In 1985, he was among a consortium of scholars organized by the Department of Commerce to examine the future of telecommunications. Their recommendations helped lead to the deregulation of that industry. An academic becomes a public intellectual by not only creating new knowledge but also actively, personally disseminating that knowledge for a wider impact on society. Traditionally, you publish in an academic journal, then somebody utilizes what you discovered or invented and makes it into some public good. A public intellectual does both.
Academics are often public intellectuals in the hard sciences and some social sciences.
In this country scientists have had an enormous public impact through research contracts. Many universities receive large-scale contracts from the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example. There, the idea is that you as a scholar would target your research to help the government with a particular problem. That is clearly the expectation society has, and every time we in the academic world do not do that, a criticism is levied. My view is that as academics we have to be socially relevant.