The Top 10 Academic Celebrities in American History

If you only judge American standards by its pop culture consumption, it might be easy to assume we only worship the vacuous and inane as role models. Some do, obviously, but air-headed materialism doesn’t exist as the be-all, end-all of celebrity culture, either. It never has and it never will. Professors, either through their activism work, populist embracing of mass media, or some combination of the two, still grow into public icons sometimes. Regardless of whether or not audiences find them divisive or generally beloved, they eventually found much larger platforms than the classroom upon which to challenge perceptions and norms.

1. George Washington Carver:

   

   At this point in American history, most tend to know George Washington Carver for his extensive work finding new uses for peanuts (which, no, never actually included an anthropomorphic monstrosity to anyone’s knowledge). While heading up agriculture research at Tuskegee Normal Institute, his experiments — published as , The Carver Bulletins — intended to provide regions crippled beneath cotton-destroying boll weevils an alternative means of keeping the economy afloat, but he didn’t just work with the beloved, ubiquitous legume! Carver almost single-handedly broadened the way humanity wielded sweet potatoes and soybeans, and in his lifetime enjoyed social, scientific, and political fame as both an innovator and a Civil Rights advocate.

2. Richard Feynman:

   

   This wildly popular, Nobel-winning quantum physicist was smart, was handsome, and was a very special person. Any students lucky enough to hear Richard Feynman regularly lecture on the scientific discipline he loved at University of Madison-Wisconsin and California Institute of Technology where he taught (or anywhere welcoming him as a guest) lauded his humor and knack for distilling complex concepts into accessible components. Such levels of intelligence and charm won him plenty of admirers outside the scientific community (he even landed some small acting roles!) and paved the way for other physicist favorites who crossed over into mainstream favor.

3. Mae Jemison:

   

   Although she cracked racial and gender boundaries when she became the first black woman in space by serving on STS-47, Mae Jemison’s litany of accomplishments stretches much, much further than that. She also worked as a Peace Corps physician, an entrepreneur, a dancer, a professor at Dartmouth and Cornell, an inventor, a philanthropist, and a passionate, outspoken advocate for blending arts and science curricula together. At one point, she wound up in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, which undoubtedly geeked out the lifelong Nichelle Nichols fan! Jemison recently worked with First Lady Michelle Obama as a strategist encouraging girls and young women to pursue their academic and career dreams, and continues receiving accolades for remaining a consistent, hardworking, and devoted role model.

4. Carl Sagan:

   

   YouTube dedicates an entire channel to the legendary astrophysicist, whose iconic documentary television series Cosmos brought the heavens to the homes in 1980. Throughout his illustrious scientific career, Carl Sagan affiliated himself with the Smithsonian, Harvard, and Cornell, where he acted as the director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies and associate director of the Center for Radio Physics and Space Research. Mainstream celebrity, though, came with both Cosmos as well as some of the most best-selling works of popular science ever published. Highly informative, easily absorbed books like Pale Blue Dot, Broca’s Brain, and the Pulitzer-winning The Dragons of Eden (even the fictional Contact to an extent) piqued the public’s Cold War lust for scientific inquiry to the point he wound up on late-night talk shows almost as often as lecture podiums.

5. bell hooks:

   

   Regardless of whether or not mainstream Americans know the name bell hooks (remember: never make the mistake of capitalizing!), they benefit from her highly influential postmodern reflections on race, gender, class, and sexuality. With more than 30 books to her name so far, the woman with no less than University of Southern California, University of California at Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, City College of New York, Yale University, and Oberlin College on her resume is a feminist superstar lauded for making the movement far more accessible to all. Both Ain’t I a Woman and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center continuously stand as social commentary classics every well-informed American should pick up at least once.

6. Susan Sontag:

   

   Prior to enjoying an illustrious career as one of the nation’s most sought-after cultural critics, ubiquitous On Photography author Susan Sontag served as a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and City University of New York. Like her later literary career, she used the classroom to explore philosophy’s intersections with the surrounding world, particularly when it involved technology, human rights, aesthetics, and sociopolitical causes. Sontag’s celebrity stems from her tireless activism work, which promoted equality across demographics and sympathetically depicted the AIDS crisis. Fellow writerly types rallied around her when she wielded her then-current PEN presidential position to defend Salman Rushdie against Ayatollah Khomeini’s declaration of fatwa.

7. Cornel West:

   

   With everything from acting in the last two Matrix movies and music performances to professorships at Union Theological Seminary and Princeton to his name, this preeminent contemporary Christian philosopher is one of the biggest names in the contemporary Civil Rights movement. Race, class, and politics drive most of his research and commentary and have rendered him a stable fixture in many relevant demonstrations, events, and rallies, though he also publicly supports the rights of animals and members of the LGBT community. West’s highly insightful Race Matters still feeds into contemporary debates about what needs to be done to overthrow cultural hegemonies and promote full equality for traditionally marginalized communities.

8. Michio Kaku:

   

   City College of New York physics darling Michio Kaku enjoys widespread popularity for his numerous stints hosting television programs for Discovery Channel, BBC, and Science Channel — not to mention his incredibly enjoyable, accessible radio program about the latest science news and views. Like Sagan and Feynman before him, even those far outside his chosen field still enjoy tuning in and learning more about the universe without having to hold a Ph.D. Because Kaku self-identifies as a futurist, his enthusiasm for what recent discoveries and emergent technologies have to offer stoke the imaginations of both his contemporaries as well as his diverse audiences. After all, people just adore the prickles of excitement that wonder brings, particularly when it comes to contemplating the universe’s seemingly infinite possibilities.

9. Angela Davis:

   

   Controversy constantly courts Angela Davis, who once lost a position at UCLA due to her leadership roles in the Communist Party and Black Panthers, but that only piles onto her already prodigious political fame. In fact, Ronald Reagan even attempted to entirely block her from ever teaching in any California school. Before retiring, she acted as both a professor and the director of University of California, Santa Cruz’s Feminist Studies department. History and political science buffs who pay attention to third parties no doubt recognize her as a two-time vice presidential candidate. Though Davis no longer serves in an academic capacity, she continues traveling and speaking on panels and at events dedicated to social, political, and economic causes.

10. Noam Chomsky:

    

    One of the most-cited academics in American history enjoys accolades from linguists, political scientists, activists, cognitive scientists, historians, and philosophers. Noam Chomsky boasts well over 100 publications in his oeuvre, and anyone who routinely follows the news has inevitably seen him dissecting current events through multiple media conduits, so chances are high every American at some point ran into something he’s written or spoken! For the past five decades, he has enjoyed a linguistics professorship at MIT, and most recently has grown into one of the Occupy movement’s most prominent sympathizers and supporters.

Taken From Online PhD