Gentlemen and Scholars

...That was about ten years ago...

...They come for bread, and they are given gas, which sends them into convulsions...

...A survey has indicated that out of 350 insurance professors in the country, more than half consulted or taught summer classes for insurance companies...

...There seems to be no acceptable mode in discourse on social policy to enter such a broad and intuitive indictment, beyond close evidence or quantification, which now courses through my mind as it has often before and fills me with an indignation only my experience prevents from becoming a rage...

...Christopher Jencks and David Riesman say in The Academic Revolution, "A large proportion of the research published in the disciplines we know best exhibits no genuine concern with answering real questions or solving important problems...

...What is this, all these professors, knowing all this, teaching daily, writing textbooks for each other and for their understudies in their professions, filling library shelves with vague or narrow articles, consulting for business for a profit, yet not giving the ordinary people who work for salaries, or tips, or in the fields, the time of day...

...Yet if this indictment is correct, as I believe it is, the conventional wisdom that the universities are the conscience of the culture, the free places for fundamental learning and the independent criticism of the societies in which they are the sources of truth and light—that conventional wisdom is a myth, and the universities are selfish, practical places, corrupted and cowed...

...Where, then, you theorists of resources, professors of petroleum, is a conclusively clear exposition of our energy resources and our common interest and rights in them...

...So there is a market for such books, professors of law, books for intelligent citizens of various states that would tell us how to do simple things for ourselves—simple divorces, bail, wills, and how to avoid shysters...

...Why, professors of government, sociologists of the marketplace, doctors of advertising, and specialists in consumer psychology, does it fall to Ralph Nader and his forty or fifty young people, or else to muckraking journalists, the roughriders of the democratic conscience, to expose the endless, ever-multiplying frauds being perpetrated on the consumers...

...Edward Shils of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought finds himself boxed into this paralyzed stance: "The students may desire a set of values rather than factual knowledge, but can we give this to them...

...1974 by Ronnie Dugger...

...Wendell C. Gordon, a professor of economics at the University of Texas, has noticed this strange negligence, too...

...This article is adapted from his new book, "Our Invaded Universities: Form, Reform, and New Starts," to be published early this year by W.W...

...It is simply a roller coaster ride along a well-worn track...

...I believe I am right that almost no such books are written by professors in universities...

...They study social sciences in increasingly large numbers...

...Professors of economics and the business schools, what about that "$200 Billion Savings and Loan Business" that we are told on television is so much bigger than all those huge corporations, its deposits so much more than the stocks people hold...

...Where is the book by the professor, any professor, who has mastered the mysteries of insurance, who makes the subject clear to the people for their usages...

...I was a little startled by that, but inclined to agree...

...The orthodox professor regards it as improper for professor or student to be concerned in his work for what is right or wrong, ethical or unethical, moral or immoral...

...Considering that he knows the subject, and that if he is correct, something should be done about it, I asked him, "Well, why don't you write a book, telling us this and telling us what should be done to fix it...

...How do these places make money out of our money and what alternatives might we have to the way things are...

...What do they get when they study the social sciences...

...Where, professors of banking, finance, and the national accounts, is a true, exact, correct, and lucid book on banking in America as a profit-making enterprise, laid out fully and plainly and morally evaluated...

...it is simply a display of professional narcissism...

...He said he was writing it...

...I myself think . . . that it would be much more desirable if they did not study social sciences in such large numbers...

...C. Wright Mills, Robert Engler, and John Kenneth Galbraith—especially in his latest, Economics and the Public Purpose—are recent exceptions...

...By their books they could plug the university into the democratic life, make knowledge more useful to the people, and make the people more responsible again to each other, but they do not...

...Do we have it to give to them...

...Vulnerable and foolish though to you it may appear, I accuse all you damned professors of playing it safe and selfish with your graphs and your parameters, and I speak to you two words: Tell us...

...There is this specialist in the criminal law who said to me at a cocktail party, "The system of criminal law in the United States is totally corrupt...

...Lacking a mode, lacking an accepted form for such an indictment, lacking a societal grand jury, I shall do the only thing that I can think to do...

...and to impart the results of their own and of their fellow-specialists' investigation and reflection, both to students and to the general public, without fear or favor...

...The academic profession's sixty-year-old proclamation of principles says that the professors' distinctive and important function is "to deal at first hand, after prolonged and specialized technical training, with the sources of knowledge...

...Ronnie Dugger is a free lance writer and former editor of The Texas Observer...

...And where, sectaries of Hippocrates, is the book guiding us through the shelves and shelves of supermarketed patent medicines...

...no doubt there are a few others...

...Norton...

...GENTLEMEN AND SCHOLARS RONNIE DUGGER I try to read the serious new books about power in America, about the way the country is run and the realities of the major industries and financial systems and the corporations that are their containers...

...A professor of economics at a small university for elite students enlightened and excited me describing work he is doing on the American economy in relationship to the world's poor, but fell back before my interest, cautioning me that by the time he got all this translated into the mumbo jumbo that is required by the status system among the professional economists, it would be dull stuff...

...But when one considers how many professors there are whose entire professional lives are given to mastering part or all of this subject, the torso of our national life, and how few of them ever intelligibly tell the public in general what they know, it appears that something is wrong...

...In an article in 1970 he asked, "Are economists afraid that, if they study the actual operation of the economy, they will uncover something that, if publicized, would keep them from getting that next fat research grant from corporation X?" A thirty-year-old Berkeley lawyer, Charles Sherman, wrote a book, How to Do Your Own Divorce in California, and it has sold 20,000 copies in a year...

...For an explanation, we may turn to the lament in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty: "Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought"—but this, in these times, is not sufficient...