The Philosophers' Magazine features an article from The Australian which discusses the thoughts of philosopher A.C. Grayling on the difference between academics and intellectuals:
[T]he great Renaissance humanists worked outside the universities, as do today's intellectuals. This makes me much more optimistic about the intellectual tenor of public life than critics of dumbing-down such as Furedi, Wheen and the rest. Grayling argues that surprisingly few university academics in the English-speaking world are intellectuals "in the sense of having wide interests of the mind and deep commitments in moral and political terms, often together with a vocation for deploying these in debate about matters of public concern". A university academic is a specialist in a narrow field who publishes, usually in jargon, technical research in journals of interest only to other specialists.
"Modern academia, on the non-science side, thus reprises the condition of Renaissance universities uncomfortably closely. Contemporary intellectuals inhabit journalism, the media, publishing, non-government organisations; they are writers or artists, commentators or independent entrepreneurs in forms of business related to the media and arts. While many of these intellectuals contribute substantially to the shaping of cultural life, their academic contemporaries pass their time obscurely multiplying footnotes to unreadable, unread and soon forgotten papers."
Ouch! In other words, modern academics, or at least a substantial portion of them, have devoted their lives to a completely pointless pursuit of the trivial and insignificant. One wonders how a haughty author of numerous papers and books that no one has read or cares about reacts to the charge that his life's work is a meaningless waste of time. Not equably, we suspect.
