Public Intellectuals or Village Idiots?

The first thing you learn when you join a literature department—and no doubt the same thing is true in physics and sociology—is that all your colleagues are smarter than you are. And if you don’t act like you know it, some of them will stop you in the hallway, regularly, to remind you of that fact.

Amid all of the complaining and hand-wringing about the hostility to higher education in this country, and the assignment of likely causes—good old American anti-intellectualism, resentment of tenure, skyrocketing tuition, student debt and so forth—is it possible that one overlooked reason is the tendency of some academics to foist their opinions on everyone else?

Once upon a time, academics published their ideas in books and articles dense with equations, jargon and incomprehensible theory, or in conference proceedings that would put most people to sleep in five minutes. In my own field of English literature, for example, some professors can make even Shakespeare or Jane Austen seem boring, opaque or irrelevant.

This is a valuable skill that until recent times helped to protect academics from outraging the public with their often stupid ideas about subjects in which they had no professional expertise. Off campus, their greatest reach was the neighborhood cocktail circle or dinner party, where other people could write off their opinions to ego, academic provincialism or alcohol.

But it is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone wants to be on TV, and academics are no exception to this deep human desire. Many times, I’ve asked my colleagues, often over a quiet, confidential lunch: What is your greatest professional goal? Winning a coveted teaching award? Receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant? Publishing a campus novel in which the dean is painfully and imaginatively murdered or the administration building is bulldozed overnight?

Answer: none of the above. Their most heartfelt desire, it turns out, is to be recognized as a public intellectual. And until very recent times, academics saw getting on TV as the royal road to their dream—despite the long odds against it.

And then God created Twitter. Or Silicon Valley did. And now we have professors all around the globe who, when struck by an idea, no longer jot a quick note, head for the research library or wisely say to themselves, “I need to think about this further.” Instead, they log on to Twitter and immediately broadcast their latest ill-considered, unfounded and unedited thought—never pausing for a bit of peer review—to their hundreds or thousands of followers.

Imagine for a moment that other people have a device with which they can read your mind, even if they don’t know you and can’t see you and are just waking up on the other side of the world. Then contemplate this: every time you tweet your latest dumb idea, those people have direct access to your brain. And you say you’re worried about what the government, or Google, or the Russians are up to? When you’ve just confessed that you hung your house key on the outside doorknob this morning?

Professors are supposed to be smart. That’s why parents are paying what feels like ransom money to send their kids to college. Until recent times, the professorial soapbox was limited to specialized forums, classroom lectures or shooting the breeze with a couple of colleagues or friends over lunch or drinks. And most people knew what professors thought only from the very few who became talking heads on TV. Twitter changed all that. And now everyone knows exactly what we think.