Only now do I see it clearly. It's a version of that deep need that crops up among academics, the need to prove that what one does is relevant in the world. It's a fear that what one spends all one's time doing does not, in the end, matter.
In that sense, the rhetoric of the "public intellectual" and the "intellectual entrepreneur" is one way that academics try to professionalize this fear. They do not acknowledge the fear, and they do not conquer it. They merely paper it over.
Ouch! Ouch! Killing me softly! The pain!
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