When Barbara Ransby started as executive director of the Center for Public Intellec-tuals last month, one of the first things she did was rename the group, which had been struggling with its moniker since its inception in 1999. “There seemed to be confusion in some circles as to what it means,” Ransby says. “And some people thought it was elitist.” The organization’s new name, the Public Square, “echoes back to a place where people can come to debate ideas and really hash it out.”
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Ransby was teaching history at the University of Illinois at Chicago when she met CPI founder Lisa Lee a year or so ago. She was intrigued by the work the group was doing–primarily organizing public lectures that cut across a broad range of intellectual interests, featuring speakers such as Ira Glass and literary theorist Marjorie Garber–and began working with it informally, helping to fine-tune its mission. Although she’d just gotten tenure, when she heard that Lee was looking for an executive director she found the opportunity so compelling she took a leave of absence from teaching.
New projects include initiatives like Cafe Society, a series of weekly discussion groups that’ll take place in coffeehouses across the city and in Oak Park, and a push to increase the organization’s membership and broaden its programming. For example, says Ransby, “[Board member] Danielle Allen has a project in which she’s talking about citizenship and strangers, and she talks about how we tell our kids, ‘Don’t talk to strangers,’ and this kind of permeates our approach to politics. A cornerstone of any kind of deliberative democracy is talking to strangers–and doing a lot of it.”
