Ep. 3 - Captured Academics: The Myth of the Clash of Ideas

2020-09-15

In this episode, Mary and Lee are sticking with the theme of money infiltrating cornerstone institutions of American democracy. But this episode is going to focus on academics, but not like Lee’s people, whose research is independent and rigorously evaluated. This episode is about captured academics who are selling their research and ideas to the highest bidder. The collective mythology of academics, at least in this country, is kind of this crazy liberal professor who sits in their ivory tower with a bad wardrobe and ju...

The collective mythology of academics, at least in this country, is kind of this crazy liberal professor who sits in their ivory tower with a bad wardrobe and just churns out books. And, yes, people mostly think academics are totally out of touch with the real world but nonetheless there’s a sense that they know what they’re doing. That their research is evidence-based, rigorously judged...you know, academic. And, more importantly, that their research can be trusted.

Except now big money has infiltrated academia--public universities, private universities, law schools--using their “charitable donations” (can you hear my air quotes) to create an agenda for what research gets done and what the research says. We know that the Koch brothers have paid for a whole host of anti-climate change “science” (more air quotes). We know that the tobacco industry paid for studies that smoking didn’t harm people. We know that Volkswagon paid for studies to say that their emissions were not polluting.

And it’s not just paying for research. They use their donations to determine who gets promoted, who gets tenure, even whether or not someone can get a book published. If we know that academics and judges and lawyers are being bought and paid for by corporations with horrifying motivations then we simply can’t trust these myths that wearing a robe or having a PhD makes you any better or worse than any other politician in the pocket of the highest bidder.