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Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

October 29, 1999

SECTION: THE FACULTY; Pg. A18

LENGTH: 3344 words

HEADLINE: Florida Atlantic U. Seeks to Mold a Different Kind of Public Intellectual

BYLINE: ALISON SCHNEIDER

BODY:
Starting a Ph.D. program for public intellectuals is a little like hanging a target on your back during hunting season. So it should come as no surprise that Florida Atlantic University has fielded its share of potshots since it opened its doors this fall to its first class of aspiring savants, 23 students who want to learn about the burning issues of the day in the hope of solving them.

Sound a little idealistic? It is. The public-intellectuals program, the brochure says, is for students who want to merge intellectualism with activism. "It is for those who want to change the social order as well as understand it."

That's a laudable goal, critics say, but isn't it also laughable? The Sartres and Sontags can be nurtured in a Ph.D. program, but they can't be manufactured there. And somehow the sunshine state's fastest growing university, for all its heat, isn't the first place people think of as an incubator for the intelligentsia. After all, there are a lot more palm trees on Florida Atlantic's campus than public intellectuals.

The folks at Florida Atlantic shrug off all the Martin-Buber-goes-to-the-beach jokes. This is not a prep school for pundits, they say. You may wind up on TV after earning a Ph.D. in public intellectualism, but you're not a failure by the program's standards if you don't. At least, that's what Teresa Brennan, its creator, argues. Lesser mortals than Henry Louis Gates, Jr., can qualify as public intellectuals, albeit with a lower-case "p" and "i," Ms. Brennan insists.

She's a case in point. Dropping Teresa Brennan's name at a cocktail party doesn't exactly pack the same punch as mentioning Catharine MacKinnon. But by Ms. Brennan's logic, that doesn't mean she's not a public intellectual. Ms. Brennan thinks critically about her work (social theory with a psychoanalytic bent); she sees it in relation to a larger web of public issues (the economy, the environment, the relations between the sexes); she shares those insights with a community (mostly academic, occasionally political); and she does it all in the hope of provoking discussion and promoting change.

Yes, she's written about Lacan, a fact that, Ms. Brennan adds a bit defensively, "is easy to make fun of." But she's also published articles on the economy and biotechnology, although rarely for the popular press. She worked with a United Nations commission on its policies on genetic engineering. She even did a year-long stint on Capitol Hill as a Congressional aide. All that, Ms. Brennan says, makes her a public intellectual (small p, small i). And it could make you one, too.

Ms. Brennan wants to free the public-intellectual definition from its elitist fetters and open it up to include everyday Joes with a grounding in social theory and a taste for social change. She's not tossing out the old identity. "I'm trying to expand it," she says.

This is a program for journalists, artists, and activists, Ms. Brennan explains. It's for community workers and curators. It's for people who want to make films or make laws. But above all, it's for people who want to make waves -- small waves, not just tidal ones.

Ms. Brennan knows that people don't need a Ph.D. to be an artist or a reporter, but a degree in public intellectualism will deepen their understanding of the world they hope to change, she says. As for those people who want to make a splash in the public sphere, well, they might want to enroll elsewhere, she adds: "People who want to be famous for getting the word out often don't have much of a word to get out in the first place."

The word has certainly gotten out about Florida Atlantic. People have been buzzing about the program since before it began, but not everybody is buying what the university is selling. This program is talking out of both sides of its mouth, the critics say. It trades on the names of well-known public intellectuals, even plastering a running list of them in the background of its brochure -- names like Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud. But then the university backs off from a commitment to produce any, they say.

And just how public is a small-p-small-i intellectual, asks Carlin Romano, a professor of philosophy at Bennington College and a literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I think it's a good idea to prepare people for the issues of public-intellectual life and send them out," says Mr. Romano, who has raised questions about "the Boca Raton intellectuals" before (The Chronicle, February 19). "But if you're sending them out to, say, the backroom of a museum where they make private decisions that affect the public, the test of time might be that they're not public intellectuals but private intellectuals who affected the public."

Playboy magazine put it more succinctly: "Hot Air Doctorate." Of course, the fact that Florida Atlantic registered on Playboy's radar at all is a development.

Fans of the program aren't daunted by the media dings. "It was kind of ripe for spoofing," says Russell Jacoby, the author of The Last Intellectuals (Basic Books, 1987) and a guest lecturer in the program. "But programs in film and poetry and novel writing are well established, so why not a program for public intellectuals? It's as legitimate and illegitimate as those other programs -- and potentially as interesting."

Florida Atlantic can thank Ms. Brennan for sparking some of that interest. She was hired after the university received a $ 10-million gift to enrich the humanities, matched by another $ 10-million from the state. Some of the money went to build a new humanities center. The rest was set aside for a new Ph.D. program -- Florida Atlantic's first in the humanities.

Initially, the university toyed with starting a traditional Ph.D. program in comparative literature, then scrapped the idea as uninspired. The next plan: an interdisciplinary doctorate in comparative studies. That sounded nice, the Board of Regents said, but what exactly did it mean? The board wanted more focus, and Ms. Brennan, the new Schmidt Distinguished Professor of Humanities -- a "super chair" that comes with a $ 5-million endowment -- provided it: a public-intellectuals program.

The name struck a few nerves. "I thought it sounded awfully pretentious," says Dorothy M. Stetson, the associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters. But she changed her mind after she read the populist-minded proposal.

So did Anthony J. Catanese, the university's president. "It's taken me a year to get used to that term," he says when asked about the public-intellectual moniker. But the last thing he wanted was a fourth-rate disciplinary program that would add more Ph.D.'s to an already flooded job market. "It made no sense at all for a place like Florida Atlantic to come up with a traditional degree," he says. "The only thing that made sense was something new, different." He pauses for a moment. "I was going to say, 'experimental.' "

That's exactly what Ms. Brennan was after. She doesn't just want to redefine the term public intellectual; she wants to reinvigorate it. A century ago, the phrase public intellectual would have been redundant, she explains. Back then, you couldn't be an intellectual if you weren't engaged with issues that affected the public. And that's how she thinks it should be today.

A few rare birds like William Julius Wilson manage to write for an audience outside academe without compromising their popularity within it. "But Bill Wilson is the exception, and there is a rule," says Lynn M. Appleton, a sociologist at Florida Atlantic. "There is such a stigma attached to wanting to connect what you do to larger social issues" -- the stigma of being branded unscholarly.

The tragedy is that a lot of people in the professoriate wind up there by default, not design, Ms. Brennan adds. "When you are in the throes of graduate training, you start to identify with the people who are training you," and ultimately, for lack of other role models, you become them.

Ms. Brennan thinks her program can give some of those lost souls a new lease on life -- public life, that is. Two, year-long required courses form the centerpiece of the curriculum. "The Public Matters" introduces students to the issues of the day, including globalization, changing technologies, ethnic conflict, the state of trade unions, and the environment.

Students ultimately concentrate their studies in one of 13 areas -- such as gender, postcolonialism, social movements, or media and popular culture -- taking at least three classes in that topic and writing about it for their dissertation, all the while trying to view that concentration within a broader cultural and theoretical context.

It's not all grand theory. The program is setting up practicums to keep students rooted in the real world. Students can work on a campaign, help out at a labor union or a legal-aid clinic, donate their time to a women's shelter, and earn credit, to boot.

"Rhetoric and Principle," the other core course, explores theoretical and practical aspects of public expression. The class will study biographies of public intellectuals, "analyzing the dialectic between rhetoric, intellect, and commitment," as well as the relationship between "inner-directed vision and outer-directed images." There's also a how-to element: Students can give public addresses, get in front of a camera, even learn what it means to be interviewed.

But, given the chance to have a real interview with The Chronicle, the pioneers of the public-intellectuals program -- wary of unfair reporting -- initially seem a bit reluctant to meet the press. The students, Ms. Brennan explains, have a few questions about a reporter's attitude toward theory before they do any talking: "Have you gone to graduate school? And, if so, where?"

Apparently satisfied with the answers, the students start talking, and, as it turns out, they have quite a lot to say. In fact, they so warm to the interview process, that a group of them even want to videotape the talk so that they can analyze their interactions with the press. ("This is all data for them," Ms. Brennan says later.)

Here are some data about them: The first class of public intellectuals range in age from their late 20s to their early 60s. They have master's degrees in English, anthropology, philosophy, fine arts, and public-health administration, to name a few, and they are all proficient in a foreign language, a program requirement. Two of them are professors; one gave up tenure at the Rochester Institute of Technology to come here. Five are in journalism -- three in print, two in radio and television. Others did grassroots work abroad. Two of them worked for I.B.M.

Half of the class members are working, pursuing the program part time. And about 10 have university stipends. The usual price tag: $ 8,700 a year for out-of-state students, $ 2,500 a year for Florida residents. The goal is to finance any student who needs it, says Max Kirsch, who recently took over the administration of the program. "This program will never generate money."

It does seem to generate idealism. Bruce Hieronymus, a former I.B.M. executive, came to the program because he wanted to write meaningful music for the masses. Sam Jones is exploring the connections between culture and the environment in a documentary about Captain Cook. Suzanne Kelly wants to start up The South Florida Review -- a cross between The London Review of Books and The Village Voice, she says. Caren Neile, a freelance writer, came here simply to broaden her horizons. "I wanted a grounding in the social sciences, in the way the world works," she says. "I came to the program not to do something else, but to be something else."

They all share one ambition: "to extend the best of the academy into the public sphere," says Paul A. Dottin, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, a former broadcaster for Pacifica radio, and a member of the inaugural class of public intellectuals. "This is not just about getting a Ph.D. and getting on TV to talk any smart thing. We're not know-it-alls. We're trying to democratize what goes into the making of an intellectual. It's not just book-learning. It's about connections with society."

And Florida Atlantic can help them make those connections in a way that other institutions can't, adds Frances Chelland, who took a three-year leave of absence from New England College, where she teaches philosophy and women's studies, to come here. Her goal: to write a code of ethics for teachers. "Traditional Ph.D. programs need not translate out into the world," but that kind of ivory-tower elitism is unacceptable here, she says. "This program's emphasis is on the doing. We're not just talking about theory in praxis. We're working toward praxis."

Some of the praxis sounds pretty theoretical in the "Public Matters" course, where the topic one recent evening is environmental illness. "Who is responsible for illness?" Ms. Brennan asks. Does the fault lie with the individual, the community, the environment? "And what does it mean for the body to know?" her co-teacher, Ms. Appleton, adds. "Is that knowledge something we can put words to, something we can act on?" The students debate: How much faith should they place in anecdotal evidence of environmental illness? Is medical jargon a means of social control? And, if so, can laymen use scientific language to challenge, even change, science itself?

Louis Menand, an English professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School and University Center and a writer for Harper's Magazine and The New Yorker, thinks not: "The tradeoff" of a public-intellectuals Ph.D., "is, are you really learning anything? Taking a course in the rhetoric of science doesn't empower you at all. You can write interesting papers about it, but it doesn't enable you to use the rhetoric of science. To do that, you have to be a scientist."

Exactly, says Alan Wolfe, the director of Boston College's Center for Religion and American Public Life. "I could see an M.A." in public intellectualism, something akin to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. But a Ph.D. in it strikes him as "weird. Unless you're grounded in a discipline, you're not going to be taken very seriously."

Camille Paglia, a humanities professor at the University of the Arts, certainly doesn't take it seriously. "They're going to groom people -- what? To be me? That's not the way to do it." She immersed herself in discrete disciplines before blending them together. "I would call their approach designer grazing, a Yuppie buffet. 'I'll take a little of this and a little of that.' And somehow it's going to be persuasive? It just isn't substantive."

Ms. Paglia, who interviewed for Ms. Brennan's endowed chair, thought Florida Atlantic should have used its humanities gift to transform itself into a center for the arts, a place where regular people from the region could come to see the best dance, theater, films, and lectures. That truly would have been a merger of the public with the intellectual, she says.

She isn't wowed by the socially minded agenda of the program, either. "If people want to minister to the social need, then let them go to a public-policy school, a social-welfare school, become a nurse. There are a lot of ways you can contribute. We've got schools for that."

Yes, there are schools for that, but most of them don't help students see their specialized interests in a general light, responds Mike Budd, a communications professor at Florida Atlantic and a participant in the public-intellectuals program. "Pick up one of their books," he says when asked about a public-policy Ph.D. "It's all this abstruse stuff. They don't talk to the public." Those places produce professionals, not broad-thinking public intellectuals, he says. And, yes, there are other interdisciplinary programs that turn out public intellectuals, like the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. The difference is that none of them have made that their explicit goal, he adds.

What many of those institutions do have, however, is something Florida Atlantic doesn't: faculties full of people who have made it as public intellectuals, and a reputation for producing them. Face it, says Bennington's Mr. Romano, "The reality of the intellectual power structure in the U.S. means that a program like this at Florida Atlantic can't have the influence on academe that a groundbreaking program at Harvard or Stanford would."

That's hogwash, says Mr. Dottin, the Berkeley student in the program. "People act as if a thought can't be thunk if it didn't come from an Ivy League school. We want to pull the elitism out of public intellectualism by proving that intellectuals can come from anywhere. It's about the preparation, not the place. Why F.A.U.? Why not?"

Besides, Florida Atlantic has assembled a group of activists and academics, people who have spent a lifetime thinking about public matters, to visit the program as lecturers or semester-long professors. The list includes megatheorists like Julia Kristeva,Jane Gallop, and Patricia J. Williams; AIDS activist Jeffrey Escoffier; anti-genital-mutilation crusader Nawal el Saadawi; and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan.

Asked about the program, Ms. Gallop, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, initially knew little about it. When she agreed to give a lecture this February, she didn't know it was for a public-intellectuals program, she says. She accepted the invitation because "I know Teresa Brennan and very much like her and respect her work" -- and "on the basis of the idea that going to Florida in the winter might be pleasant." But once the program is explained to her, Ms. Gallop says she thinks "it's a really good idea." This isn't "wasting" students' work, as so often happens in the glutted market for traditional Ph.D.'s; "it's broadening it."

What needs to be broader, critics say, is the program's list of visiting lecturers, almost all of whom are on the political left. Where are the public intellectuals on the right? Where are thinkers like the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb?

"We are very open to opposing viewpoints," says Mr. Kirsch, the program director. "But the people who think there should be reform -- of the environment or health care -- tend to be on the left. I don't think Gertrude Himmelfarb would ever be asked here, because she doesn't address these questions of the public." Apparently, he didn't check the fine print on the program's brochure -- the one with the running list of public intellectuals. Ms. Himmelfarb is on it.

But she isn't holding her breath for an invitation. "As far as I can tell, the only common denominator and distinction" of the visiting lecturers "is trendiness and political correctness," says Ms. Himmelfarb, who calls herself a traditionalist. "The people on the right have notions of reform. They're just different notions of reform."

Ms. Brennan isn't sure. "A public intellectual is always going to be geared toward a consciousness of social institutions and social change. That being so, they need to be critical of the existing order," not established within it. People on the right usually don't fit that bill, she says. And even if they did fit the bill, she says, who can pay it? Conservative thinkers are "very expensive. We'll welcome them here if they'll come for the same fee."

Ms. Brennan is hoping to bring a few to Florida Atlantic for a debate on free trade. Meanwhile, the University of Paris VII has set up a cooperative public-intellectuals program with F.A.U. Nawal el Saadawi is toying with the idea of setting up one in Cairo. And Andrew Ross and Henry Giroux are coming next year for a big conference organized by the program on Disney.

When it comes to public intellectualism, Ms. Brennan says, "something is in the air." And none of the air, she says, is hot.

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