The Doubter's Companion Read Free Page A

corporations and governments? What they have to sell, after all—their aura of independent expertise—has a real use and therefore a quantifiable value.
    When lawyers and lobbyists take up this kind of public activity it is monitored and licensed by government. Sometimes it is called influence peddling, sometimes lobbying. The social scientists escape these controls precisely because universities are thought of as independent. The question their commercial activity raises is whether a professor has the moral right to cash in on the independence of academia and on the value which society has assigned to the freedom of inquiry.
    Since the rise of the European universities early in the second millennium, there has been a gradual change in the stature of professors. At first they were priests or freelance men of knowledge whose income came directly from the students. Professors who didn’t teach what the students expected to learn were fired or chased through the streets. This had its disadvantages but kept the professors on their toes. Some, like the philosopher Giambattista Vico in Naples, did suffer in spite of their brilliance. He was a bad teacher. But Vico and his ideas nevertheless survived.
    As the power of learning grew, universities became places which those with power sought to control. Initially the churches assumed this task, so one of the central goals of the Enlightenment was to release the universities from religious control. The new democratic élites of the nineteenth century declared the universities to be the custodians of intellectual freedom. In reality this young political order financed the institutions just as the old one had and sought to impose its “standards.”
    Despite being edged with hypocrisy, the idea of academic independence was an important pillar of the new democratic nation state. Higher education gradually came to offer the basic training required by anyone who hoped to occupy a position with any power at all. In short, a university degree became a proof of membership in the ruling élite.
    With the decline of the influence of religion to an ever-narrower area—often no more than the places of worship—the whole domain of public training in ETHICS and morality was left unaccounted for. Much of that role was gradually conferred upon the universities, where it was taken over by independent thinkers and teachers. A university education became the true finishing school of the responsible citizen in a democracy.
    Most philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries earned little, expected little public respect, ran constantly on the edge of the law and were rarely employed in any regular manner. They would have looked upon the invention of the twentieth-century tenured professor as one of the great victories of the Enlightenment. They would also have been surprised to learn that an increasing number of them acted as if freedom of thought combined with secure employment and widespread respect was not enough. What the modern professors really wanted was more money. And they were willing to sacrifice all the rest in order to get it.
    In fairness, the initiative had been taken by the corrupters not the corruptees. It began seriously after the Second World War with politicians seeking out ever-more academic advisers. They weren’t paid much and they were exercising their own right to have political opinions. But as social and economic programming grew, with its inherent tendency to reduce the unlimited power of the large corporations, so those corporations began to mount a counter-attack.
    Their answer to the practical and ethical arguments being made in favour of a stable and fair society was to develop absolute truths related to the market-place. Very early on they identified the need to cultivate their own independent experts capable of delivering truth. They began funding “independent” foundations dedicated to learning. Independence and