Several years ago, I introduced a class at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism which was designed to encourage scholars in training to think more deeply about the public-facing dimensions of their work. I wanted to call the class, “How to Be a Public Intellectual,” but this is a university, so we couldn’t be that direct and practical. After some negotiation, the class became “Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice.” Click here for my latest draft of the syllabus.

Students were asked to try their hands about a range of genres (the op ed, the blog post, the digital essay, the interview) that went beyond the university press monograph and the peer-reviewed journal; they heard from faculty at USC and elsewhere who were in the trenches, using their research to make a difference in the world; they underwent media training, including time being interviewed inside a radio…