Preliminary

Unlike other ‘isms’, ageism can have detrimental, favourable or neutral outcomes. Current approaches to understanding and managing ageism often overlook or briefly mention this variation, the pros, the cons and the in-betweens, concentrating instead on combatting and eliminating ageism through collective action for social justice.

• Stephen Buetow

“Intellectual death is endemic in areas where people are unprepared to obtain new information for development. Learning is a way of staying alive.”

– Israelmore Ayivor, Shaping the Dream.

Public intellectualism is something bigger than any one public intellectual or even laundry list of public intellectuals. It is the larger movement of a people towards insight. Here’s our definition of public intellectualism.

• Untold

Public Intellectualism is a steady, collective movement towards insight; an irrepressible hope that people together will seek knowledge, so much more than an exclusive ‘A’ List of eggheads who rule the world; rather a trust that those with knowledge can share it well; a belief that together as a public we are capable of learning and making inclusive, informed decisions that promote the public good.

• Untold

Introduction

There are three ideas linked in one spectrum of thinking and reasoning in this article: Academic ageism, intellectual death and decline of public intellectualism. They are all present in our institutions in general and universities in particular in Uganda. They have been given little attention, individually and collectively in Uganda. However, globally a lot of literature now abounds on each of them. This article is cognisant of this. The article could be the first of its kind to link academic ageism, intellectual death and although the author has in the past looked at intellectual death and the decline of public intellectualism not only in Uganda but the whole world. 

I have written on intellectual death and the decline of public intellectuals in the past, but this is the first time I am attempting to link these two with academic ageism in one spectrum of thinking and reasoning.

Academic ageism

Academic ageism refers to discriminatory practices or attitudes based on a person’s age within academic settings, impacting both younger and older individuals in hiring, promotion and overall treatment. This can manifest as negative stereotypes, limited opportunities and a biased evaluation of skills and abilities based solely on age. Ageism in academia, both towards older and younger individuals, can significantly undermine a university’s effectiveness and overall environment. It can lead to a decline in morale, reduced innovation and a less inclusive learning environment. This discrimination, whether subtle or overt, can negatively impact faculty, staff, and students and thereby hinder their potential and contributing to a less vibrant academic community. 

The phenomenon of academic ageism, despite being experienced by higher education teachers and students is little studied in regards to education in Uganda and many other countries. Lauro Oliveira Viana and Diogo Henrique Hela (2023) sought to deal especially with this issue in the university environment and in the academic career in order to identify the predominant factors of ageism at the university. Two factors related to ageism in the university were identified, one positive and one negative.

Professors, as they expand the age range, point to positive aspects of ageism, which reflects that increasing age is not associated with negative aspects in the work environment. The aging professor is positively positioned as he is inserted in more postgraduate programmes.

Feldman (2024) confirms that ageism can take various forms, including biased hiring and promotion practices, negative workplace culture and barriers to education and career advancement. Outside the university, many employers hold misconceptions that older workers are less adaptable, less technologically proficient or less capable of learning new skills. As a result, older workers may be overlooked for job opportunities, even if they have the necessary qualifications (Feldman, 2024). Older employees may face obstacles to career advancement, as younger colleagues are often perceived as having greater potential for growth and innovation. This can lead to older employees feeling undervalued and frustrated.

Employers may also provide fewer opportunities for training and development for older employees, assuming they have less need or capacity to learn new skills. This can create a skills gap and hinder career progression for older workers (Feldman, 2024). Creating age-friendly environments requires a concerted effort from employers, educational institutions, policymakers, and individuals.

By fostering diversity, promoting inclusivity and challenging age-related biases, organisations can harness the potential contributions of older learners and employees and create more equitable and thriving communities.

Academic ageism, the discrimination or prejudice based on a person’s age within academic settings, is a recognised issue in Ugandan universities. It can manifest as negative stereotypes, prejudice and discriminatory practices against both younger and older academics and students. Funke, T., Gaite, S.S., V. Kayindu and Specioza Asiimwe (2023) observed that productivity of academic staff is likely to start declining at 50, and recommended that much pressure of work in private chartered universities in Uganda should be exerted on academic staff at ages between 31 and 50. They did not, however, explicitly mention the phenomenon of academic ageism in Ugandan universities.

Intellectualism

“There is no such thing as a private intellectual, since the moment you set down words and then publish them you have entered the public world. Nor is there only a public intellectual, someone who exists just as a figurehead or spokesperson or symbol of a cause, movement or position (Suchintan, 2022). The public Intellectual is a societal necessity and political being.  The interventions of the public intellectual in the form of speeches, writings, public interest litigations and civic advocacy of causes are often timely and visible. His or her engagement with the people tends to be consistent and meaningful and to expose the monotonous notions of the rulers (e.g., Suchintan, 2022).

Intellectualism cannot argue for or against war because the stakes are not abstract – they are not located in the life of the spirit alone. Where war is concerned, the issues at stake are a matter of life and death. Faced with destruction, the most that intellectualism can do is to better understand how death and aggression play out in this tragic chapter of the drama we call life (Stromberg, 2024).

Intellectualism’s core activity is analysis – investigating how and why certain occurrences take place around us. Intellectuals can make political statements. But they are no longer in the realm of intellectualism. They aim to effect policies that are different from those already in place. They seek to end a specific case of destruction. This activity doesn’t require intellect. It requires power (Stromberg, 2024).

The role of intellectualism in times of war has become increasingly urgent as the conflict in the Middle East enters its second year and the war in Ukraine is heading straight into its third. Writers, thinkers and cultural producers of all types have weighed in on the political and historical implications of these conflicts and their influence on societies (Stromberg, 2024). Under the guise of thought-leadership, intellectuals are increasingly making a case for why they are right and others are wrong. As soon as they make general arguments for or against war, we turn into activists or politicians vying for public influence. These may be commendable efforts for individuals to undertake during periods of armed conflict. But they no longer belong to our era’s intellectual legacy.

Public intellectualism.

Intellectuals may be public figures, but we are not expected to know them in person to appreciate their talents, intelligence, or wisdom. As we are not supposed to know artists in person to admire their music or paintings, we are not expected to know intellectuals personally to appreciate their ideas and their contributions to knowledge and social progress. Intellectuals tend to be reclusive or loners who communicate more with books than with living persons. Their circles of friends may be small and often based on shared interests, and their exposure to society is limited, not because they are shy or lack self-confidence, but because they are not one hundred percent sure about what they preach or think. They are always unfinished works in progress and we love them in a remote or roundabout way (Mulugeta Gudeta, 2025). However, they become public intellectuals when they focus on the “public” in public intellectualism (e.g. Suchintan, 2022).

Public intellectualism, referring to the role of intellectuals engaging with the public on important societal issues, including political and environmental issues, is perceived by some as declining. This decline is linked to various factors, including the increasing specialisation and professionalisation of academia, the rise of the digital public sphere, and the challenges of effectively communicating complex ideas to broader audiences from disciplinary angles. Factors like academic specialisation, media fragmentation, and a rise in anti-intellectualism are contributing to the decline in public intellectualism. 

This decline is not just about the absence of prominent figures, but also the reduced impact of intellectual voices on public discourse and policy. One writer has suggested that to effectively promote public intellectualism, knowledge must be: accessible; translatable; interdisciplinary; collaborative; ethical; authentic; entertaining; and factual (Untold). I would expand axiom 3 (interdisciplinary) by adding crossdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary. There is an evolving consensus that it is critical to pursue an age of public intellectualism. Later will be too late.

Public intellectuals could be anyone: writers, journalists, philosophers, professors, and in today’s new media, even some bloggers and vloggers, and most would argue they have played an important role in guiding society with the power of ideas (Ko, 2017). However, academics have generally withdrawn from the function of public intellectual and now emphasise scholasticism and/or academicism. They have evolved their institutions to incentivise a very narrow form of public intellectual life: Discovery). They value the container for these new things, the publication and all of the processes and principles that shape these documents. This shallow view of being intellectual, as only involving discovery, means that all of the powerful, important, stable ideas that we’ve collectively shaped over the past centuries- the ones that ought to be shaping public debate here and now – are of little interest to them. They encourage only curiosity. new idea.

By encouraging only curiosity, they overlook other important values such as influence and impact on public life. To spend time as an academic shaping public debate with well-worn ideas is also important but the majority of academics now don’t care about the “Public” in public intellectual anymore (Ko, 2017). They celebrate impact through education, but only as a secondary goal, and only for those people who gain access to their institutions. They fear failing at public engagement they haven’t practised. They fear public criticism of their ideas. They fear the messy, violent, personal world of politics. They fear losing time, which is already scarce in their overfull lives of research, teaching and service.

Sometimes they fear being wrong, and being publicly shamed for it. And yet, as public intellectuals, engaging in public life is their responsibility. Freedom to ignore markets, history, beliefs and politics, and use that freedom to define the future, to shape how people think, and ultimately, to disrupt the status quo for humanity’s eventual benefit (Ko, 2017).

Public intellectuals have historically been those who speak truth to power and challenge dominant ways of thinking. Critical pedagogy argues that academics have to take up this call, leaving the ivory towers and entering the public sphere. The new task of public intellectuals in the Post-digital age academics is unrelated to that I played in the 20th Century. Academics who wish to contribute to social movements must embed themselves and operate within social movements, joining the leadership of organic intellectuals and professional revolutionaries, and even viewing their own critical work not as the production of new knowledge but rather the amplification of existing knowledges generated through these struggles, shifting the educational register from epistemology to ontology, and the educational mode of operation from teaching to collective studying (e.g. Ford and Jandric, 2019).  

At worst, a public intellectual is a “second hand dealer in ideas” (Hayek, 1949), and at best a challenger of the conventional wisdom (Kim, 2017). Smith (2014) explored Hayek’s views on intellectuals, whom he called second-hand dealers in ideas. In Hayek’s context, the term “second-hand” does not disparage the intelligence, knowledge or importance of intellectuals. Intellectuals may be intelligent or stupid, wise or foolish, knowledgeable or ignorant, quick​witted or dull, original or hackneyed. By “second-hand” Hayek means second in the order of the transmission of knowledge. Hayek’s intellectual is defined in terms of his social role in the dissemination of specialised knowledge to a wider audience; he is an “intermediary in the spreading of ideas.” (Smith, 2014).

To put it another way, intellectuals, according to Hayek, are not the scholars or experts in a field but, instead, are the middlemen of ideas. Inhabiting diverse fields from journalism to medicine, they are familiar with a wide range of topics and have mastered the art of communicating them to the public (e.g. Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2025).

Universities in their original conception were idealised in the Renaissance as places that could produce ‘intellectuals’. An intellectual was a person of inquiring mind who, through rational judgment and prodigious independent study, battled with an intellect they could not suppress, to reason through challenges that as yet had little or no answers, for the betterment of knowledge, humanity and the human race. Where we have failed in the last century is losing touch with this original conception of the intellectual in pursuit of a more mundane, professionalised ‘expert’, who contests not with ideas but merely ideas that have come before, and inches knowledge by an inch where their teachers refuse to let them run the mile (Krook, 2014).

Intellectuals have lost place amidst the bulging sphere of modern ‘experts’: people who have credentials in a subject matter, but do not necessarily dare venture beyond formalised learning and formalised education (Krook, 2014). In “The Last Intellectuals”, Professor Russel Jacoby chronicles this decline in correlation with the rise of modern universities. He argues that “before the age of massive universities, ‘last’ generation intellectuals wrote for the educated [public].” (Krook, 2014).

Academics grew up on campuses, instead of independently, and the effect this has had on thinking cannot be understated. There has long been evidence of individuals taking on characteristics of groups that they belong to. Hence, academics, moving to formalised institutions, lost that thread of independence, lost that verve for dreaming, for passion and creativity – they got taught that they should reference everything and that everything required authority. “Original thinking” is rewarded in academia only in so far as it is heavily referenced and relies on prior thought to substantiate it. In other words: as long as it is not original at all (Krook, 2014).

Instead of informing public debate university experts argue amongst themselves. The vaunted and celebrated ‘battle of the minds’ we hear about at university are synonymous with this phenomenon. Academia is enriched by these debates, often locked away in peer-reviewed journals; but the public, who have limited access, are not. “They [the intellectuals] have been supplanted by high-tech intellectuals, consultants and professors – anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but who do not enrich public life… the public culture relies on a dwindling band of older intellectuals who command the vernacular that is slipping out of reach of their [younger] successors.” (Krook citing Russel Jacoby).Besides, when they write they write to themselves.

In turning away from the “idea of the intellectual”, universities have trended towards producing professionals, people who are competent at doing their jobs but not necessarily competent at enriching the world. The problem with this is the effect it has on students themselves. It manifests in them a deafening silence by which they cannot articulate what is wrong with their lives or the world (Krook, 2014). This is why we talk of the conspiracy of silence on university campuses.

Independent thought, when all are asleep (and never assessed) – is a rare attribute. It is becoming an even scarcer attribute in the young, who are discouraged from voicing wide-ranging opinions on anything other than how they can contribute to the economy.  Meritocracy is abandoned in favour of a strict hierarchical structure of bachelors, masters and PhDs, which reinforces a hierarchical ageism against the young (Krook, 2014).

An inherent implication is that the young have nothing to contribute to public debate. The young must spend their time ‘learning’, no matter how clever they may be. And so, in conclusion, the old generalisation that “wisdom comes with age” reigns supreme, untested, but heavily referenced. Academic strictures are designed to demand a certain number of articles per year or other limitations that prevent growth, rigorous independent thought and energy. All this amount to intellectual death.

Intellectual death

“Learning without thought is labour lost. Thought without learning is intellectual death”. Learning without thought: you might learn the wrong things which makes the effort you put into useless. Thought without learning: you think but you don’t learn from your mistakes. Intellectual death: no progress (Confucius).

“Intellectual death” is not a recognised medical or legal term. It is sometimes used in philosophical discussions, but it’s more commonly associated with concepts like “cognitive death” or “brain death,” which refer to the irreversible loss of brain function. (Wijdicks, undated). Intellectual death signifies a cessation of critical thinking, resulting in mental stagnation that hinders spiritual and personal growth, ultimately blocking the path to genuine enlightenment and fulfilment.

Intellectual death signifies a state of mental stagnation that hinders spiritual and personal development. It involves a lack of critical thinking, which thwarts genuine enlightenment and spiritual growth. This concept emphasizes the dangers of losing the ability to engage thoughtfully, ultimately leading to a cessation of personal evolution and understanding. Recognizing and overcoming intellectual death is crucial for fostering ongoing spiritual and personal enlightenment (Wisdom Library, 2024).

Linking academic ageism, intellectual death and decline of public intellectualism

It is not farfetched to argue that academic ageism contributes to intellectual death, which in turn accelerates the decline of public intellectualism.

Academic ageism is the phenomenon where younger academics are favoured over older, more experienced scholars, often due to perceived productivity, innovation or adaptability. This can lead to older academics being marginalised, excluded or forced into early retirement, pushing many to die early before retirement age or soon after retirement due to emotional and psychological problems. At Makerere University many such scholars have stayed on campus for even as many as 35 years. Being compelled to enter society outside the ivory tower is not an easy transition. Besides the older academics with power, authority and influence may use their positions to push for unfavourable policies that may hinder the academic progression of young scholars. This, for example, did happen at Makerere University in the early millennium when the university senate passed an academic policy called “Akiki Mujaju Academic Policy, which required only scholars with Ph. Ds in the disciplines and discouraged interdisciplinary scholarship. This opened the way for Makerere University promoting multidisciplinary collaboration at the expense interdisciplinary, crossdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and extradisciplinary scholarship and collaboration, which have gained ground in the 21st century.

The silencing or marginalisation of the older, more experienced scholars by younger scholars with authority and power on the one hand, and silencing and marginalisation of the younger scholars by the older scholars with authority and power, and dominating the hierarchical structures of the universities, is encouraging not only a conspiracy of silence but also squeezing or diminishing the contributions and insights of a cross-section of scholars.  The education system is nurturing or sowing seeds of some kind of intellectual death. A university with these relationships will most likely stress academics or scholasticism and regard intellectualism as an encumbrance. Virtually all the universities of Uganda are similar. In this respect. Intellectual death is on the rise. Also on the rise is the meteoric decline in public intellectualism.

The “public” in public intellectuals is being squeezed out of public intellectuals thereby diminish the contribution of universities to public discourse. And the almost discredited ivory towerism is creeping back on university campuses. As I have shown elsewhere in this article, public intellectuals play a crucial role in shaping public discourse, providing context and offering nuanced analysis. Without public intellectuals, public debate and discussion may become shallower, more polarised and less informed.

In fact, today, Uganda’s public intellectual space has been captured by politicians and their sycophants, who are also making sure that the last public intellectuals on university campuses are completely exterminated. This might explain the rise in violence in the socio-political space in Uganda. Critical thinking and critical analysis have been squeezed out of the socio-political space. This has been taken over by money, politics, lies and thieves -some former academics.

Therefore, by linking the phenomena of academic ageism, intellectual death and decline of public intellectualism, we can explore how academic ageism can have far-reaching consequences, not only for individual scholars, but also for the broader intellectual landscape and public discourse in Uganda

From this discussion, research scholars in all the universities of Uganda should get interested in the following questions:

• How does academic ageism impact the careers and contributions of older scholars and younger scholars?
• What are the consequences of intellectual death for the academic community and public discourse on Campus and in the country?
• How can we promote a more inclusive and age-friendly academic environment that values experience and expertise and the upward mobility of young scholars?
• What role can public intellectuals play in shaping public discourse in the 21st century and beyond, and how can we support their work?

If the phenomena I have focused on continue to manifest and interact in an uncontrolled manner, we shall not only say goodbye to the public relevance of universities in Uganda, siphoning off so much public money for no value to the public good, but we shall also say good bye to the public intellectual and to Homo academicus. We may even have already witnessed our last intellectuals, public intellectuals and effective Homo academicus in terms of public value.

For God and my country.

• A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).