Is it the job of intellectuals to speak to the public?  Or is it the responsibility of the public to put forth the effort to understand complex and important ideas by intellectuals?  Did the proponents of cultural literacy dumb us down?

Over the last two decades, there has been a lot of insistence on the need for "public intellectuals."  The implicit assumption in that demand is that intellectuals should speak to the public and within that assumption is another:  that the public requires clear, simple, direct, almost business-book-like forms of simple, clear, journalistic communication.   Anything else is dismissed as "jargon" and thus not worthy of the public's attention.  It is dismissed as academic navel-gazing.

But this morning, over the breakfast table (well, more like running around with coffee in our hands getting ready for a day of work), my partner, Ken Wissoker, editorial director at Duke University Press, and I began teasing out the history of this demand for a clear-spoken public intellectual.  It was Ken who said he'd love to have someone write a book on where the shift occurred, where it was no longer thought imperative for the public to be educated so they would be able to understand complex and subtle ideas by major intellectuals but, the reverse:  that it was imperative for intellectuals to write advice-book style bestsellers that appealed to the masses.  Where did this disrespect for the intellectual come from?

I'm not sure I've seen anyone take on this issue in quite this way, on how the putative role of the public intellectual has changed in the U.S. in the last two or three decades.  If you look back to great public intellectuals of the 1970s--from Susan Sontag to Michel Foucault--they were not particularly easy to read.   But their message was important, revolutionary, and it was thought that, if you were an intellectual or even a concerned and responsibile intelligent citizen, it was important for you to grapple with their ideas.   As Ken pointed out, this was also a time when the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review  regularly reviewed university press books and declared them among the top 100 notable books of the year.  Now, this rarely happens.

Interestingly, the Culture Wars contributed to this.  A binary was made by many, especially cultural conservatives, that academics were jargon-prone narcissistics who wrote for one another, not for the public.   William Bennett, for example, wanted us to return to the Great Books and E. D. Hirsch began spouting about "cultural literacy," and suggested, implicitly, that none of those Great Books had jargon in them.  But all of the great philosophers wrote in what, by Bennett and Hirsch's own standards, would be considered "jargon."  Others would say they wrote with precision about complex ideas that required careful and patient reading and understanding.  An intellectual public wishes no less.

It would be ironic indeed if the great conservatives of the Culture Wars contributed to the decline in cultural literacy by making the supposed jargon of intellectuals the target of their derision rather than asking what we could do to help a public become more conversant with the complex issues that require patient, precise extrapolation, analysis, and interpretation.  It would be ironic indeed if the "dumbest generation" weren't these much-decried digital kids but the self-proclaimed guardians of cultural literacy who, implicitly and by policy, worked toward a dumbing down of the intellectual public.