> Rigorous scholarship can of course be valuable, especially if combined with broader community engagement - but most of the time the notion of an "intellectual

> Rigorous scholarship can of course be valuable, especially if combined with broader community engagement - but most of the time the notion of an "intellectual" refers to nothing more than pointless navel-grazing, with very little in the way of real, enduring achievement. To be honest, you raise a valid point; often the people who show the highest degrees of intellectual vigor are those the purportedly intellectual institutions reject. Einstein wasn't actually a poor student, nor was he ever thought to be stupid, but he was an absolute misfit in academia even then, and he would have failed out of the conformist environment today (in large part because, as an ostensibly mediocre graduate student, he'd never have gotten his 1905 papers published or read at all). Which raises the question of why we have them in the first place. Brilliant kids who grow up in Harlem will never get into Harvard; complete dolts from prominent families do; so why have it at all? It becomes a long discussion. The issue in discriminating "navel gazing" from "enduring achievement" is just that latter adjective. We don't know ahead of time what will endure. We have to be more accepting of the 999 contributions and efforts that, in the long run, will not amount to very much in order to get the 1000th that will. The tradeoff is that, while we ought to nurture genuine contributions as if they all have intrinsic value, we have to get better as a society at preventing charismatic (or merely randomly successful) artifacts from taking up all the oxygen and starving what we really want to see. We have to be tolerant of intellectuals who want to offer their ideas, but intolerant of those who insist on only their ideas being heard.