The "Public Intellectual"

At the beginning of the "Activist Research" section of this paper, Cushman outlines one of the negative side-effects in the students of the service learning course, what she calls the "liberal savior" complex. To me, this whole paper stunk of liberal savior complex. Ideally to me, a paper on how educated people can use their knowledge and means to help out those less fortunate would be full of applicable ideas and solutions, not ONE case study and sentences like "Theories of praxis can be united with notions of emancipatory pedagogy in an effort to create a theoretical framework for activist methodology." To me, that's just an attempt to prove the "intellectual" part of the claim made in the title. Cushman paints a picture of these "intellectuals" (a meaningless buzzword term in itself) as the benevolent instructors, handing down divine knowledge from on high. In the case of the YMCA case study, she seemed to talk about the "non-intellectuals" as a sort of untamed species, wild animals that needed to be tricked (if we give them journals, they won't realize they're learning!) in order to fully embrace education. While I think Cushman's motivation are admirable, her execution and professional tone, to me, leaves something to be desired. Perhaps it's that sinking feeling that in order to truly affect the literacy and education of people in the inner city, you need more knowledge and practical experience than "a three and a half year long ethnography."