Intellectuals searching for publics: Who is out there? Management Communication Quarterly

At the age of 10, after Barcelona fell to General Franco in the SpanishCivil War, he wrote his first article about the looming threat of fas-cism.1 In his mid-20s, as an MIT professor, he became a legend in the field of linguistics, creating the theory of generative grammar. In his mid-30s, he began to write and speak provocatively against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, earning a reputation as a rousing political activist, left-wing intellectual, and, in his own words, a “libertarian socialist. ” In 2007, at age 79, he writes and travels around the world, giving lectures and interviews on a wide variety of topics: linguistics, philosophy, morality and ethics, international affairs, and U.S. foreign policy. Meet Avram Noam Chomsky, public intellectual number one (Herman, 2005). What does it mean to be a public intellectual in addition to being an intellectual who engages with the public? The Emersonian notion of an intellectual is one who represents the “world’s eye”; one who holds great ideas of the past, communicates them to the public, and, in the process, cre-ates new ideas (Lightman, 2000). Edward Said (1996), a public intellectual in his own right, emphasized the intellectual’s responsibility to advance human freedom and knowledge and to disturb the status quo. In this sense, public intellectuals are more than just righteous in their stance; they embody and enact moral leadership. They are not afraid to speak out; rather, they thrive as “rabble-rousers ” grounded in ethical pillars. At first glance, an aura of elitism seems inescapable when framing the term public intellectual, but need it be? Presenting ideas that are intel-lectually grounded for public consumption does require a physical place— courtyards, public parks, classrooms, printed pages, Internet Web sites, and others. These places are directly “accessible ” to people or can be “recreated