I've found that having a boatload of children mitigates against the evils of academic socialization. As does a perpetual stream of irony.

But then, I don't have tenure, either.

I think she makes a lot of good points, but her description of her TV program on energy does not really fit with my perception of what a public intellectual should be.

"'I may not know your name, but I do know one pretty private thing about you. You have been involved in a tempestuous relationship, pursuing a mad romance . . . with fossil fuels.' The Center of the American West, which I chair at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is making a documentary, the first enterprise (that we have ever heard of) to take literally the familiar metaphor of 'America's love affair with petroleum'. and put it to work to make a therapeutic case for moving on to a new, more lasting and gratifying relationship with energy efficiency and renewables."

This approach is silly for the same reason that "tunnels of oppression" are silly.

First off, we have no coherent definition of "public intellectual" here. There's a huge difference between, say, Eugen Weber's PBS series on Western Civ and Cornel West's religious and political activism. The term "public intellectual" has usually implied social or political service. Otherwise, we should use a term like "popularizer."

The humanities always need great popularizers. I don't know if the academy needs "public intellectuals" at all.

The problem is that being either a popularizer or a public intellectual requires a type of mastery over one's entire field that usually does not come right after earning one's Ph.D. I'm reading Seth Lerer's lovely *Inventing English*, and it's clear that this work comes out of decades of research and writing about the development of the language and the key literary artists who reflect and engaged with these developments. It would be unreasonable to expect a professor in his/her first five or ten years of research to be able to write these broadly focused, popularizing works for their fields.

Secondly, it's irresponsible to make the pursuit of private cash the responsibility of junior faculty. Again, part of the point of one's first and second book projects is establishing further mastery in one's field. Time away from research and teaching means time away from professional development.

Universities certainly need a broader idea of what might constitute research: an LRB review is not "peer reviewed research" right now. If professors knew that popularizing work, or work for broader audiences, constituted research, there might be more incentive to do such work. But Tukufu Zuberi, for example, is certainly not getting research credit for his work on *History Detectives* right now.

There's a reason besides the comfort of tenure that explains why 25-40 year old professors don't tend to write broad, popular work: such work requires years of experience and writing about one's field. Rushing professors to complete such work could take away from the research they actually need to complete to one day write the popularizations.

"There's a reason besides the comfort of tenure that explains why 25-40 year old professors don't tend to write broad, popular work: such work requires years of experience and writing about one's field. Rushing professors to complete such work could take away from the research they actually need to complete to one day write the popularizations"...but aren't there many subjects about which one could write a good and useful popularization without doing years of research? For example, right now we could use good (knowledgeable and unbiased) books on energy alternatives and policy...and you don't really need to do advanced research on (say) thin-film solar cells in order to be able to write such a book. It's a matter of breadth vs depth.

David, it seems that the "New Releases" table at my local Barnes & Noble is littered with such books about energy policy and such.

But a responsible scholarly popularization would have to come from someone who not only has the breadth of knowledge to survey the field but who also has the depth of knowledge in each particular specialization in order to make responsible judgments about the issue and to present the various sides of the debate accurately and honestly.

Lerer's *Inventing English* is a perfect example. It covers major moments in the history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon runic writing to the debates over black American English. Each of those topics is an entire specialized field in itself, and within those fields are plenty of debates and conflicts. Lerer has clearly studied each area closely, over decades, and has managed to not only map the field but to evaluate the scholarship available in it. The Great Vowel Shift is not cut and dry; for a scholar to do more than simply summarize other people's work would mean to begin with the linguistics, with the volumes and volumes written about the subject, in order to condense it, as Lerer does, in brief, highly readable, eloquent chapters.

And let's remember that even a scholar with the depth and breadth of Lerer is relying on other scholars' very focused, in-depth work. One paragraph in Lerer's book summarizes Steven Justice's work on the importance of the 1381 peasant rebellion -- but that paragraph couldn't have been written without the years of specialized research Justice himself undertook.

Which highlights another issue Limerick and O'Connor ignore: too many popularizations are little more than summaries of other scholars' years of painstakingly rigorous, specialized, "navel-gazing" and eggheaded research. Gombrich's "little history of the world" wouldn't have existed without the hundreds of encyclopedias and historical works G consulted when writing it.

It is the rare popularizing survey -- Gombrich's Story of Art, for example -- that adds a new vision to the specialized works on which it relies.