ABSTRACT
Local knowledge all too frequently finds itself in direct confrontation with knowledge that specialists would like to bring to bear on local issues. Generally speaking, specialist knowledge is knowledge produced and disseminated in the heartland of academia, composed mainly of high-profile universities, prestigious research centers and the like that somehow manage to exist in cozy and self-imposed isolation from the communities that host and maintain them. As it happens, scholars who are actively engaged in the production and dissemination of specialized knowledge are generally persons with plenty of bookish knowledge, but often with little practical or hands-on experience. Small wonder therefore that, in the last two decades or so, these scholars have increasingly become easy target for charges of elitism and social irrelevance, coming from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. According to those who look at the problem from a leftist point ofview, many of these intellectuals have opted to quarantine themselves from the community outside the campuses with whose members they used to work in close unison in the past. And even more disappointingly, they have allowed themselves to be co-opted into the power structures represented by the university (Jacoby, 1987). Those who criticize them from a rightist perspective would like to see these "public intellectuals" made more and more accountable to the public at large and the results of their research subjected to market forces and quality controls, in such a way that success becomes synonymous with survival in "the public intellectual market" (Posner, 2000).
