The threads I see between these two articles may not be immediately apparent (although they are part of the reason I launched one of the two blogs I launched last week, the public one-- the design sucks right now, called "Spinning and Being Spun: The Idea of Journalism in a Postmodern World." I rushed the launch because of all the Libby stuff. It's still just a little baby blog trying to figure out what it wants to be, except that I know it is going to be my sort of "public intellectual" venture)

(and because I was half-heartedly scanning Chronicle jobs last night, my blood is feeling chilled over all my blog ventures... I go so far afield from anything in any of those job descriptions, it discourages me from even thinking about returning to academia proper instead of working as an independent researcher).

My MAIN hobby horse, in this respect, is that I'm really critical of the inadequacy of critical and postmodern theorists to be persuasive in a larger public sphere. If these theories are so important and compelling, why do they inspire such academic conservativism? (lack of activism or even engagement in the face of direct threats to their ideas)

I know, it's because of their anti-foundationalist nature, and a bit of pomo paralysis, but I don't think that's a good excuse, I just think it's descriptive of the paralysis (with a good mixture of tenure tyranny for young scholars).

My point would be that IF an argument is good, it should also be persuasive to larger audiences. I'm extremely concerned about the abdication of the public sphere by intellectuals and academics. If they're so smart, why aren't they in the thick of things? Why are they only speaking in their insular disciplines?

Blasphemy Alert: maybe they're not so smart. Maybe insularity has left them intellectually lazy. Maybe their ideas wouldn't stand up to interdisciplinary and public analysis.

[Anti-intellectualism such as the blasphemy I voice above is also a sign of lazy scholarship, as seen from the opposite POV, a lack of engagement in difficult ideas or a lack of intellectual abilities to engage difficult ideas. By uttering the blasphemy above, I risk aligning myself with anti-theory forces in skill-focused journalism schools, and with management at television news networks who promote people who make a case that they most resemble the network's audiences by not having read very many books. Reading too much can sometimes be a liability for promotion, because it distances a person from understanding the mind of the audience, enforcing something like the mediocrity of Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"]

I have a paper about this that I need to get out and shop around that deals with some of these issues, an rhetorical analysis of a video the religious right made in Arkansas to try to shut down a school where I once taught, and the inadequacy of the academic faculty at the school to defend what they were teaching to gifted high school kids in terms the general public could understand. I need to bring it up to date and send it out to a rhetoric or speech com journal, because so much is going on now that parallels what happened then.

Also I'm thinking about postmodern attacks on the Enlightenment, which, for all its foundationalist tyranny [G], was about knowledge in public, in the light, replicable, as opposed to hermetically-sealed epistemologies of alchemists and such that hunkered down to survive the Inquisition. Which model do scholars and experts want to align with?

And it isn't just insular disciplines that are hermetically-sealed these days. It is also Bell Labs and other non-replicable scientific research sites, "proprietary sponsored research" so potentially lucrative (alchemy, a variant of lead into gold, pharmaceuticals, etc) it must be guarded from the light (Enlightenment) of public scholarly examination and replication.

Think about the Phantom Professor blogger from SMU, doing what creative writers have done for many years, mining her life for material and putting it in stories with the names and situations changed. When fiction writers do it, their relative obscurity gets them academic status and literary awards, but because the Phantom Professor did the same things in the powerfully disseminated blogging medium, people actually found out about her in a way they they don't with ignored fiction writers, and she was fired. She wasn't fired for what she did so much as she was fired because PEOPLE ACTUALLY READ WHAT SHE WROTE. In academia, writers get more status when they are more widely ignored. And they can take bigger risks.

You could say the Colorado professor Ward Churchill with the peculiar but perhaps more academically acceptable ideas about culture and conflict and 9/11 was also a victim of the dissemination of his ideas, where he'd probably retain his academic status without difficulty if he had remained strictly in his disciplinary sphere.

And see, where I'm at right now, here in Missoula, illustrates these ideas in dramatic fashion, so I guess that means I'm supposed to be thinking about these things. This is a traditional journalism school, meaning strongly anti-theory, practical and skill-based in its focus. They are asking for my help in developing a new media track and curriculum, so I'm stewing on a lot of these ideas, thinking about how to present them (and the theories behind them) without sounding offensive. Because they have a good point: you can be smart without being a complete pointy-headed wonk.

I asked one colleague here to respond to Juan Cole's quote about Iraq coverage above his bio the Sidebar site, and I'm looking forward to sharing his well-considered response with the group in L.A.

It's like the simple dichotomy Mark Twain and other writers invoked, playing with the motif of the American West, of the Eastern effete from the intellectual establishment vs the clever wanderer in the American frontier, living by his or her wits, but a bit lite on the "book-learning." A grown-up Huck Finn who "lit out for the territory." (uh, I'm not talking about the president's Texas version of this motif, which is not only anti-intellectual, but is also NOT clever or quick-witted. Mark Twain's clever frontiersman was never stupid.)

Growing up in Alaska, in a blue collar family that was never happy about my attending a New York PhD program, I feel these tensions enacted across my body. My grandpa hopped trains during the Depression, went out and worked on those big dam projects out west, a laborer, but a guy who could teach himself any skill, pick up any technology, fix anything, finally ending up an electrician, as are my father and many uncles and cousins. I have his technical abilities, and my mother's family's dyslexia, so I come at all this stuff from a peculiar angle. I want both, the book learning and the clever and quick-witted skill-based common sense. I don't want to diminish one or the other.

So what am I honing in on or looking for? I'm not just talking about competing with MSM, I'm talking about a much needed and overdue expansion of the discourse of the public square to include intellectuals in the conversations, and thinking about the pros and cons of such a move, the advantages and real professional and career-development risks of doing this. And I'm also thinking about what role the highly professionalized field of US journalism has when the discourse expands.

So to phrase this mind-wandering excursion around our topic in the form of some questions to throw out to the group, to possibly discuss in our meeting, try these on for size:

What does it mean for academics to venture out of their insular disciplines and into the public square?

We seem to accept this as an unqualified good (at least I do), but in doing so, people in tenure-land will be taking some very real risks with very little payoff. The "Mind the Gap" article points out that many of us are choosing those risks, but even in carving out territory as independent scholars with some other day job, speaking out in public can mean very real and economic consequences. People who blog risk losing their jobs. I fly under the radar at CNN, but I'm conscious with every blog post I make that I can get in just as much trouble there as I would in academia.

What can we do to encourage the acceptance of public intellectuals both inside the academy and out?

It won't get anyone tenure. The work has to be done for its own sake, and for one's own sense of relevance and engagement with the world. Would it be feasible to form some kind of professional advocacy organization for respected scholars who want to engage with the world more as public intellectuals? Or should people who don't have tenure simply not even try?

[Chris inserts here that this is a much larger issue than framed out above, because most people's work lives are being carved out without any true "free speech zones," not even the chain-link kind created for G8 summits and national conventions for political parties. The tensions created by bloggers illustrate in graphic terms how fully many of us live under restricted speech conditions dictated by our employers, suspending the first amendment not only in the workplace, but in our extracurricular activities as well. Perhaps this is something public intellectuals should be taking the lead in speaking out on, making visible what is invisible and insidious in our culture.]

Here's a dumber question: What happens to academics who try to speak out on public issues and do so very poorly, with jargon-filled wonk-talk, alienating elitism, and perhaps poor social skills?

I think there's going to be considerable blinking and acclimating to the public sphere for many who could easily hide out in their disciplines.

I'm not really that worried about those folks. I just had to pose the question to get to my next one:

PERSUASION. This is perhaps the crux of what keeps me up at night, what I was circling around above.

How do we negotiate a common ground in the discourse of the public square to be able to make compelling and persuasive arguments without a disciplinary foundation based on commonly understood knowledge, or, for those of us who don't believe in disciplinary or universalist foundations, an agreed-upon, socially-constructed idea of a common good, not to mention a sense of what makes one argument more persuasive than another?

Shouting matches are just not useful, nor is endless relativism. I know my field is rhetoric and I don't need epistemological certainty, but I definitely believe supporting arguments can be verifiable, and that bad arguments NEED to be exposed wherever they appear. And we can't just retreat into the easily obscure epistemologies of our disciplines.

But how can academics and experts learn to communicate in the public square in a way that is compelling and persuasive, that cuts through bullshit, exposes the more inept sophistry that passes itself off as "proof" in some non-reality-based shouting soundbite universe, earning respect, credibility, and influence on larger audiences?