I have begun to worry that public history and public intellectuals are in danger of becoming oxymorons. Public history, to be sure, is alive and well in the states and, paradoxically, in private museums such as the Autry in Los Angeles, but its heartland is always going to be in Washington, D.C., and there it is not doing as well as it might. I taught a class in Washington, D.C. last year that involved dealing with many museums and many public historians, some of them people I have known for years and very much admire. I, like the students, was struck by how demoralized many of them were and how critical they were of the practices of the very institutions with whom we, as an organization, seek to collaborate. At least in the Smithsonian, as recent controversies make clear, what is going on may not be history and it may not even be public.

Public intellectuals are certainly public; it is the intellectual part that worries me. Raritan is not a history journal, but it is a very good journal edited by a historian. I read it and write for it occasionally. The current issue captures the dilemma nicely. There is an article by the editor Jackson Lears that brings considerable scholarship and learning to bear on an important public issue. This is what public intellectuals should do. There is also an article by Todd Gitlin, a sociologist, on why we need public intellectuals. It is a good example of why we might actually need fewer public intellectuals. It is a rant. That it is a rant in favor of reason and the Enlightenment does not make it any less of a rant. I happen to agree with at least some of Gitlin’s politics, but that is why I find the article so embarrassing. It is lazy. There is not a single idea that we have not heard many times before. It deals with difficult intellectual issues by denouncing them. Ranting fills a niche already crowded to overflowing.

What currently passes as public history in our premier national institutions and the rather low bar for being a public intellectual raises questions about what scholars should, and should not, do as citizens....

The best public interventions by scholars are when the stars align and a matter of urgent public interest corresponds to topics to which we have been giving considerable thought and research. Then we have a responsibility to speak out no matter how unpopular our positions might be. The worst moments are when we become pundits—experts on everything, masters of the superficial, purveyors of opinion for opinion’s sake. We also need to be harder on people whose opinions we share. We are, after all, implicated in the stupidities of our allies not our opponents. We need to recognize when the stars align; at other times, we might just let other people talk.

I have sometimes considered endowing yet another award in our seemingly endless series of awards. It would go to the year’s Most Embarrassing Historian. The winner, almost by definition, would be someone who became too public of a public intellectual. We are all eligible. I might win it myself one day.