Who gets to be a public intellectual? If you write a Facebook post with an incisive response to Mark Greif's recent discussion of public intellectuals at The Chronicle of Higher Education, are you yourself a public intellectual? And if not, why not?

The answer may seem obvious: No, writing on Facebook doesn't make you a public intellectual. But Greif's article suggests otherwise:

Public intellect is most valuable if you don’t accept the construction of the public handed to us by current media. Intellectuals: You—we—are the public. It’s us now, us when we were children, before the orgy of learning, or us when we will be retired; you can choose the exemplary moment you like. But the public must not be anyone less smart and striving than you are, right now. It’s probably best that the imagined public even resemble the person you would like to be rather than who you are.

Greif is presenting the public intellectual as democratizing or egalitarian; the public intellectual includes all of the intellectual publics. But that democratization is, explicitly, imaginary.

The real dynamics of who is and is not a public intellectual remain fairly traditional. Greif sees public intellectuals as linked, one way or another, to the university ("it would be wise for intellectuals to stop being so ashamed of ties to universities, however tight or loose; it’s cowardly, and often irrelevant"). He also places them in the context of familiar outlets, whether the Partisan Review, his own magazine n+1, or (perhaps) The New Republic. Public intellectuals imagine themselves as part of the public, but they also separate themselves from it. The Partisan Review writers, he says "distinguished themselves from [the public] momentarily, by pursuing difficulty, in a challenge to the public and themselves—thus becoming equals who could earn the right to address this public."

Greif continues, "One must simultaneously differentiate oneself from the university spiritually and embed oneself within it financially," but the spiritual differentiation seems more notional than actual. The vision here is of public intellectual as teacher, leading an eager, intelligent, but still hierarchically subordinate group of students. All the public is equal, but some public intellectuals are more equal than others.