Putting the "Public" in "Intellectual"

By Barbara Fister. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lit up Twitter and prompted some thoughtful blog posts here when he wrote “Professors: We Need You!”, urging scholars to stop writing such obscure and tedious stuff for each other and become public intellectuals. I am partly sympathetic to his message. There are a lot of ways public policy could be better informed by the research conducted in our universities, and I’m rather boringly fixated on open access to knowledge as a way of sharing knowledge outside our gated communities. Read more...