Big Brains, Small Impact:
The new thinkers became academic — not public — intellectuals, with little purchase outside professional circles. [...]
Of course, few like to believe that we live in an era of mediocrity. [...]
In the United States, however, blogs are not so much about challenging an authoritarian state as about adding to the cacophony. Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones than reasoned contributions to public life. [...]
As academic intellectuals subvert paradigms and deconstruct narratives in campus symposia, conservatives take over the nation. Brilliant!
Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. A columnist for The Chronicle Review, he is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).
