Beyond ‘talking out of school’: educational researchers as public intellectuals

Abstract

This conceptual article explores the notion of educational researchers operating as public intellectuals. To do this, I situate my analysis within a broader tradition of public intellectual work in the American academy. I also offer a framework for three specific forms of public intellectual work, supported by relevant examples, which can be taken up by educational researchers. I then raise critical issues, concerns, and tensions that complicate such work, and conclude by offering suggestions for better linking educational research to the broader public. Although this article focuses largely on researchers working within the university context, particularly tenure-line faculty, many of its insights are applicable to independent researchers, policy analysts, or others working within the broadly defined field of educational research.

Keywords:

• public policy
• methodology
• epistemology
• applied research

Notes

Throughout this article, I make deliberate use of feminine, rather than masculine or gender-neutral, pronouns. I do this in order to mark my own positionality as a ‘Black male feminist’ (Neal 2005), as well as to draw implicit attention to the ways in which notions of the public intellectual have historically privileged male identities (Hooks and West 1991).

It is worth noting that, despite its fundamentally democratic character, public intellectual work does not always yield favourable outcomes. One of the most troubling examples comes from the work of European eugenicists in the middle of the twentieth century. Scholars like William Bradford Shockley, Arthur Jensen used the public sphere in order to advance arguments about the inherent intellectual and moral superiority of whites over people of colour, namely people of African descent. These arguments became central to public policy debates, as they were used to buttress segregationist attacks on civil rights movements in general (Zuberi 2001), and school integration movements in particular. More broadly, as Baker (1998) contends, the social sciences (particularly anthropology) have played a critical role in the reification of ‘race’ within the public imagination through their engagement with a variety of public spaces including trade publications and the World's Fairs. It is my contention, however, that such examples do not speak to the fundamentally antidemocratic character of public intellectual activity, but rather the need to expand the public sphere in order to accommodate competing truth claims and alternate ideological positions.

Throughout this article, I use phrases like ‘qualifies as’ and ‘satisfies the conditions for’ in order to mark the definitional boundaries of public intellectual work. It is not my intention, however, to suggest that more traditional (i.e. non-public) approaches are less authentic, important, or useful.

Burawoy's stance on policy work is an absolutist one, as he constructs ‘policy’ and ‘public’ in sharp opposition to one another. Although I take Burawoy's critique seriously, I echo Patterson's (2007) counter-argument that not all policy approaches are performed in the service of a corporate or governmental client. As such, I consider policy shaping activities to be central to public intellectual work, provided they cohere with the principles articulated throughout this article.

I do not mean to suggest that methodological approaches that are undergirded by scientific rationality are incompatible with public engagement. As I demonstrate throughout this article, multiple methods and methodologies (including those used by individuals who embrace scientific rationality) can and must be used in the interest of public intellectual activity. Rather, like Cochran-Smith (2006), I am arguing that resistance to public intellectual work within the current historical moment is often undergirded by the same epistemological frames that enable the fetishization of scientistic forms of inquiry.