Refusing 'the vocation of mere scholar,' new generation of intellectuals enriches public culture

Not seeing academia as a refuge and using social media to generate an audience, younger intellectuals are reemerging in the public sphere.

Is the academic jobs crisis a boon to public culture? In an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Evan R. Goldstein argues that it is. Goldstein writes that younger intellectuals who came of age in the 80s and 90s have “never known a healthy academic job market or a time when the humanities wasn’t in a defensive crouch.” Not seeing academia as a refuge and using social media to generate an audience, they’ve begun to reverse a thirty-year trend of intellectuals separating themselves from public culture.

Read the full article from Nov. 13, 2016, here.