Andrea Smith, an organizer of INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, did a post-doc at UIUC a couple of years ago. Someone introduced her as a scholar-activist and she began by discounting that label. She said, we don’t say florist-activist or dentist-activist, why do we say scholar-activist? What about scholarship necessitates adding the noun activist if one is engaged in social justice work, for example? What was clear is that activism among scholars is rare enough that people find it remarkable.
INCITE! has a relatively new compilation, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, about the US non-profit sector, the “non-profit industrial complex.” Andrea Smith has an essay in it as does Ruth Gilmore.