Florida Atlantic University launches a novel doctoral program: "A Ph.D. in being a public intellectual? It sounds strange," writes Tom Scocca in LF. Apparently, FAU doesn't think so. The university recruits a clutch of real public intellectuals as visiting faculty and guest lecturers, among them K. Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, and the man who started it all with his book The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby. "It's a natural for me," Jacoby tells LF.

The English department Stanley Fish helped to build at Duke was, by all accounts, legendary: Fish's distinguished hires included Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. But by 1999, most of the stars had fled, and Fish himself has left to become a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago. LF's David Yaffe finds that in a department built to meet the needs of its high-profile faculty, "there was just no there there."

In the 1960s, Yugoslavia's Praxis intellectuals argued for worker self-management and democratic socialism, attracting a glittering array of Western supporters to their summer seminars on the Adriatic. But as ethnic tensions mounted, many members of the group turned toward the politics of nationalism. The group's most prominent member, Mihailo Markovic, became the leading ideologue of Slobodan Milosevic's party. By 1994, the group's Western allies had broken off cooperation on the journal Praxis International. In September 1999, ,LF's Laura Secor reports on the Praxis movement's rise and fall.

Can a public institution provide a good education while keeping its doors open to all? Back in 1993, LF's William McGowan wondered whether a City University of New York plan to raise entrance requirements would transform "the Harvard of the poor" into a "smaller institution for white, middle-class students." But the 1993 plan was just the first of many controversial CUNY moves. In November 1999, CUNY decides to eliminate most remedial education by September 2001, forcing students who fail entrance exams to enroll in community colleges instead. One study estimates that the new policy could affect as many as 4,032 students.