Solitary Soulmates: The Marginalized Role of Intellectuals and Artists Within American Higher Education

Abstract

The author makes the case that the role of the intellectual is to effect change, to challenge vested interests that would limit dialogue on matters of grave importance and to function as a public witness-bearer to personal and public forms of truth. He goes on to state, however, that this role cannot be properly fulfilled unless narrow, purely scholastic interests are balanced by humanistic and artistic concerns that address the whole nature of the human being. Education in, through and for the arts is seen as complementary to more traditional modes of higher education. Cultivating one’s aesthetic sensibility and emotional intelligence is therefore of particularly vital importance in an age that has placed an inordinate emphasis on work and material reward as distinct from living a creatively rich and rewarding life.