Like splinters, certain words persistently get under people's skins. Such a word is academic -- as a noun, not an adjective -- and its snooty linguistic sibling, intellectual.

Those words are so off-putting to so many people that a nonprofit organization recently was forced to change its name in order to avoid being stereotyped as a bunch of elitist snobs.

This is an ironic destiny for a group actually devoted to reaching as many different kinds of people as possible, not to closing itself off to just a privileged few.

Thus, Chicago's Center for Public Intellectuals, founded in 1999, is now the Public Square (www.thepublicsquare.org).

The necessity for the name change underscores the nation's love-hate relationship with the life of the mind and the place in which that life should feel most at home: the university.

"There is a certain anti-intellectualism in this country, a desire for quick and simple answers, a negative association with grappling with complex issues," said Barbara Ransby, new executive director of the Public Square. "How it came about, I don't know."

While the Public Square draws its leadership from academia, that link is not the most important aspect of its work, said Ransby, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who took a leave of absence to head the organization. "We're not anti-university, but I don't advertise it [academia] as my identity. But I'm also not offended by it."

Along with Ransby, the Public Square is run by Cary Nathenson, program director, and Lisa Yun Lee, chairwoman of the board of the directors. All three have doctoral degrees and have published extensively in academic journals.

A matter of emphasis

Yet when it came to an organization devoted to encouraging everyone -- not just students and professors -- to think deeply about important issues, they realized they needed to downplay the academic tie, Ransby said. Hence, the word "intellectual" in the title got the heave-ho.

"We'd been grappling with the name change for some time. The idea was to emphasize the 'public' part of what we do, not the 'intellectual' part," she added.

Among the inspirations for the new moniker, Ransby said, was this quotation from Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and a famous public intellectual:

"We must focus our attention on the public square -- the common good that undergirds our national and global destinies. The vitality of any public square ultimately depends on how much we care about the quality of our lives together."

The Public Square recently began a series called Cafe Society, in which people gather at local coffeehouses to discuss current events.

Early next year, the group will initiate a monthly public debate series on topical issues such as war with Iraq and intellectual property. Other activities include lectures and panel discussions by visiting authors and artists.

The audiences for those events are academics and nonacademics alike, said Lee, a co-founder of the Center for Public Intellectuals who agreed with the name change. "One of the battles I thought we could wage [in the beginning] was to combat anti-intellectualism and to make people realize those terms [academic and intellectual] were not as foreign as people think," she added. "But I realized it was not a battle worth fighting."

"We wanted to change society, and the term 'intellectual' was tripping us up a little bit," she said.

American bias

The origin of the bias "has a long history," Lee said. "For me, it goes back to the difference between physical and mental labor. There is a notion that, somehow, thinking and talking and engaging critically with ideas is not important work in this society.

"But it's important for us all to think critically, whether you're an academic or a journalist or someone working at Starbucks."

Nathenson concurred. "There's always been this populist dimension to American relationships to intellectuals. Most of it comes from a mistaken idea that intellectuals are these aloof creatures in ivory towers with nothing to say to ordinary people," he said.

"Our point in wanting to change the intellectual landscape is that most of the people we consider intellectuals are 'of the people.' They explore the power of ideas to make changes in socially relevant ways. One of the big arguments of the last two decades or so is -- are intellectuals only found in universities?"

The Public Square's answer to that is a resounding negative, Nathenson said, which is why the name change was imperative.

"We're able to do the same work we always did, without the distraction of people thinking we're a branch of Mensa."

Are anti-academic and anti-intellectual biases exclusive to America? Umberto Eco, professor at the University of Bologna and author of such novels as The Name of the Rose and Fou-cault's Pendulum, believes it may be so.

"Here [in America] you have the campus, which is outside the city," Eco said during a recent lecture sponsored by the Public Square. "Historically, the campus in Europe was born inside the city, in the center of the city. [In Europe] you can't tell who are the students and who are the citizens."

That sort of mingling would delight the Public Square's members.

"We're not a think tank," Ransby says, "but we see ourselves as a kind of hothouse of ideas."

Julia Keller is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.