellectual activists like Huey Newton. Decrying the decline of the public intellectual as Richard Posner has done is simply a waste of time. As Dr. Mack points out, criticizing the status quo and discussing questions of social, moral, and political import is the duty of all citizens in any healthy democracy. Highly trained scholars are often better at this because, as Dr. Mack succinctly observes, it’s their “day job.” These voices certainly deserve our notice, but anyone who has a good idea or a cause to champion also deserves notice. In fact, people like Richard Posner, who whine about the current state of the public intellectual, seem to be revealing an existential angst they must feel about their chosen profession: if people like Huey Newton and other supposed outsiders can effect so much political change, where is the value in old-fashioned scholars like Posner? Mr. Posner needs to remember that the goal of his social criticism is not about mirroring some scholarly ideal, it’s about the message itself.

Perhaps our least intellectual president, Theodore Roosevelt, said it best:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat[12].

If Teddy were alive today, I think he would have valued the efforts of Dr. Huey P. Newton as highly as any intellectual’s. And that’s good enough for me.

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[1] Cushman, E. (1999). The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research. College English, 61.3, 328-336.

[2] Cushman, E, p. 328.

[3] Townsley, E. (2006). The Public Intellectual Trope in the United States. The American Sociologist, 37.3, 39-66.

[4] Townsley, E, p. 40.

[5] Townsley, E. p. 40.

[6] Townsley, E. p. 46.

[7] Pinn, A.B., Finley, S.C., & Alexander, T. (2009). African American Religious Cultures, Volume 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC.

[8] Pinn, A.B., et al. p. 21.

[9] In my research for this essay, I found that people who considered themselves to be public intellectuals would often say so in their obituaries (whether they had been written by themselves or others). The term “public intellectual” does not appear in reference to Huey P. Newton in the several articles written about his murder in the New York Times, as well as his obituary in the Times and other publications.

[10] Huey P. Newton. (3 Jan 2012). Retrieved 26 Jan 2012, from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Huey_P._Newton

[11] Mack, S. (13 Jan 2012). The Decline of the Public Intellectual [blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2012/01/the_decline_of_7.html#more

[12] Roosevelt, T. (23 April 1910). Citizenship in a Republic. Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris.