Scott Mclemee, the last public intellectual standing, has jumped ship from The Chronicle of Higher Ed to Inside Higher Ed, a new challenger to the Chronicle created by the Chron‘s former top editors. At Inside Higher Ed, Scott will be unchained: a columnist of “Allery-Wissenchaft (the Science of Things in General).”

“I’ll track down dissertations and conference papers that deserve a larger audience,” writes Scott, “and report on what’s happening in the world of think tanks, humanities centers, literary quarterlies, and online e-zines. Nor, of course, will we neglect the terrain known as the blogosphere — that agonistic realm routinely combining the best qualities of the academic seminar with the worst traits of talk radio.

“The sudden shift from ‘I’ to “we” in that last sentence was no accident. I am counting on eagle-eyed readers to point out things meriting attention. The essay form is at its most interesting when it becomes ‘polyphonic,’ as the Soviet-era cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin put it — a space in which a number of voices coincide and enter dialogue.”

You got that? Scott wants you to sing along.