Leaders in thought and action

This piece about Thought Leaders is troubling. 

More and more of my students--Europeans, Africans, Americans--fit the description in the last few paragraphs of this piece as new public intellectuals. They are straddling the academy, small businesses, cooperatives, social movements, non-governmental organizations, and other sectors. They know universities may not or cannot extend a secure embrace to them. Yet they cannot bear to participate in business or government as usual. So they are ceaselessly refining a new kind if bricolage, building new forms of economy perhaps even of society. 

They are so vulnerable but also so smart. They work so hard. They are relentlessly engaged, theoretically astute, realists or even cynics yet also able to delight in this world. They give me so much hope. They take so much care--of me, of their environment, of each other. Some days i feel if i did nothing more than support them and serve as a bridge among them i would have lived as i was intended...