Where Are All the Young Brains?

By Ezra Bowen

The U.S. is not a nation that commonly confers celebrity on its discordant intellectuals. Yet in the past eight months, several feisty scholars have pounded academe, as well as society in general, and seen their books turn into unlikely best sellers. University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind attacked U.S. universities for dereliction of their duty to educate. The University of Virginia's E.D. Hirsch Jr. in Cultural Literacy blasted U.S. schools for failing to teach Western culture. Latest to join the list of academic provocateurs: Russell Jacoby, a former visiting scholar at the University of California in San Diego, whose new work, The Last Intellectuals (Basic Books; $18.95), argues that the U.S. is running out of what he calls public intellectuals.

That assertion now has an unintended irony in light of the three authors' public success. Last Intellectuals is in its second printing, and while it has not yet matched Bloom's and Hirsch's sales, it is a brisk seller and has sparked spirited debate over its thesis. America, Jacoby says, is producing no young crop of heirs to the great public writer-thinkers like H.L. Mencken and Thorstein Veblen, whose works set directions and standards 60 and 70 years ago. Nor, he notes, have successors emerged for the current senior generation of broad-gauge university scholars like David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith and Daniel Bell, with their insights on society and the economy.

"Name a group of important younger American critics, philosophers or historians," demands Jacoby. The fact is the naming comes hard, even on campuses, where the book has generated particular attention -- as well as trivial pursuit of rebuttal candidates. At Duke, for example, a recent faculty klatch turned up isolated, fiftyish nominees such as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, but no fresh generation.

Jacoby blames the dismantling of America's public "intellectual plant" on the linked appeal of security and specialization. Instead of standing in the cold to criticize, writes Jacoby, today's young brains opt for the warm but stifling blanket of academe, where 50,000 positions in 1920 have mushroomed to 700,000, many of them offering the tenured safety of $40,000-plus salaries. On campus, he claims, innovation and creativity have been subordinated to abstruse research, cranked out to satisfy doctoral requirements or a department chairman's notions of what will advance the discipline. As one proof, the author recalls a Modern Language Association project in which 18 scholars read Tom Sawyer backward to avoid being caught up in the story while they checked how often "Aunt Polly" is written as "aunty Polly."

Universities have actually grown more inimical to the sort of popular, innovative writings that Galbraith and others produced, contends Jacoby. His examples include the case of Paul Starr, 38, who rose quickly at Harvard, then was denied tenure after winning a 1984 Pulitzer Prize, the first ever awarded a sociologist. Grumbled a former departmental chairman of such popular repute: "If I want to be a free-lance journalist, then I should quit Harvard and go be a free-lance journalist."

An unrealistic, as well as ungracious, suggestion. As Jacoby also complains, free-lance writers are already squeezed between low space rates paid by editors and high rents for space exacted by landlords. Greenwich Village, he mourns, is bare of angry young Marxists; no new Dwight Macdonald jousts with the Establishment. Public intellectualism is drying up in the city, as bohemian haunts become gentrified, driving yesterday's impoverished iconoclasts to become today's fast tenure trackers.

Unfortunately for the weight of his arguments, Jacoby, like the year's previous provokers, makes too narrow a case. He tends to confine his examples, both good and horrible, to sociology, economics and criticism. He gives history the barest buss, substantially ignores the law and has no truck with science. He thus ignores vast regions of the cerebral landscape. As Critic George Steiner observes, "Never before have the vital things been so recondite. It is not the general intellectual who enters the debate but the expert, and not in the universities but in the think tanks, the congressional staffs and even inside government."

Jacoby is also guilty as a writer of occasionally spooning out the kind of muddy academic goulash he criticizes in others. Sample: "The zeitgeist, if not armed, is watchful." But he has hardly practiced what he is now preaching against. At 42, he has taken leave of his sixth teaching post, with no tenure in sight. Academic friends, he reports, have praised the book, "but they have also been telling me that I've ended my academic career."

With reporting by Lawrence Malkin/Boston