I guess, because it’s an academic industry, money is always a problem. That problem filters its way through institutional procedures and practices, affecting the work done, in various ways.
The whole ‘public intellectual’ thing is a concern with public relevance, a relevance that is always in question; increasingly so, when financial, political, and social information electronically proliferate into the new forms and swarms of a ‘cloud’ based culture. It’s all ‘in the air’, so to speak. I guess, Marx’s dictum, “All that is solid melts into air”, has become literally true, lol.
There are countless ways of manufacturing meaning, and I’m sure they’re all worthy pursuits; but there are different understandings, purposes, and needs; so that automatically creates a diversity of requirements. In unsettling times, of radical change, people are under duress to congregate around ideological simplicities, or at least they are more susceptible to them. That may be what’s occurring in general intellectual and academic discussions. They’re trying to mine a simplicity of sense; the motherlode of a superconducting, integratative (sic) efficiency. It’s the corollary of the profit drive, which is the corollary of a ‘Heaven’ ideology. They worship the god, ‘BetterOff’, so avidly, they are unable to contemplate or even acknowledge, anything else. That’s their ‘reality’, and it’s the only game that they can play, but they themselves are the pieces in that game.