The Public Intellectual, Service Learning, and Activist Research

hile I support the good intentions of those who have recently proposed definitions of the intellectual, I find these definitions problematic in their narrow delineation of the word public-they focus on a public consisting of middle and upper class policy makers, administrators, and professionals, and, in doing so, omit an important site for uniting knowledge-making and political action: the local community. Canvassing the letters submitted to the October 1997 PMLA forum on intellectual work in the twenty-first century, one notices numerous tensions regarding the larger role of the intellectual: