public intellectuals and the fickle food of fame

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This weekend, at Amherst, I enjoyed a rich conversation about the purposes of liberal arts colleges. One proposal (not mine, but I appreciated it) was for liberal arts colleges to nurture public intellectuals.

The colleges represented at the meeting use basically the same criteria and standards for hiring and promotion that research-intensive universities use. Should their faculty be distinctive in any way? Universities tend to reward work produced for experts within fields. Liberal arts colleges could favor work that is meant for the public. Because they can be very selective, they could attract public intellectuals without compromising quality.

Sometimes, writing or speaking for the public is defined as reaching a large audience–in a word, as fame. But the most famous person who ever lived in Amherst refused to share her work with the public and wrote several trenchant poems about fame.

For instance, these four lines constitute Emily Dickinson’s poem #1788:

Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

The “song” is the attraction of fame, but the the “wing” refers to its tendency to fly away after causing pain. The ancient personification of Fame was winged, but I think she was envisioned arriving by air to announce someone’s success, rather than flying away unpredictably. Dickinson suggests a similar idea in the poem (#1659) that begins “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate.” There is also: “Fame is the one that does not stay” (#1507).

Dickinson carefully designed her own funeral, a public event that launched her career posthumously. It seems that she wanted to reach an audience (hence becoming famous) but did not want fame to affect her work. She carefully timed her fame until after she could experience it (Crumbly 2017).

That sequence is clear in #1427:

To earn it by disdaining it
Is Fame’s consummate Fee—
He loves what spurns him—
Look behind—He is pursuing thee.

So let us gather—every Day—
The Aggregate of
Life’s Bouquet
Be Honor and not shame—

The addressee of the poem (Dickinson herself?) is moving toward an unnamed goal. That goal is not fame, which is behind her. Fame pursues her because she does not seek him. Perhaps an author or thinker who disdains to pursue fame is more likely to become famous because the quality of her work will be higher.

There is an air here of lovers, like Keats’ figures on the Grecian Urn (“What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”). And there is something a bit creepy about Fame sneaking up from behind. You would think that turning around to see him would be a mistake, like Orpheus’ tragic error in looking behind him for Eurydice. But Dickinson’s narrator advises, “Look behind–he is pursuing thee.” Perhaps you should look back to remember the temptation that shadows you and then press forward to stay out of his clutches. Play hard to get.

The second stanza instructs us to attend to what life provides and to make art from it, not caring about the “shame” of becoming famous. We should be concerned with what we can gather, not with what people will think of us.

Nevertheless, Dickinson is a consummate rhetorician in the sense that she addresses strangers and tries to influence them, carefully considering what they may know, care about, and want to hear. Even though she eschews a contemporaneous audience, she writes for a public. Most readers feel that she is talking to them, and we certainly don’t have to be professional poets.

The kind of academic or intellectual work that I most appreciate (and try to support through the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts, the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, and other efforts) involves collaborations between scholarly experts and concrete groups, organizations, movements, or communities. The experts must talk in useful ways. It is exciting when their collaborative work expands to large scales and affects many people, but sometimes large scale is inappropriate or impossible. Aiming for big numbers can undermine integrity and quality. The goal is to share what Hannah Arendt calls a “world” with people who are independent and different from oneself.

If Amherst’s most famous resident is a model, the lesson would be to make things that have value for strangers, not just for colleagues and specialists. But treat fame as a threat to quality. Run away from it.

Source: Crumbley, Paul. “Emily Dickinson’s Funeral and the Paradox of Literary Fame.” The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 26 no. 2, 2017, p. 51-69. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/edj.2017.0014. See also: anxieties of influence; love of the world

Civic Studies and the Black Intellectual Tradition

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The Center for the Humanities at Tufts and the Center for Public History will offer a discussion on “The University and the Democratic Imagination: Civic Studies and the Black Intellectual Tradition” at 4:30 pm on Oct. 5 with Hollis Robbins, Brandon Terry, and me. Please join us!

Robbins is a scholar of American and African American literature and my favorite writer these days about AI. Terry is an authority on African American political thought.

“The broader seminar gathers scholars from within and beyond the Boston area to explore the resources of the Black intellectual tradition and the practice of public history for supporting academic freedom and advancing democracy within and beyond the university.”

I suspect we will pick up some themes from Robbins’ piece, “My AI thinks Civics is Black Studies,” and my response, “Is Black Studies Civic Studies?” More generally, this may be an opportunity to think about what people should read and discuss to be good citizens, particularly in the USA. I would make a case that we should all reflect on the history of Black thought and respond to it, but I also believe that other canons are valuable. So our conversation can explore what kinds of thought citizens need, what makes a “tradition,” how academic freedom and the university relate to democracy, and the particular resources of the Black American tradition for democracy in the USA and around the world.

Those are my questions, but I’m sure the other speakers will have additional ones.

the university between a club good and the commons

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The late Elinor Ostrom taught us many useful things, including how to analyze complex situations rigorously to reveal ways to improve them. Instead of reacting to the world with anger and confusion, someone who has learned from Ostrom can break down a problem and look for remedies.

I am teaching her work this week to undergraduates, and separately discussing the application of her framework to energy policy with colleagues in engineering. If you happen to want a primer to Ostrom, I have recorded lectures about her basic ideas (Part I, 17 minutes) and their application (Part II , 1 minutes).

To develop the mental habit of analysis, our students and I considered Ostrom’s framework for goods (things of value to anyone). We used her framework to model the situation in which we found ourselves, a classroom at Tufts University.

As shown in the graphic that accompanies this post, Ostrom divided all goods in two ways. Some goods are subtractable, meaning that they can be used up or ruined. But others are not. And some are excludable, meaning that it is possible to prevent individuals from using them. But again, others are not. These two distinctions create four categories.

In a college classroom, the private goods include the students’ property, such as their phones (neatly out of sight in our case) and their clothes. One student pointed out that a chair in the classroom, although legally the property of Tufts, functions as a private good during class because of an effective norm that you can’t take someone’s chair away.

Knowledge can be a pure public good. If I explain Ostrom’s theories, that doesn’t subtract or detract from them. And it is hard to block people from learning about her thought once it’s published.

Tufts is a club good, meaning that students benefit by virtue of being admitted to it. Other students do not detract from the benefits of enrolling, except that a very large student body would begin to dilute the “brand.” Yet it is easy to exclude individuals through the admissions process. I suppose that a diploma is a private good, as are the credits that add up to a degree. But the value of a degree depends on its indicating a club good that is owned by all alumni.

Finally, the learning environment is what Ostrom called a “common pool resource” or “commons,” for short. It is subtractable in the sense that a student (or a professor) can make it worse by acting badly or even by taking space in a classroom without contributing much. However, the learning environment is not very excludable, because it will benefit everyone who is present and wants to take advantage of it.

For me, the interesting question in an institution like mine is the relationship between the commons and the club goods.

Our business model depends on selling a club good. This is not true in other countries with different educational systems, or at least it is less important there. But institutions like Tufts cannot survive financially without charging people to join an exclusive club.

Perhaps it is good for the world that American colleges and universities provide club goods by selecting and labeling their students. For one thing, many people appreciate the club that is their own alma mater. And arguably, the sorting function sends useful signals, transmitting information about people who have graduated from Chicago or Oberlin or Vanderbilt. However, on the whole, I think the competition to generate club goods does harm. It sorts and separates young people, reinforces prior inequalities, and allows colleges to compete for exclusivity instead of offering educational value.

An institution’s value (in the more idealistic sense of that word) involves the commons that we create in which our people learn, grow, and form a community.

Thus we can measure our excellence by the degree to which we leverage our club goods for the commons, or (put another way) how we minimize the exclusivity of our club while maximizing the common-pool resource that we create here.

The cynical take on US higher education says that it maximizes its club goods and uses the commons (i.e., the learning environment) mostly for branding. Frank Bruni satirized that situation in a memorable 2016 piece in which he imagined that Stanford had finally reached the ultimate success, a zero percent admission rate. He wrote:

At first blush, Stanford’s decision would seem to jeopardize its fund-raising. … But over recent years, Stanford administrators noticed that as the school rejected more and more comers, it received bigger and bigger donations, its endowment rising in tandem with its exclusivity, its luster a magnet for Silicon Valley lucre.

In fact just 12 hours after the university’s rejection of all comers, an alumnus stepped forward with a financial gift prodigious enough for Stanford to begin construction on its long-planned Center for Social Justice, a first-ever collaboration of Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava, who also designed the pedestrian bridge that will connect it to the student napping meadows.

But real universities (including Stanford) actually create learning environments for those who get in; they don’t merely issue diplomas to those whom they admit.

A university also generates important pure public goods, new knowledge and culture that disseminate globally. And it can even offer worthwhile private goods, like t-shirts and dorm rooms. But I would focus on the degree to which an institution deploys the resources from its club goods to provide common-pool resources. The more of that, the better.

See also: why don’t colleges allocate more resources to access?; the weirdness of the higher ed marketplace, etc.

do the liberal arts accomplish civic education?

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Next weekend, I’ll participate in a discussion at a famous liberal arts college about the various crises facing such institutions.

All the other participants will be liberal arts college professors. Although my institution is a research university, the intersection of the liberal arts and civic learning also matters to me.

First, the crises that confront the liberal arts (from the cost of college to the rise of AI; from Donald Trump to cultural challenges within the academy) also threaten the parts of a university where I work.  

Second, we face an important conceptual question whenever we try, at universities like mine and many others that I visit (and in k-12 education) to strengthen civic learning. Are the liberal arts automatically “civic”? In other words, is saving the liberal arts a way to accomplish “education for citizenship” (which will be the title of my talk next weekend)? In practical terms, can we say that a student who has a good basis in the liberal arts is also educated for citizenship? Or is there a distinction between civic and liberal education?

In short, my answer would be that the liberal arts provide education for a good individual life. But the specific question for citizens is how to do good things together. Citizens need collective agency.

Most or perhaps all of the liberal arts are useful for collective agency. A group of people concerned with the condition of their community can benefit from understanding economics, the carbon cycle, liberalism and its critics, and the origins of their language, to name just four examples. However, a mass of such knowledge may not sufficiently inform them about how to act well together. They also need the Tocquevillian art and science of association, the “mother science” in a democracy.

We can learn how to associate effectively and wisely from experience. If one grows up amid functioning voluntary associations and participatory democratic institutions, one may learn how to make them work well without having to study that topic extensively. However, most modern Americans lack such opportunities.

Besides, since the challenges of forming and sustaining effective groups have grown and changed in the 21st century, accumulated experience may not suffice. Civic education requires the explicit study of collective agency, often based on texts.

Note that the scale of collective action ranges from pairs of collaborators to the whole human species. A nation is one “we” among many others.

The precise topics of civic education may vary depending on students’ interests and needs. However, as illustrative examples, it can be very useful to understand how the grassroots leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement formed effective nonviolent organizations, or how a 21st century nonprofit should develop a strategic plan, or how to analyze an argument about values, or how to collect relevant environmental data, or (indeed) what James Madison advises about the problem of factionalism in Federalist #10.

These are classic topics in the liberal arts, likely offered in departments from history and biology to philosophy. What matters is the spirit and purpose of the inquiry, which must involve collective agency. The primary question is not how things work, or how things should be, or what someone thought, but what we (a group to which a person belongs) should do.

Both pedagogy and content are relevant. To learn to govern things together, it is valuable to practice discussing and writing about texts and data. These are forms of pedagogy. But it is also valuable to understand the difference between a labor union and a corporation–that is content, which can be conveyed in a lecture. Both matter.

Three quick historical illustrations may help to convey this ideal.

The earliest attested use of the phrase “liberal arts” occurs in an early and minor work by Cicero, De Inventione (1.35). He is not discussing the liberal arts. The phrase occurs in a long list of ways that people differ. A person can be male or female, strong or weak, Greek or barbarian. (I would like to ask a classicist whether Cicero, a Roman writing in Latin, considered himself a barbarian on account of his country or a Greek because of his education.) A man’s character also depends on “who he had as teachers of the liberal arts” and “who has instructed him in living.”

This brief mention is hardly a theory of the liberal arts. However, Cicero opens the book with this problem: wisdom is moot without eloquence (no one will act wisely unless persuaded), yet eloquence is morally neutral and can be used for evil. His stated objective is to serve “our republic” by uniting wisdom with eloquence. In that context, the liberal arts appear, along with moral exhortation, as ways of making men lead good lives–men who are not only individuals but also citizens of a republic.

Now compare the image of Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts by the remarkable woman Herrad of Landsberg (ca. 1185), which accompanies this post. Here Philosophy is the Queen. Philosophy says that the liberal arts flow from her as seven streams of wisdom, and she gets her wisdom from God. At the bottom of the picture are four bad men (listening to black birds instead of Philosophy) who violate the liberal arts. One of those is a Magician, and another is a Poet, consigned to the bottom because he makes up false stories.

Herrad may have been an exemplary participant and leader of a group–the abbey whose nuns elected her as their abbess in 1167. Nevertheless, her conception of intellectual life is religious as opposed to republican. For her, knowledge is abstract and divine, discovered not created by people. Education leads one up and out of human affairs.

Finally, Hannah Arendt aimed to recover the republican ideals that animated the young Cicero but for modern times. In 1958, she wrote:

There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.(The Human Condition, p. 4).

Herrad of Landsberg’s truths are definitely beyond speech and relevant to the individual soul, because they are truths about God. But I think the ordinary modern liberal arts also pursue truths beyond “speech” (in Arendt’s idiosyncratic terminology). For example, pure mathematics belongs to the liberal arts. One might think that any science which relies on impersonal methods pursues truths without intrinsically requiring “speech,” and its truths can matter to people. But the liberal arts also involve truths that we make together by talking and acting. That is where the liberal arts and civic education intersect.

See also: love of the world; is Black Studies Civic Studies?; A Defense of Higher Education and its Civic Mission (2013); the humanities as civic education etc.

Frontiers of Democracy 2026

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Frontiers of Democracy 2026: The United States at 250: Meeting the Moment for Democracy, in the US and Around the World

October 2 – 4 | Tufts University in Medford, MA

Frontiers of Democracy is an annual conference at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life that convenes practitioners, scholars, leaders, and community members from across the United States and the world. I co-led (or even sometimes solely led) this conference between 2009 and 2025, but I am delighted that a new set of leaders has taken it over. Although I am (thankfully) no longer in charge, I will be there and excited to see many friends and meet new ones. The agenda–with at least 19 different sessions–looks rich and interesting. As always, the sessions tend to be highly interactive and informal, and the participants bridge the worlds of research and teaching and practice and advocacy.

At a moment of significant political change in the United States and around the world, the Frontiers of Democracy 2026 convening will explore the essential elements of democratic process, policy, and partnership. Drawing on global, historical, and youth perspectives, and using the framework of generous listening, we will examine the intersections of political pluralism, activism, and academia—and consider how to meet this pivotal moment in history.

While this framing guides our conversation, the convening is not limited to a single theme. Sessions will also engage with topics central to Tisch College’s North Star: building robust, inclusive democracy for an increasingly multiracial society.

The agenda will feature concurrent breakout sessions, keynotes, plenary sessions, and networking opportunities, including an organization and poster fair. We are pleased to announce Danielle R. Holley, President of Mount Holyoke College as this year’s keynote speaker.

Here, again, is the Agenda. Register now!

This event is hosted by the Vuslat Foundation Generous Listening and Dialogue Initiative(VF-GLADi) and the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University