There is one public that will not disappear before we do—our students. Every year we cre- ate approximately 25,000 new BAs, who have majored in sociology. What does it mean to think of them as a potential public? It surely does not mean we should treat them as empty vessels into which we pour our mature wine, nor blank slates upon which we inscribe our profound knowledge. Rather we must think of them as carriers of a rich lived experience that we elab- orate into a deeper self-understanding of the historical and social contexts that have made them who they are. With the aid of our grand tra- ditions of sociology, we turn their private trou- bles into public issues. We do this by engaging their lives not suspending them; starting from where they are, not from where we are. Education becomes a series of dialogues on the terrain of sociology that we foster —a dialogue between ourselves and students, between stu- dents and their own experiences, among students themselves, and finally a dialogue of students with publics beyond the university. Service learning is the prototype: as they learn students become ambassadors of sociology to the wider world just as they bring back to the classroom their engagement with diverse publics.3 As teachers we are all potentially public sociolo- gists.It is one thing to validate and legitimate pub- lic sociology by recognizing its existence, bring- ing it out from the private sphere into the open where it can be examined and dissected, it is another thing to make it an integral part of our discipline, which brings me to Thesis III.