In Praise of Intellectualism, Or Notes on the Corpademy

Ok, if I had just left the first part of the title of this post in, you wouldn’t have read it, right? I mean, noone likes “intellectualism”, it sounds so, well, intellectual. We think professors are boring, and never take risks. We say things are “academic”, meaning that they don’t really matter. “It’s academic”. Being too smart or too well read is actually seen as a liability. Our heroes in America at least are not those who write a great research report, but people who bust down doors. Without asking first.

Other countries and other periods of time have celebrated their intellectuals. They felt like they actually had something to offer. Good thing we can go read about those times and places. I’m not sure where the U.S. got off on this anti-intellectualism anyway. I mean noone will even admit that they are intellectuals.

I mean, do you think Hulk Hogan is going to discover the cure for cancer? Or Hannah Montana? I doubt it.

She might be able to wipe up your little tears if you cry though.

Which gets me to the next part of this post. The Corpademy. By this I mean the gradual merging of corporate and academic culture which has taken place over the past twenty years in the U.S. Especially in medical schools, where the school gets a portion of the royalties from inventions, so they encourage their faculty to commercialize their work. The faculty, on the other hand, feeling like noone really cares about them, are thrilled to get a few crumbs brushed off from the corpademy table. They get kudos for bringing in money from industry, and then can line their pockets by consulting on the side or doing things like giving “promotional” lectures for drug companies to their fellow doctors, that sort of thing.

After all, everyone gets so fired up about “entrepreneurship” and so that they forget what they are there for in the first place, and when you bring a bunch of lawyers into the administration the “academic mission” gets pretty diluted. Sure, they have nice language about “free inquiry, and the exchange of ideas”, but they also have “policies” about not identifying what university you come from, which get applied in a lop-sided way to faculty who do more than mumble and ship off their boring research to, yep, “academic” journals, as recently happened to me.

The other thing that happens in medical schools is that they get so used to the corporate culture through interacting with pharma etc that they start to apply it to their own departments and colleagues, and even using their language. To whit, when David Kupfer MD, head of the DSM-5 committee which is revising criteria for psychiatric diagnoses, made everyone sign a confidentiality agreement. What is weird is that for his explanation he said that lawyers had advised him that they needed to do this in order to protect their intellectual properties. I mean, first of all, someone is going to publish their own psychiatric criteria to compete with them and make a profit? The other thing is that this is exactly the kind of behavior and language that drug companies use when they are trying to keep stuff secret, usually stuff that they did wrong.

And when I started writing about the DSM-5 Anxiety Disorders Committee, I was publicly scolded and taken off a paper I was writing with one of the committee, i.e. effectively ostracized.

I.e. no discussion, no debate.

So if everyone is tolerated fine, as long as you slap the other guys on the back and don’t actually create a real debate, but then pounced on if they disagree or argue, then that really isn’t debate or free inquiry, is it? So if we aren’t debating ideas, then what, as professors, are we really doing anyway?