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HOW TO CREATE PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS. Ezra's wondering where the next generation of Arthur Schlesingers will come from. Look no further than this paragraph from the Times' obituary:
Mr. Schlesinger spent a year at Peterhouse College of Cambridge University on a fellowship and returned to Harvard, where he had been selected to be one of the first crop of junior fellows. Their research was supported for three years, but they were not allowed to pursue Ph.D.�s, a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill.That's all there is to it. The Harvard Society of Fellows no longer forbids people from getting onto the "standard academic treadmill," indeed, its one of the choice spots on the treadmill. Obviously, there's no factory for creating new Schlesingers or Galbraiths (although those two families do pretty well) but anything that can be done to change the system of incentives for young academics or would-be academics so that there are rewards to making relevant contributions to public life, rather than incrementally advancing some narrow question within their field, would be good.And needless to say, creating those rewards for a certain kind of academic is one thing the right has done quite well. People don't suddenly wake up one day and become Paul Krugman. They need networks, encouragement, and places to publish. Like, for example, this magazine.My friend Kevin Mattson, who manages to keep up with the academic treadmill while also contributing to the public debate, wrote a great essay in Democracy last fall citing Schlesinger:
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued in the Atlantic that when scholars abandon engaged history and leave public life behind, they empower "prophetic historians" who replace complexity with a big overarching idea (Schlesinger had in mind Marxism). Today, scholars are leaving behind the public world not to communist theory but to the History Channel, where the imperative of entertainment trumps veracity, where shows about absurd conspiracy theories run alongside more serious fare, all formatted to work in between commercials. Or they leave it behind to blockbuster historians�think David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or the recently deceased Stephen Ambrose�whose books, though widely bought, lack analytical power and critical insight.-- Mark Schmitt.
