Smail

It certainly seems that a large part of the actual activity of professional academics, scientists etc. is aimed at keeping their knowledge as a kind of intellectual capital which maybe employed to make money at interest without itself becoming dissipated into the beliefs practices and preoccupations of ordinary people. Hence perhaps the enormous energy put quite overtly by professional groups in these fields into protecting their rights and claims to exclusive knowledge and competence etc. The economic basis of production and consumption in which we are all, willy-nilly, caught up, is thus reflected in the structure and functions of our scientific and intellectual institutions. Psychotherapy for example is as much an industry as is steel manufacture and entertainment; universities have in many fundamental respects become factories for the production of knowledge. The primary function of which is to perpetuate the academic industry itself by manufacturing the raw material which keeps it going, if this later seems a harsh judgment one need only reflect that both teachers and students in universities are in their own (not consciously perceived) interest forced to act (produce) like teachers and students if they are to justify their continued existence in an over crowded and competitive academic world. It is obvious that in these circumstances mere quantity of output will become more important than quality of work, (it is also, let it be noted, more easily and objectively measurable). Thus I have seen academic boards set up for senior university appointments make preferences for one candidate rather than another on the basis of the number of publications listed in the candidates curriculum vitae without any attempt being made to consider the content or intellectual quality of the publications. Similarly, considerable debate has taken place in the pages of the main professional journal of British psychologists (the bulletin of the British psychological society) seriously advocating the measurement of psychologists academic worth by the number of publications they produce. The parallels of this kind of approach with industrial production seem to me inescapable, as does its irrelevance to anything one might naively associate with academic excellence. Again Students have complained to me that their teachers, although sometimes representing extremely opposed intellectual positions, will not confront each other in public over their differences but instead advocate a kind of tolerant eclecticism in which the concept of truth quietly disappears. This seems hard to understand as anything but a function of the setting in which teachers depend heavily for their academic advancement on winning research grants from both public and private body’s so that they cannot afford to be wrong, and hence unconsciously suppress public disagreement amongst themselves as well as the opportunity for outsiders to criticise their activities, this is highly understandable (which of us would not do the same?) but nevertheless militates against traditional (possibly even mythical?) values of intellectual honesty and debate, and at the same time subtly appropriates knowledge as the production of a particular professional group. That self interest and greed play a large part (all be it unconsciously) in these processes, as indeed they do more overtly in our economic institutions is perhaps easy enough to see. What may be less readily appreciated is the extent to which the general population becomes intellectually subjugated thereby. One result of this is the enormous gullibility and ineffectiveness of the ‘ordinary’ person in matters which have become professional property. For example, laymen’s expectations of science and medicine are almost boundlessly naive (and their surprise when confronted personally with medical and scientific failures correspondingly exaggerated.) Since they have, in a sense, given up their right to consider or criticise. Consideration and criticism have become part of the professionals special prerogatives; for laymen, theirs is only to wonder and consume…It is not the case that those who embody the system – e.g. academic teachers of psychology see themselves as guardians of a repressive orthodoxy. I’m sure they would be appalled at such a suggestion. Rather is it the case that this is the result of their conduct whatever they may claim to be doing.

     David Smail