Many GC Professors Almost Public Intellectuals
by Advocate Staff
Once in a while they are on public radio, even more rarely are they on public television, and none dare dream of becoming a media pariah, a la Ralph Nader. The thought of it is tantalizing, the possibility too slim. As a recent report from the Graduate Center’s Center for the Promotion of the Graduate Center puts it, “many of our professors are almost considered public intellectuals.”
The most surprising finding in the report is not that none of them are actually as boring as Noam Chomsky, as smug as Stanley Fish, or as swarthy as Slavoj Zizek, but that so many of them almost are.
Indeed, the report details a plan to bring GC professors tantalizingly close to actual public intellectuals, at least in terms of their physical proximity. “The 2008-09 Public Events series on Power, in addition to attracting many extremely articulate and not-at-all insane people to the microphone during the question-and-answer period, had the happy side effect of creating photo-ops of GC professors alongside famous people, even if Photoshop enhancement was sometimes required.”
Although it ended up featuring a mind-numbing number of variations on the theme of Power, the Great Issues Forum started off reasonably enough with “Economic Power,” “Political Power,” “Cultural Power,” and “Power and Science” last fall. But since then, it has begun to generate a kind of “Great Issues Forum Bubble” with events of significantly less value being given the same publicity.
There was “Fashion and Power,” which our sources tell us President Kelly required all GC Professors to attend. More recently, there was “420 and Power,” which featured a group claiming to be GC students extolling the virtues of solar powered carbon-free drug use, by taking the entire audience at Proshansky Auditorium up to the roof of the Graduate Center to demonstrate the lighting of a “water-pipe” with a magnifying glass.
Against the advice of many, the program is being extended into next year, with a series of new events. “Summer Vacation and Power”: a 40-hour slideshow featuring photos from the exciting lives of GC Professors; “Somnambulism and Power”: featuring GC security staff discussing the dreams they have while dozing off near the entrance to the library; and “Coffee and Power”: featuring a debate on the wisdom of pegging the price of Grad Center coffee to that of a subway ride.
But, proponents argue, thanks to the Great Issues Forum, certain Professors have been given once in a lifetime opportunities. For example, Neil Smith and David Harvey, the Hall and Oates of Marxist Geography, were both given the chance to sit on stage with Naomi Klein, a journalist of half their intelligence, but twice their sex appeal.
Critics argue, however, that some Professors have stumbled when given the opportunity to address audiences larger than their seminars or the readership for their books, roughly 20 people in either case.
Only one GC scholar who is ready for his close-up has shunned the media spotlight, Professor Jerry Watts. When he won the Nobel Prize for Blackness, Professor Watts did the only thing he could to keep it real: he declined the award, even though it would in all likelihood have bumped his books on Ellison and Barak up the sales ranks on Amazon.com, from 2,112,847th and 2,026,641st to probably somewhere in the top 1 million. But Professor Watts is already a public intellectual in another since. As the unofficial Diogenes of Midtown, he can often be seen trading lectures on “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual” for cigarettes in front of the Grad Center.
