April 4, 2005

Mind the Gap

By Diana Rhoten

Nearly 20 years ago, in The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Russell Jacoby charted the disappearance of the “public intellectual” — a phenomenon that occurred in lockstep with the rise of the university. In the first half of the 20th century, Jacoby contended, thinkers such as Lewis Mumford, Lionel Trilling, and Edmund Wilson dominated the landscape, addressing topics of broad concern, writing for an audience of educated laypeople. But as universities replaced urban bohemias as center stage in the life of the mind, these public intellectuals were succeeded by a cadre of professional academics: preoccupied with tenure and peer review, highly specialized, and writing mainly for each other.

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Today, however, there are signs that Jacoby’s “age of academe” may be winding down and a new era emerging. While universities continue to play an important role in intellectual culture, increasingly they are no longer the only game in town. With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities.

Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making.

Over the past five years, I’ve seen this phenomenon taking shape first-hand. In my analyses of different research organizations, I’ve conducted scores of interviews with scholars in their twenties and thirties, both inside and outside the university, typically on the cutting edge of science. What I’ve found is a generation as highly trained and intellectually committed as their academic elders, but far more predisposed to reaching beyond the limits of their own academic work and their own scientific fields in terms of both the individuals with whom they collaborate and to whom they communicate in the course of their research.

These new “postacademic intellectuals” are not exactly successors to the last intellectuals, most significantly because many are scientists not polemicists. Moreover, unlike the “academic entrepreneurs” of the 1980s, this is not a group clinging to university appointments as a base while pursuing outside endeavors. Nor are they like such so-called “third culture intellectuals” as Murray Gell-Mann or Nicholas Negroponte, who moved to the edges of their fields after establishing themselves in the center of the academy.

Instead, this is a generation so confident as researchers and yet so claustrophobic as professors that they are unwilling to wait until late in their careers to blur the institutional and intellectual boundaries of science, scholarship, and society. And, indeed, they are so committed to building new tools and networks that they’re willing to leave the university behind, or forgo it in the first place. In the past months alone, I have encountered top-flight academics transforming themselves from: university-based molecular geneticist into biomedical technology VC fund manager, political science professor into public radio producer, ecology postdoc into co-founder of ecoinformatics lab, and environmental health prof into risk assessment consultant.

Over the last 25 years, the percentage of recent science (including social science) and engineering Ph.D.’s — those who’ve graduated in the past four to seven years — employed outside academia has risen 11 points, to 58 percent. This trend isn’t terribly surprising given that prospects for securing posts in the ever-tightening academic job market have dimmed. Who would relish joining the ranks of the Invisible Adjunct and the Barely Tenured – especially when the potential for “alternative careers” outside the university is expanding?

Although common arguments about the Ph.D. glut may explain part of the story, they don’t tell the whole story. Importantly, among the young academics I interviewed who have flown the coop, many if not most were considered rising stars, firmly on the track to tenure. In other words, they weren’t forced out nor did they fall out of the university. Rather, they opted out.

Why? Well, it’s not simply about the money as some suggest. Many were driven by a desire to address, in more pragmatic and dynamic ways, complex problems in areas such as the environment, health, technology and global security. As such issues have become more urgent and the limits of traditional approaches to addressing them more apparent, many young scientists and scholars I know are rethinking how to maximize the impact of their work beyond, as one puts it, “adding another decimal point to the same old regression.” And many are concluding that the narrowness demanded by academia, while arguably useful in enforcing scholarly standards, simply doesn’t further that goal.

Meanwhile they are also discovering myriad opportunities outside the university where they can do intellectually creative, scientifically rigorous, broadly relevant work that lets them fuse their academic training with their nonacademic interests. While some of these opportunities can be found in many of the likely companies and laboratories, they are ever more cropping up in previously unprecedented places like, for example, the Molecular Sciences Institute, the Public Library of Science, Google, Vulcan, and the blogosphere.

In the eyes of many senior academics, these positions would hardly qualify as sites of science and scholarship, however unconventional. Instead, they’re often seen as hinterlands for those not gifted or authentic enough to compete in the university. And, no doubt, among young academic refugees in these new homes, there are moments of doubt and insecurity, even guilt and shame. As one, sounding like a 12-stepper, put it, “The process of recovery is always hard.” But by and large they have few regrets. Rather, most express delight at having escaped the stultifying constraints and conformity of the university, and now finding themselves messily engaged with a wider, more diverse world.

All of which, naturally, brings us back to Jacoby. He argued that the reason no true public intellectuals had arisen since the 1950s was that younger versions “no longer need or want a larger public; they are almost exclusively professors.” On many levels, the new generation I’m describing shares little with Trilling, Wilson, and other old-school public intellectuals. Yet by choosing to leave the academy, they demonstrate at least one thing in common: They need, want, perhaps even crave a larger public.

And that immediate desire – if it continues to grow – is almost certain to have important implications. As was the case with the rise of the university, a significant shift of expertise away from the campus, propelled and hastened by the Internet and other new technologies, enmeshing scientific argument and evidence into diverse conversations on a plethora of new extra-academic platforms, would not only change the locus of knowledge, but also its content and quality. (Though for better or worse, it’s far too soon to say.)

It could also challenge the university’s identity as the terra firma of intellectual innovation. No one sensible still denies that the nature of science and scholarship are changing at a rapid clip. No one denies that the action in every area of intellectual endeavor is on the interdisciplinary front — the hot zones where disciplines collide and commingle. As it happens, many members of the new generation most frustrated by the university are those working in these zones.

If the university loses them, it may lose its pioneering role. What the academy might do to hold on to them is the subject of another column: suffice it to say, wholesale institutional reforms for junior faculty may be necessary. But even then, I suspect that the changes — economic, technological, cultural — swirling beyond the Ivory Tower are too tumultuous to hold at bay.

Peter Drucker has said that, in 30 years, the university as we have known it will be no more. If that proves true, this generation of “postacademic intellectuals” will be no small part of the reason.

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