Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Makings of a Public and
the Role of the Academy
Noëlle McAfee
For more than a decade, those embarking on public scholarship
and those rethinking the civic mission of the university have
been asking, what kind of relationship should there be between the
academy and the public? This is much bigger than the old town/
gown problem. It is more than a matter of building good public
relations. And the closer one looks at it the more complex this
“relationship” becomes. We are not asking about the relationship
between one thing and another thing, for neither the academy nor
the public is a thing. The academy is not only spread out all over
the world, not only a loose unfederated array of institutional and
scholarly inquiries with a mission to teach, to learn, and to serve;
it is a frame of mind, a way of relating to the world as it is, and it is
often situated in something like a hierarchical relationship to all it
studies and to whom it teaches.
But what is even more intriguing and baffling is this non-thing
we call “the public”: most always with the definite article, the public.
To use the term publics, as some with multicultural sensibilities
sometimes do, is to twist the word beyond recognition, for the word
public seems designed to connote a collectivity, really an ubercollectivity
of members of a political community (at whatever scale); and if
there is more than one collectivity, then any one of them isn’t a collectivity
or a public at all. Instead of a public, we might call it a faction.
I say the public, whatever it is, is not a thing. By that I mean that
it is not waiting in the wings. It is ephemeral. It comes together one
day, it seems, and disperses the next. A public is always in relation
to something else, whether a problem that can, upon recognition,
band people together, or a cultural production, or a speech. Yet with
speeches and cultural productions, “a public” seems to mean anyone
paying attention, and it calls for little more than paying attention.
That’s what we call an audience, not a public.
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