The Rise of the Promotional Intellectual
By Jeffrey J. Williams The Chronicle of Higher EducationAugust 05, 2018 Premium
The main tasks of a professor are to teach and do research. The two sometimes vie for priority, but together they encapsulate what we expect professors to do, and they take the bulk of weight in yearly evaluations, tenure judgments, and other professional measures.
Now, it seems, a new task has been added to the job: promotion. We are urged to promote our classes, our departments, our colleges, our professional organizations. More than anything, we are directed to promote ourselves. The imperative is to call attention to one’s writing, courses, talks, ideas, or persona in media new and old. It could be about your new book on Shakespeare or the history of haberdashery, or something you did, or simply yourself, but the key is to get your brand out there — if not in The New York Times, then on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just the department newsletter. And if not quite to the general public, at least to administrators, boards, funders, students, and other professors.
The conventional standards — teaching your classes well, publishing in reputable journals or with academic presses — no longer are enough. You do not exist unless you fire up your personal publicity machine.
Promotion runs through the institution. At my university, besides the central public-relations office, a few years ago a media person was hired to promote the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and last year we added one solely for the English department, who regularly sends out email blasts. We have meetings where we are asked to tap our inner marketer to figure out ways to promote our programs — worrying about a dip in enrollment, as if the problem is not the price of tuition, or the messages in our culture against the value of the humanities, or the pressure for an explicitly practical degree, but simply that we’re not promoting English enough. Besides providing course descriptions on our regular departmental list, we now advertise underenrolled classes with glossy posters.
Colleagues elsewhere tell me about similar or more advanced cases of promotional fever. Graduate students at a nearby university report that they are pressured to promote their classes at risk of their funding if they don’t reach a certain enrollment (with posters, but they are also supposed to hunt down former students via email). one professor in the Midwest tells me that a publisher offered a contract based not on readers’ reports but on the size of the professor’s Twitter following.
The promotional imperative has not only become part of institutional protocol; it permeates how we understand and conduct our own work and careers. We post pieces on Academia.edu, build our own sites, and paper Facebook with posts and links. At the behest of our publishers, we send information about our new books to any friend or acquaintance we’ve ever had, and cajole them to circulate it, like a chain letter. Friends are no longer just friends but conduits in one’s promotional circuit.
The adage seems to be morphing from "publish or perish" to "promote or perish."
It is, of course, not a bad thing to circulate one’s scholarly work, or to say a good word about a colleague, college, or profession. But we’ve been overtaken by the codes and goals of advertising, without confidence in the normal channels of professional recognition. It does not especially matter what’s sold, only that it’s sold. The promotional imperative has become a self-generating motor of the contemporary academic sphere. Supplanting the model of the traditional scholar or the public intellectual, we have entered the era of the promotional intellectual, with damaging consequences for the academy and the life of the mind.
The promotional intellectual is a natural outgrowth of the entrepreneurial university. In the hard sciences, the criteria for research have, since the 1980s, increasingly emphasized patents and marketable products. Especially in practical fields like computer science and engineering, professors have long consulted for or formed their own businesses. Now the need to hawk one’s brand has leached into the humanities and social sciences. The classic aims of the university — the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and the education of citizens — have taken a back seat.
Where I find a particular rub is that, especially in the humanities, the promotional urge has been painted as an altruistic turn toward the public that makes us public intellectuals. But "public" can be a vague and amorphous category. After all, Walmart aims to reach the public, but it exists foremost to sell things for the benefit of Walmart and its shareholders, not to carry out a cultural, civic, or political mission.
The public sphere constitutes a field separate from the conventional market, just as religion occupies a separate field, and everyone presumably has an equal right in it, not merely according to financial stake. The public intellectual often goes against the current, taking the role of gadfly or dissident — a role that might, in fact, damage rather than promote one’s career. Mid-20th-century figures like Lionel Trilling and Hannah Arendt, or more recent public intellectuals like Edward Said, Alan Wolfe, Judith Butler, and Robin D.G. Kelley, have often resisted rather than accommodated mainstream views.
In contrast, the promotionally minded academic need have no politics. In fact, it’s better not to be seen as too polarized. A little bit of activism to show you’re not an egghead is fine, but too much dissent makes you seem fringy rather than friendable. You wouldn’t want to put off potential donors, readers, or clicks.
I see this in a curious new tendency at lectures and other academic events. The previous code was to challenge speakers or even quarrel with them, but now the academic intellectual is more likely to avoid conflict and offer the milquetoast "Thank you so much for your talk" and "Thank you so much for your question." We internalize market-speak, assuming the affect of the smiling Starbucks server, who dare not put off customers.
That is not to say the previous intellectual sphere was an Eden from which we have fallen. The New York Intellectuals, often taken as exemplars of the species, were not immune to self-promotion. But they were unapologetically critical of our culture, especially its being overridden with commercial imperatives, and they typically took an adversarial stance to it, as Trilling underscored in his book The Opposing Self. Now we assume that the market is the predominant form of human interchange, so those not participating are just going to get left behind.
The promotional imperative runs through the plentiful advice now meted out especially to graduate students and junior faculty members at campus workshops and academic meetings, and in career-advice guides.. Often it invokes the honorific figure of the public intellectual. In The Chronicle, for instance, Devoney Looser, recounting her experience promoting her new book, gives a how-to in "The Making of a Public Intellectual." Leonard Cassuto has urged graduate students to "go public" ("How to Go Public, and Why We Must").
Both essays are well-intentioned, trying to overcome what the authors see as academics’ distance from the larger world. And both give some useful advice for gaining wider attention. In fact, they largely adopt journalistic rules of thumb: Keep up with your email and other accounts, and respond quickly; work on your "pitch" for your writing; have a "peg" tying your idea to the news; start writing with a provocative "hook" rather than academic palavering.
But both invoke a fuzzy sense of the public and don’t really answer why we should go public. To increase useful knowledge? To speak truth to power? Simply for the sake of attention? Moreover, what is wrong with aiming for a scholarly rather than a public audience? Not to mention that mainstream venues don’t seem to lack material. Are academics really so removed, when so many of them contribute to magazines from the Los Angeles Review of Books to The New Yorker?
Looser illustrates her advice with the story of how her recent book, The Making of Jane Austen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), gained major media attention in Britain, with television interviews, among other things. That’s great — I’m all for popular attention to literature, classic to contemporary, and Looser has built an impressive body of scholarly work on 18th- and early-19th-century literature while still at midcareer, so it seems fitting that she is becoming a spokesperson for literature.
But that’s not the same thing as being a public intellectual, like Richard Rorty, Stanley Aronowitz, or Michelle Alexander. It is not the story of dissent, of social criticism and risk, or pointed reflection on our cultural condition. In fact, Looser eschews that standard sense of what it means to be a public intellectual, remarking that it sounds pompous. Maybe, but most aspirational goals are.
Actually, what she is talking about is the traditional literary intellectual — and a retinue of British and American scholars does comment on Shakespeare or Keats or Thoreau or Zadie Smith on the BBC or C-Span, and sometimes on mainstream news shows. That is a respectable task, but it does not match the moral or political charge of a public intellectual, if that phrase is to have any teeth.
At heart, much of the advice literature implicitly blames academics for their lack of public purchase, diagnosing the problem as recalcitrance. It’s the nerd default, assuming that all academics are naïve or unworldly. And it suggests that they can’t find decent jobs because they don’t promote themselves well enough — not because the system of academic labor is structured so that only a third of Ph.D.s get proper, full-time jobs.
Another danger is that the advice literature drums up the pressure to do it all: not only to be a solid scholar, but also to publish in public venues, and to market yourself to boot. That’s too many jobs for most people to do well, and to do them successfully is not just a matter of will, or failure of will, but of opportunity and ability. It’s like telling everyone to be a home-run hitter. Or write for The New Yorker. The people we take as exemplary are usually outliers not easy to duplicate.
Rather than apologize for our public failure, we should recognize that we actually have a sizable public in our teaching. If more than 80 per cent of young Americans have attended college at some point — 20 million are in college this year — we have a public right in front of us. Why do we feel that this is insufficient? It is our indigenous audience, with real and immediate contact. Still, that is not the same thing as being a public intellectual.
The phrase "public intellectual" was put into circulation by Russell Jacoby in his 1987 book, The Last Intellectuals, to distinguish earlier examples like the New York Intellectuals from their heirs. For Jacoby, it was a story of decline: Intellectuals had largely migrated to academe and become inbred and obscure, immersed in hieratic pursuits like postmodern literary theory and abandoning wider audiences. Some have pointed out that the phrase "public intellectual" is redundant — the concept of the intellectual, like that of a writer, implies speaking to a public — but Jacoby was emphasizing the shift in the position of intellectuals and the limitations of those raised in the academy.
In the 1990s, a much-noted article in The New York Times announced that "The Public Intellectual Is Reborn." It celebrated a new impetus, especially among younger academics like Michael Bérubé, as well as more established ones like Patricia Meyers Spacks, to turn to cultural politics from specialties in highly theoretical fields. The subsequent decade saw a wave of scholars who sometimes wrote crossover criticism. In part, they were mobilized by the culture wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s, defending against attacks on academe.
In some ways, they fashioned a new hybrid: the academic-public intellectual. The cohort, while versed in postmodern theory, also produced a good number of books with trade presses — for instance, Kelley’s Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994), Laura Kipnis’s Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (1996) and her recent Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017), Andrew Ross’s Celebration: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town (1999) and his Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade — Lessons From Shanghai (2006), Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal (1999), Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (2006), Eric Lott’s The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (2006), and J. Jack Halberstam’s Gaga Feminism (2012), to name just a few. Not to mention crossover journalism for magazines and websites. They marshaled various critiques of our contemporary culture, arguing about race, gender, sexuality, labor, the environment, and other ideas with political force.
Added to those are a wave of books by a rising generation, like Mark Greif’s Against Everything: Essays (2016) and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (2016). In aggregate, they show that the idea that academics have neglected the effort to go public is something of a straw man. And they invite the obvious question: If there is a substantial number of public intellectuals, why all the recent urging?
The new promotional imperative pressures scholars to produce more directly marketable products, skills, and ideas. It also produces a new mind-set.
As promotional intellectuals, we internalize risk as part of our market-thinking, so our success or failure in jobs or publishing is our luck or our problem, not one of the profession or world. Ironically, in a world of constant "social" media, we are cellularized, competing for attention and isolated in discrete moments of it, which must be continually renewed. It takes us from the long scholarly cycle of research and the perdurability of scholarship to the temporary segment, pulling us into the 24/7 world, in which all of our attention is conscripted into the never-subsiding pulse of the market.
It produces a world not of scholarly reflection but of constant anxiety: Did I promote enough? Did I keep up with my social-media and email accounts? I missed a day! Will I disappear?
The promotional ethos has been accepted largely without question by both progressives and conservatives. We hear that professors are Marxists, but given how they have adapted to this new ecosystem, they may as well work on Madison Avenue — or in a media start-up.
On the other side of the aisle, conservatives should recognize that the market might not be their friend. What, after all, is the breakdown of the canon and traditional values but disruptive innovation? If the public wants to study the lyrics of Katy Perry instead of Homer, then the rule of the market is to give it to them. We’d be misserving shareholders otherwise.
Progressives and conservatives alike consider education central to our society, albeit sometimes with conflicting purposes, so they should look more critically at many aspects of the promotional turn.
The breakdown of scholarly values is probably tied to the diminution in standing of professional expertise, whether in government or education. Typically, professions control the dispensing of their special knowledge and work according to their guild’s codes and standards. You want your oncologist to be deemed a good oncologist by other doctors. But now the measure tacks to a market one: How many likes did you get?
While Jacoby was accurate in saying that intellectuals had migrated to academe, he did not allow that the academic position, whatever its limitations and problems, does have advantages in supporting critical intellectuals. It confers a certain independence. Even Edmund Wilson, an icon of the public intellectual, commented in "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed" that the life of the freelance intellectual had real deficits, as one was subject to the dictates of editors and whims of market taste, while academe had the advantages of stable employment and a connection with literature. (For him, the chief danger of academe was pedantry.)
We need to be more careful to retain that independence from the conventional market. Our culture, academic and otherwise, needs independent criticism now more than ever, when otherwise it follows the dictates of our corporate sponsors. Since "public intellectual" has lost some of its edge, a better designation might be "critical intellectual," who publicly casts a cold eye on our culture, society, and politics.
Jeffrey J. Williams, a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University, is the author of How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University (Fordham University Press, 2014.)
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