Lang’s
Gural Scholars investigate the role of thought leaders in society.
James Baldwin. Fran Lebowitz. Dr. bell hooks. Usually, when we think about public intellectuals, we think about great minds in history, people who have opened up culture and politics for thoughtful, urgently needed discourse, people who dare to push the
culture forward. So it’s fitting that the Gural Scholars, a group of Lang students who are community leaders and activists, have spent an entire semester exploring this subject, in a course titled Public Intellectuals.
The Jeff Gural Academic Achievement and
Opportunity Scholars Program is a selective four-year scholarship program for students at Lang that provides need- and merit-based funding for up to 48 Lang students each year, from Orientation to graduation. The scholarship is rooted in the idea
of taking social justice and theory out of the classroom and into the world. The make-up of each cohort of scholars is different — but the baseline is always activism.
“Most of the students are already campus leaders,” says Natasha Rivera, assistant director of the Office of Civic Engagement and Social Justice at Lang. “They’re peer health advocates, they’re activists, they’re leaders in the Black Student Union. Gural
ended up becoming a place for those folks to gather together.”
Whether in Gural program courses like Public Intellectuals, out in the world working with community partners, or at their monthly meetings, at which former and current cohorts and faculty reflect on their work, these activist-scholars exemplify the blending
of theory and praxis characteristic of Lang. “One of the best things about Gural Scholars is that they come to class with a world of social justice experience under their belts,” says Ted Kerr, a New School alumnus who teaches the Public Intellectuals
course. “They bring nuance, experience, and curiosity to every conversation. There was no difference when it came to contemplating public intellectuals.”
During the semester, Ted’s students interrogated the idea of public intellectuals in order to redefine for themselves what it means. They revisited classic interpretations, then drew on those discussions to broaden their own definitions of the term and
inform a collective end-of-term project. “We started by reading Audre Lorde,” says Ted, “and very quickly moved to thinking about the influence of people like Kanye and Cardi B. We worked through a lot of frustration around how some people get to
influence culture just because they are rich or fit some norm around beauty. They’re often not thinking about the world through a lens of social justice.”
The distinctions between social influencers and public intellectuals, between rhetoric and action, are at the core of the program. Gural Scholars always have one foot in the classroom, the other in the world. “These students dive deep into what it means
to be in praxis,” explains Natasha. “They learn theory about what social justice is, what liberation is, what anti-oppression is. Then they are forced to act on what they are learning.”
Ultimately Ted’s class decided that ideas of freedom and growth should be conveyed by people with visible platforms, no matter who they are. The Gural platform of choice? A zine expressing that very idea. “We decided to think of a public intellectual
less as a person and more as a process,” says Ted. “This makes it so that you, me — anyone — has the potential to be one.”