One charge frequently leveled at academic studies is that they don’t address the everyday problems of life and thus have little practical application. To be sure, media research has built a growing knowledge base and dramatically advanced what we know about mass media’s effect on individuals and societies. But the larger public has had little access to the research process, even though cultural studies research tends to identify with marginalized groups. Any scholarship is self-defeating if its complexity removes it from the daily experience of the groups it examines. Researchers themselves have even found it difficult to speak to one another because of differences in the discipline-specific language they use to analyze and report their findings.

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In addition, increasing specialization in the 1970s began isolating many researchers from life outside the university. Academics were criticized as being locked away in their ivory towers, concerned with seemingly obscure matters to which the general public could not relate. However, academics across many fields moved to mitigate this isolation, becoming increasingly active in political and cultural life in the 1980s and 1990s. For example, essayist and cultural critic Barbara Ehrenreich has written frequently about labor and economic issues for such magazines as Time and the Nation and has written several books on such issues.

In recent years, public intellectuals have also encouraged discussion of the new challenges posed by media production in a digital world. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has been a leading advocate of efforts to rewrite the nation’s copyright laws to enable noncommercial “amateur culture” to flourish on the Internet. He publishes his work in print and online. American University’s Pat Aufderheide, longtime media critic for the alternative magazine In These Times, worked with independent filmmakers to develop the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. The statement calls for documentary filmmakers to have reasonable access to copyrighted material for their work.

Like journalists, public intellectuals based on campuses help advance the conversations taking place in larger society. They actively circulate the most important new ideas of the day—including those related to mass media—and serve as models for how to participate in public life.

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