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October 27, 2008
Why the Corporate World Needs University Endorsements
Prof. Soltan writes at Inside Higher Education about how someone like the execrable Prof. Nemeroff can drag down the name of Emory University:
Keep front and center the fact that in this sense the university is immensely valuable, even to people like Nemeroff, for whom the shabby, earnest ethos of the institution is a joke and a personal insult. To play the professor is to play the man with integrity, the man who has eschewed the corporate world because he's above single-minded profit-taking. He's motivated by science and altruism.And it is precisely everyone's appraisal of the university professor as a serious person, motivated more by ideas than money, that Nemeroff and his corporate clients exploit. Professor Nemeroff shares with you his admiration for our new drug! This admiration emerges solely out of his intellectual scrutiny of its properties. You can trust his sober, disinterested point of view because... he's a professor...
The character emerging from what UD's been describing comes out of a nineteenth century novel. The fraud, the poseur, the hypocrite, the confidence man who breaks the rules more and more flagrantly because he's sure he can get away with it. The world, after all, is a cynical place. He knows how to play it.
This is a comic character, full of high sentence and secret hoardings. The only writer today who can do him justice is Tom Wolfe.
Charles Nemeroffs are amusing in novels. Their reality is sad, sad, sad. If you care about the American university.
(my emphasis)
I wonder how much further into the 21st century the idea of the sober, disinterested pursuit of truth will survive as a characteristic attributed to professors in general. I think Prof. Soltan is right that it does still operate now. I'm not certain what will break it up faster - revelations like those about the corruption of science by Prof. Nemeroff or the realization by the broader public that Republicans are correct when they say that almost all professors are members of or contributors to only the parties of the left.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 27, 2008 12:16 PM
Comments
I think the broader public probably realizes most professors are liberal--it's a national stereotype, for heaven's sake.
I think the broader public has probably *not* decided that only Republicans can engage in the sober, disinterested pursuit of truth, because that's total nonsense. Although, you appear to imply it. That is to say, that professors contribute largely to the left is IRRELEVANT to whether they are truly engaged in the pursuit of truth. The broader public has been told, and has apparently rejected, that classrooms are places of indoctrination. I'm pretty sure that, when judging the ultimate driving force behind professors, the broader public will read the act of spending 5-7 years studying something no one cares about as knowledge for knowledge's sake, rather than as an act of left-wing liberalism.
Posted by: dance at October 28, 2008 6:11 PM