The TWO types of INTELLECTUALS - Academia DEFINED

Anyone who has ever spent a great deal of time, within organized hierarchical institutions of higher education, can testify to what Noam Chomsky identified as the two types of intellectuals. I have experienced this firsthand both at the graduate level in the US and also Europe. It is very apparent once you are actually made aware of the dynamics and interplay between a so-called instructor and student, and the boundaries which exist between acceptable and passive acquiescence and intellectual dissent.

As Chomsky noted, the concept of “intellectuals” in the modern sense gained prominence with the 1898 “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” produced by the Dreyfusards, who, inspired by Émile Zola’s open letter of protest to France’s president, condemned both the framing of French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason and the subsequent military cover-up. The Dreyfusards’ stance conveys the image of intellectuals as defenders of justice, confronting power with courage and integrity. But they were hardly seen that way at the time. A minority of the educated classes, the Dreyfusards were bitterly condemned in the mainstream of intellectual life.

As such, the pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished. This method is also utilized within the academic setting, most notably reflected in your grades for assignments which counter the instructor. This is most prominent within the social sciences, especially political.

Notable figures such as Bertrand Russell, Eugene Debs, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Liebknecht were, like Zola, sentenced to prison. Debs was punished with particular severity—a ten-year prison term for raising questions about President Wilson’s “war for democracy and human rights.” Wilson refused him amnesty after the war ended, though President Harding finally relented. Some dissidents, such as Thorstein Veblen, were chastised but treated less harshly; Veblen was fired from his position in the Food Administration after preparing a report showing that the shortage of farm labor could be overcome by ending Wilson’s brutal persecution of unions, specifically the Industrial Workers of the World. Randolph Bourne was dropped by the progressive journals after criticizing the “league of benevolently imperialistic nations” and their exalted endeavors.

As a result, two categories of intellectuals emerged. The ridiculous eccentrics are termed “value-oriented intellectuals,” who pose “a challenge to democratic government which is, potentially at least, as serious as those posed in the past by aristocratic cliques, fascist movements, and communist parties.” Among other misdeeds, these dangerous creatures “devote themselves to the derogation of leadership, the challenging of authority,” and even confront the institutions responsible for “the indoctrination of the young.” This was in contrast to the include the “technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals,” responsible and serious thinkers who devote themselves to the constructive work of shaping policy within established institutions, and to ensuring that indoctrination of the young proceeds on course.

Unfortunately, most institutions of higher learning employ and perpetuate professors and instructors of the latter variety - those individuals who use their positions as a means to promote complicity and uncritical thinking - much like what George Carlin, John Taylor Gatto, Charlotte Iserbyt or Ivan Illich lambasted concerning mass public education.

From my experience, working the system is rudimentary, you can excel by going along, completing assignments in automatic fashion, doing what is expected in order to achieve the desired result but not the effect. You can remain a critical thinking individual except that your mode of expression within organized academia is temporarily curtailed by the system. The only other option which has historically been a viable choice was to drop out and remain disillusioned or to try to exist in a world that values complicity, passive acceptance to authority in all forms and worship of collective idiocy which is perpetuated by mass media. Panem et circenses indeed.