Public intellectual, celebrity academic, scholar with a media strategy – there’s a lot ways to describe a professor that keeps one foot in the ivory tower and the other in the limelight. Sometimes you will find yourself appreciative of the musings, such as when Henry Louis Gates tackles some new facet of the black narrative. At other turns you may wince at the volume of their views– such as those expressed by Cornel West in a recent face-off with Al Sharpton — even if you agree with their positions. The Atlanta Post looks at these professors and four others who have established a presence far beyond the classroom.
Cornel West
As far as academics in the public eye, very few people get around as much as Cornel West. Princeton and a weekly radio show with co-host Tavis Smiley are regular gigs. Beyond that he’s liable to show up anywhere. Cable news shows are a given, as are an endless array of forums on race. But that’s also him in the studio cutting singles alongside Prince and Jill Scott, or racking up film credits in the Matrix franchise, which is the only time you’ll catch West in anything other than the trademark three-piece black suit.
Henry Louis Gates
There’s no little bit of irony in the fact that one of Black America’s leading intellectuals is better known for his arrest than his academic credentials. After all, a black man in cuffs is an easier image to access than one in front of a classroom. But if it bothers Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, it certainly hasn’t bound him. “Black in Latin America” debuts next week, the eleventh in a series of PBS documentaries covering everything from ancient kingdoms to Oprah’s roots. Off camera he keeps up the extra-curriculars, most notably as co-founder and editor-in-chief of online daily, The Root.
Michael Eric Dyson
Michael Eric Dyson teaches sociology at Georgetown, received his PhD in Divinity from Princeton and is an ordained Baptist minister, but he’ll preach about anything. The outspokenness has earned him frequent television invitations and a show on public radio which airs five days a week. If seeing and hearing him are not enough, readers have a library of books to choose from; in all he’s published 17 that run the gamut from hip hop to Hurricane Katrina.
Julianne Malveaux
Since 2007 Julianne Malveaux has been the president of Bennett College. An economist by training, she’s written columns for the last thirty years looking at the subject through the lenses of race and class. Television appearances followed print as network and cable programs sought out the woman Cornel West referred to as “the most iconoclastic public intellectual in the country”. Her thoughts have been collected in several books, most recentlySurviving and Thriving: 365 Facts in Black Economic History. It’s published by Last Word Productions, a multimedia company she founded and for which she serves as CEO.
Marc Lamont Hill
Marc Lamont Hill teaches education at Columbia University. The title of his book, Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Identity hits on subjects that keep him engaged beyond the lecture hall. He’s made the rounds on the cable news shows, spending a good chunk of time playing the liberal counterweight on Fox’s The O’Reilly Factor. Last fall he landed a regular television spot when he was brought on to host “Our World with Black Enterprise”, which airs on TV One.
Imani Perry
Since 2009, Imani Perry has made her home at Princeton. Holding doctorates in history and law from Harvard, her research looks at these subjects in the context of race. Just reading the title of her latest work, More Terrible, More Beautiful: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, gives you some sense of why Perry’s a popular commentator in the age of Obama. And while all of her musings can be categorized as cultural criticism, some writings look specifically at that part of culture that is also art; her articles on literature and the book, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, are such examples.
