How do academics secure resources and status for themselves? Like other professions, they need to translate skills and knowledge into salaries, facilities and autonomy from outside control. The academic profession, even more than other professions, depends for its position on the value of what is claimed to be legitimate, expert knowledge.
There are two basic avenues for building academic power. One is through the teaching function, and is based on control over credentials. The other is through the research function, and is based on providing knowledge for practical applications and for legitimation.
In relation to the state, academics provide knowledge for sustaining and expanding economic and technological systems, and for building the military. Academics also provide knowledge which legitimates state power and state policies. To sustain both the power of the state and the power of the academics, academic knowledge cannot be presented in an open, easy-to-use fashion. If any group could utilise the knowledge without much difficulty, this would undercut the power of both the state and the academics. To selectively serve the state, the knowledge needs to be selectively useful to large-scale bureaucracies. To selectively serve academics, it also needs to maintain the state's dependence on academic expertise.
In relation to capitalism, academics provide knowledge to aid profits and corporate control. The same considerations apply as the case of the state.
For example, for many decades mining companies never bothered to rehabilitate mined land, and little academic study was devoted to the problem. But since the 1960s the environmental movement - supported by some academics - has helped generate community awareness and concern about environmental destruction and has stimulated governments to take action which threatens mining company profits. The companies have responded by sponsoring professorships, providing consulting work and giving access to land and data to academics who look at things from their point of view. This has provided the companies with licensed expert opinion - of 'objective' academics, not mining company employees - to legitimate existing and further mining operations. As my friend Basil Schur puts it, the main objective is not rehabilitation of mined land but rather the rehabilitation of public opinion.
In relation to other professions, academics provide training and credentials. This is valuable in regulating entry into professions and in legitimating their roles as experts. Academics also provide cognitive bases for the professions: bodies of knowledge that underpin professional practices. A cognitive base is important not only in legitimating a profession in relation to the wider community, but also in unifying the members of the profession themselves. Once again, academic knowledge, if it is to serve professions, cannot be simple, easy-to-use knowledge. It must be opaque to outsiders and dependent on academics.
All these factors influence the nature of academia. But given the complexity of the influences on academic knowledge, it should not be surprising that what happens is less watertight than the cosy picture of academics accommodating the state, capitalism and the professions. There are all sorts of leakages, failures, countervailing forces (such as workers and social movements) and conflicts of interest.
One of the important reasons why academics are less than effective in tailoring their knowledge to their own interests in conjunction with other powerful groups is that they do not they conceive their function that way. In their rhetoric for public consumption, academics claim that they labour in the pursuit of truth, service to the community and other praiseworthy goals. But many academics do sincerely believe in these things privately as well. At the same time, the collective interests of academics are served by accommodating the interests of dominant groups in society. The result often is an awkward conflict between beliefs and actions with no satisfactory resolution.
Also complicating the picture are several other important influences on academic knowledge deriving from power relations inside academia: hierarchy, disciplines and patriarchy. These are taken up in the next three chapters.
Here I sidestep many of the complications and concentrate on features of academia that reflect the strategy of tying knowledge jointly to academics and to powerful groups. This sort of tied academic knowledge maximises benefits to academics while adapting to other social structures. This single concept makes understandable a wide range of features of the academic scene.
To talk of a strategy of tied knowledge does not mean that academics consciously aim to adapt their research and teaching to serve these particular ends. Rather, tied knowledge mainly results from the meshing of large-scale social structures. Here I give some examples of how this happens. But much remains to be learned about the process.
Research and teaching. It is well recognised within academia that research is much more highly valued than teaching. Producing large amounts of research can help an academic to get ahead; doing no research can be a serious hindrance. Doing top quality teaching does little for an academic's career, and often it can be a hindrance if it takes too much time away from research; being a poor teacher seldom is a serious career disadvantage.
Most high status academics do as little teaching as possible, and prefer to teach more advanced students. In Australian higher education before 1987, university academics had a much lighter teaching load than academics in the colleges of advanced education, which were lower in academic status. At the top of the status hierarchy are institutes or centres where no teaching is done at all. At the Australian National University it is much more prestigious to work in one of the research schools, where no undergraduate teaching is done, than in one of the faculties. Academics can increase their prestige considerably by conspicuous research, but hardly at all by conspicuous teaching.
Modern research produces knowledge that is specialised and hence which can only be used by other specialists. Research of this type heightens the power of the researchers as well as building bonds between the specialist research community and the specialist users of the research (if any). Most research is not intelligible or useable by members of the general public, or indeed by anyone except special interest groups. Specialist research thus maximises the power and status of academics in conjunction with those interest groups that can utilise the research findings. One key use of specialist research is providing hard-to-challenge legitimation of policies or practices.
Teaching, rather than setting up exclusive knowledge, spreads knowledge around. Rather than building up the power and status of academics, it threatens to weaken their control over specialist knowledge.
In earlier eras, teaching was more highly valued, and research was a lower status activity. This applied for example in Britain until recent decades, and still persists in some areas. Teaching could be a high status activity and serve the interests of academics as long as higher education remained the preserve of a social elite. With the ever-increasing proportion of the population partaking in higher education, teaching implies that a larger and larger fraction of the population is gaining access to once exclusive knowledge and status. As a result, both the social exclusiveness of higher education and the intellectual exclusiveness of basic knowledge in academic disciplines are being reduced, and hence the status of teaching in academia is falling. (This conclusion is subject to all sorts of qualifications: the balance between teaching and research is complicated and subject to historical, national and local variations.)
The elevation of research above teaching benefits the academic profession as a whole vis-a-vis other groups, by emphasising the role of academics as producers and interpreters of esoteric and powerful tools - namely specialist knowledge and techniques. But how does this overall benefit to the academic community become entrenched in the individual beliefs and behaviours of academics? That is hard to answer without detailed study, but it is possible to describe some plausible mechanisms.
Outside academia itself, researchers have more to offer to powerful groups than do teachers. Knowledge and advice are sought by corporations and state bureaucracies, in particular the sorts of knowledge and advice that will be fairly exclusively advantageous to them. Research thus provides a stronger claim for the value of academic work for the powerful groups that can both advance the careers of individual academics and also support the overall funding of academia. By contrast, great academic teachers - ones who can make difficult subjects clear and who can illuminate the complexities and unities of knowledge - may be worshipped by students, but this does not provide a stepping stone to greater power. Great teachers conceivably might find their skills rewarded by textbook publishers or even the mass media, but this is seldom a road to greater returns for the academic community as a whole.
The connection between academic research and the dominant users of specialist research is especially apparent to elite academics, who are more likely to be consultants for government or industry and more likely to have personal links with state and corporate elites. The lack of a similar connection with teaching is quite apparent. In short, the outward looking elite academics know where academic strength lies in relation to powerful groups. As a result, they quite sincerely come to favour research performance over teaching in their role in appointments and promotions. In this way, the preference for research over teaching filters down from academic elites. This process can only become more pervasive as research becomes more tightly tied into national economic and political processes.
Another way in which academic preference for research can be fostered is through the direct contact academics have with members of the public. As more and more people are exposed to higher education, the mystique of tertiary training wanes and the reality of much mediocre teaching is more widely recognised. But research is highly specialised and therefore not understood by many tertiary-trained people. In addition, research is routinely associated with social benefits and 'breakthroughs' involving medicine, space and the like. Being a researcher seems more likely to bolster the prestige of individual academics.
Also, as I will describe in the chapter on disciplines, research more than teaching helps to protect the position of academic disciplines from the encroachments of other academics.
There are some contradictory aspects to academic valuation of research over teaching. Most academics will say that teaching is important, and a large number decry the great emphasis on research. But these expressed feelings are not translated into changes in actual appointment and promotion policies. The divergence can be explained by noting that while many academics might personally prefer to do more teaching, structural influences on academia promote the higher status of research. Academics can moan about the low status of teaching all they like, but unless they address the structural influences, the situation will not change.
Another intriguing point is that according to their public rhetoric academics get ahead by merit (especially research), but in reality scholarly performance, including research performance, is not as important in getting ahead as widely believed. Studies by Lionel S. Lewis and his collaborators have shown that the salaries of US academics can be predicted much better by knowing how long they have been around than by examining their scholarly performance. This divergence of belief and reality may reflect the advantage in having people (including academics themselves) believe that high ranking scholars are in their positions purely because of superior performance in specialist knowledge. In practice, a pure merit competition would be too precarious for academic elites: their performance might fall off and their positions would be challenged by hard-working upstarts.
I have taken quite a bit of space describing how the academic valuation of research over teaching is a response to the relation of academia to dominant power structures in society. The following examples trace the implications of the strategy of tied knowledge more briefly.
Student-oriented learning. The status of academic knowledge depends on its exclusiveness. Academic teaching, though of lower status than research, maintains the emphasis on the knowledge. Knowledge is structured around disciplines, and students must adjust their learning to the knowledge framework of the disciplines. Academic teachers are disciplinary specialists.
An alternative learning procedure is to proceed on the basis of what caters for the interests, experiences and receptiveness of individual students. In this approach, knowledge is structured around the needs of students.
The second procedure, student-oriented learning, has a lower status than discipline-based learning. Student-oriented learning puts a higher priority on the students and less on the expertise of the teacher. This is the reason why tertiary and secondary teaching has a higher prestige than primary teaching, which is usually much more student-oriented. It also helps explain why adult education, which is more likely to be student oriented in order to attract students at all, has a low status in academia.
Jargon. Jargon makes it hard for others to know what is being said. It thus protects the specialist researcher from scrutiny by others. Only the experts - those who know the jargon - are in a position to judge the value of the esoteric knowledge. Jargon thus serves to make knowledge more exclusive: it can more easily be made selectively useful for particular groups, either the academics themselves or outside groups to which they tie their knowledge. [Wendy Varney comments: "Jargon also makes others feel inadequate and undermines their right to hold opinions in matters that have been 'jargonised'."]
Jargon is only the surface manifestation of the deeper structure of esoteric knowledge. The concepts and the organisation of the concepts of specialist knowledge can also be made difficult to understand by nonspecialists. In short, the organisation of knowledge as well as the vocabulary is jargonised. [Wendy Varney comments: "The whole language of academia is such that an outsider might actually know a lot about the area under discussion but still not know what the academics are talking about."]
Sometimes jargon does make it easier for specialists to communicate with each other. That is not the issue. What is significant is that there is little countervailing pressure within academia to develop explanatory systems and language which is readily grasped by outsiders. Instead, impermeable specialist knowledge structures proliferate. The main restraint is training of new recruits and the building of power bases within specialities, which limit the advantages in the further splintering of knowledge.
Pure research. Within academia, pure research usually is more prestigious than applied research. Why? It symbolises independence from any external forces. Pure research is widely claimed by academics to be vitally important to society in the long term. Pure research is also claimed to require complete independence from outside direction. Neither of these claims stands up to scrutiny very well. But they are widely supported in academia because they provide a rationale for academic autonomy.
Applied researchers are the ones who make compromises with external influences in developing tied knowledge that serves both academic and outside interests at the same time. Much of the financial and social support provided for research comes from expectations for eventual applications. Applied researchers help satisfy these expectations. But pure research is promoted because it stakes a claim of independence for research as a whole.
Popularisers. Academics who write for newspapers, appear on television or give numerous talks to community groups are almost always suspect in the academic community. This suspicion or even antagonism is usually rationalised in terms of concern for scholarly standards which allegedly are not sustained in public forums.
Some sorts of popularisation are not frowned upon so much, such as accounts of the wonders of science or the social importance of the latest discovery in an esoteric research field. This promotion of academia in the public domain may be tolerated, especially if done by prestigious academics who speak carefully and with appropriate authority.
But popularisation which shows any of the warts of academia is most unwelcome. Explaining what is going wrong in a discipline, exposing harmful uses of academic expertise, or making fun of academics: all these are considered totally out of bounds. Certainly they cannot be scholarly!
'Scholarly' here means dressed up in academic jargon and footnotes, so that no wider audience could possibly be interested. Any sort of critical popularisation is thus ruled out by definition as being unscholarly.
Popularisation that exposes the secrets and problems of expert knowledge is clearly a threat to the strategy of tied knowledge. The academic evaluation of 'scholarship' has adjusted to exclude such threats. Populisers are rejected as scholars precisely because they debase the currency of academic status. After all, academics have a collective interest in exaggerating the difficulty of their work, thus setting themselves above other groups such as manual workers.
Jørgen Nørgard, a Danish Physicist, wrote a popular and widely distributed booklet on energy efficiency. It even contains cartoons! He said that when other scientists asked him for a reference on a particular point and he said it was in his booklet, they requested some other, more technical source. They did not want to cite a 'popular treatment'.
Public knowledge and professional knowledge. Most academic knowledge is promulgated widely: it is 'public knowledge', not restricted to a particular group. The aim of most academic researchers is to publish their findings in journals which are available to anyone who wishes to read them. The exceptions to the promotion of public knowledge - such as secret military research - are frowned upon by many academics.
While academic knowledge may be public, it is not easy to use by non-professionals. To begin, non-academics seldom know where to obtain academic knowledge, even if they know it exists in the first place. Often they can be intimidated by campuses and their libraries. Then there is the obstacle of jargon and specialised knowledge frameworks. Finally, the production or application of much academic knowledge requires large teams of workers, sophisticated equipment or expensive investment.
The development of academic knowledge as public knowledge in specialist, professional form serves to maximise benefits to the academic community itself. There are dangers to the position of academics from two sides: powerful vested interest groups, and popular movements representing wider interests. If academic knowledge were structured as private knowledge - restricted to small groups such as individual corporations, government bureaucracies or local academic elites - then these same groups could exert great power over academics. By having the knowledge open to other scholars in other institutions and countries, common interest and mutual support is created between groups of researchers who might otherwise be divided and ruled. The sharing of professional interests in open knowledge in the physical sciences between Soviet bloc scientists and Western scientists helps to explain the important role of political dissent by Soviet scientists and the occasional support for this dissent by Western scientists.
Public knowledge serves the interests of professionals against control by powerful vested interests, but if public knowledge were too open it would undercut the control by the professionals themselves vis-a-vis various public groups, or indeed vis-a-vis other groups of professionals. Hence academic knowledge, while public in the formal sense, is made exclusive to professionals through jargon, exclusive knowledge frameworks and antagonism to popularisation.
Selective prestige of useful knowledge. I noted earlier that esoteric, pure research is highly prestigious in academia because it symbolises independence from other groups. But in those disciplines where knowledge is obviously applied, the prestige ranking is linked to the prestige of the groups to which it is most useful. For example, knowledge directly useful to employers, such as new computer developments, is quite prestigious in academia. A research finding that leads to an industrial or agricultural innovation is often touted as justification for investments in higher education. By contrast, a research finding that gives support to workers challenging hazardous working conditions is likely to be considered marginal academically.
Teaching of theory. Academic teaching has a strong orientation towards theory. Courses for example are promoted in the mathematical foundations of neo-classical economics and in the methodology of the social sciences. In most disciplines, the theoretical basis of the discipline is central to the structure of the curriculum. Furthermore, the teaching of theory - and indeed the teaching process itself - is commonly separated from practice.
The status and power of the academic profession is linked to autonomy from influential groups. Theoretical knowledge is the preserve of the academics, and hence this has greater prestige. It also helps sustain the ideology of value-free knowledge that aids academics in their bid for autonomy.
On the other hand, there are continual pressures to integrate theory and practice in teaching. These pressures can come from at least two sources. One is the advantage of tying knowledge to particular applications and to particular interest groups. The other is the realisation that learning is usually much more effective when theory and practice are linked. The result is a recurring struggle between pressures - linked to academic self-interest - to make courses more theoretical, and pressures - linked to outside interests or social goals - to structure learning around a combination of theory and practice.
For example, much of what is taught in teacher training has little relevance to the actual practice of teaching. After years of study in an academic climate, trainee teachers on entering schools often suffer cultural shock and find they must discard most of what they had learned, in theory, about teaching. Teacher training would certainly be changed if the only consideration were effective preparation for teaching. But teacher training takes place under the constraint that the training is under the control of the academic profession.
Long apprenticeship. Becoming an academic involves a long period of study and then usually a long research apprenticeship. This sequence serves to adjust students to the academic culture and to induct them into the dominant knowledge frameworks. The separation of academic training and being an academic thus serves to reproduce the academic profession.
An alternative procedure would be for learning to be structured around mutual study groups organised by students who could call in academics (or non-academics) as advisors, and for students to begin research work at an early stage in their studies. Such an alternative essentially involves breaking down the rigid sequence of study first and only later research and teaching. This alternative would undercut much of the power of academics by breaching their control over teaching and research. It would also threaten the various groups that obtain relatively exclusive benefits from different segments of academic knowledge, since outsiders from rival groups could enter into the academic system much too easily.
The long academic apprenticeship is highly inefficient in terms of learning and use of academic resources, but it does help reproduce the academic system.
Evaluation of academic performance. Like other professions, academics tightly control the right to evaluate their own performance. Appointments, promotions, publication: decisions on such matters are taken largely by other academics. (A strong qualification is that top academic appoinments and allocations of funds, especially in centralised education systems, are strongly influenced by political and economic elites.) The main way in which academic work serves outside groups occurs through the tied knowledge itself: academics control their own work, but the knowledge they produce is tied. If one teaches and does research in the proper way - namely by adhering to the standard knowledge frameworks - then academic advancement is possible.
Tied knowledge thus enables academics to minimise direct control by outsiders over academic decision-making while still satisfying the demands of groups that have a strong interest in academic knowledge.
One implication of the preference for professional control over evaluation of academic performance is the dislike of teaching or research methods that allow easy evaluation by outsiders. Normally, very few ever sit in on lectures of their colleagues in order to assess teaching performance: an academic's classroom performance seems to be considered a private affair, an 'academic freedom' to teach as poorly as one likes. Teaching methods that allow colleagues or the public to examine and compare performance - such as television lectures - have not become popular with academics. Likewise, articles and books about research methods and their limitations are almost always aimed at others in the same discipline or speciality. Treatments aimed at a general audience are rare indeed, and hence virtually become exposés. This is an aspect of the academic denigration of popularisers.
Private repudiation of reputations. Some academics are:
* incompetent in their work;
* incapacitated, for example due to alcoholism;
* criminals, for example manufacturers of illegal drugs or traders in protected birds' eggs;
* thieves of credit for the ideas of others.
Seldom are such academics publicly repudiated by the profession. The preference is for problems to be dealt with on the inside, which often means doing nothing about them. This is because the status and privileges of academics, like any profession, depend on outsiders believing that high professional standards are maintained. Hence incompetents tend to be tolerated, or quietly encouraged to obtain other jobs. Open efforts to expel them for inadequate performance would draw outside attention to shortcomings in the profession.
Plagiarism is the taking of the ideas or work of another and presenting them as one's own. In the most blatant form this involves using another person's writings word-for-word under one's own name, but many more subtle forms of plagiarism exist. In my examination of plagiarism cases, it has been a familiar pattern that many academics, especially those in positions of power, simply do not want to know about it. This might seem surprising given that plagiarism is considered one of the most serious scholarly sins. But many people outside academia also perceive plagiarism as improper. Exposing plagiarism publicly therefore reflects badly on academia, so attempts to deal with the problem are usually quiet inside affairs. If the plagiarist threatens to make a lot of noise, the disincentive towards taking any major disciplinary action is increased.
There is a competing influence here: the interest of non-plagiarising academics in exposing a person getting ahead through cheating. In practice, only a very few academics who become aware of plagiarism by others - even their own work - are resolute enough to challenge scholarly decorum and attempt to expose the problem. It is especially difficult for students, assistants and wives - three groups whose work is frequently misappropriated by supervisors and husbands - to challenge plagiarism, since this also means rocking the academic hierarchy.
Talent and privilege. Two of the most fundamental beliefs of academics, especially successful academics, is that being an academic requires special talent (and also more or less work) and that because of this talent academics deserve greater privileges than the ordinary person. Quite obviously, both these beliefs serve to advance the claims of academics in relation to other groups, at least to the extent that the other groups accept the beliefs too. Other privileged groups have little reason to object to such beliefs.
Many of the changes in higher education promoted by reformers can be interpreted as a way to make academia more responsive to a changed configuration of power in society. Here I make a few brief comments on how this process may occur.
More 'relevant' teaching and research. One of the continual debates is whether teaching and research have become too isolated from pressing social problems. Of course, this begs the question of what is 'relevant'. Teaching and research oriented to disciplines, without much connection to applications, means that academic knowledge is not tied to any particular outside group: it is mainly useful for reproducing the isolated academic discipline. But when outside groups such as the state demand more responsiveness to their requirements, orienting knowledge to the narrow concerns of the discipline may not be a good survival tactic. The 'reform' orientation, promoting relevance to social applications - whether profits of corporations or the bureaucratic provision of social welfare - serves to tie academic knowledge more to outside groups. Much of the struggle between academic traditionalists and reformists centres around the question of which groups knowledge should be tied to.
Interdisciplinary studies. As disciplinary studies become more and more specialised, the usefulness of academic knowledge becomes more and more splintered. This can benefit narrow sectoral interests inside and outside academia, but groups with broader perspectives, such as state bureaucracies dealing with problems of social unrest, environmental destruction or unemployment are less satisfied. Interdisciplinary studies become necessary as knowledge becomes more fragmented. The struggle for academic reform to introduce teaching and research programmes which transcend narrow disciplinary frameworks thus aims to change the selective usefulness of academic knowledge from specialist to broader interests.
'Radical' programmes. Black studies, women's studies, environmental studies, peace studies: these are some of the teaching and research programmes that have been set up, usually in response to the existence of and pressure from a strong social movement. Although such programmes often suffer attacks from other academics, at the same time they provide protection for academia as a whole. By providing niches for dissidents, universities have a potential for gaining support from, or warding off attacks from, a whole range of groups in the community. For example, strong popular pressure on the state for action against war can be partly defused by establishing peace studies and research programmes. Often such programmes serve to coopt grassroots energy and give the impression that something is being done about the issue. For academia, such programmes ensure some degree of professional control and help prevent community demands from leading to programmes entirely independent of academia. 'Radical' programmes usually are torn between pressures for a professional orientation, which makes the academics happier, and pressures for relevance to the demands of the social movement.
By most definitions, academics are intellectuals. Academics are mental workers, and most of their work is neither routine nor tightly managed. Intellectuals are also found in the professions, in the state and especially in less bureaucratised occupations such as journalism and the arts. Higher education is a key structure in the training and employment of intellectuals.
There is a considerable literature on intellectuals, some of which is quite thought-provoking. But it is hard to get very far by treating intellectuals - or mental work - as an autonomous category, since the social role of intellectuals depends on the other systems of power to which they link themselves or from which they try to obtain independence. Nevertheless, here are some general points about intellectuals which I think are worth noting for their relevance to academics.
* Most intellectuals have conventional views and lives: there is little inherent radicalism in being an intellectual. Intellectuals will orient themselves to groups offering occupational and political opportunities. Certainly this applies to academics. Studies of the political views of academics show much more variation between disciplines than any difference between academic attitudes and those of the general public. This is also quite compatible with different groups of academics tying their knowledge to different interest groups, especially the more powerful ones.
* Those intellectuals who believe in the traditional view of intellectual excellence are likely to support the independence of intellectuals from outside interests. Those intellectuals who believe in social reform and the administration of society are likely to develop ties with state bureaucrats and administrators in the professions. This difference partly corresponds to conflicting pressures to tie knowledge either to the academic profession itself or to the state.
* Social activism by intellectuals reflects their use of knowledge. Intellectuals are more likely to believe in the power of logic and knowledge to bring about social change, and hence to favour methods using information and persuasion rather than 'gaining the numbers'. Intellectuals are more likely to become socially active on moral issues, such as peace and social injustice, than to build links with working class movements.
* Those intellectuals in marginal or economically precarious positions, such as free-lance writers, are more likely to become radicalised. In academia, most of the radical activists are found among the students and untenured staff. Tenured staff - those protected by 'academic freedom' - are less likely to have any reason to support unpopular causes. (One qualification on this tendency is that the radicalism of intellectuals also seems to include a 'generational' factor, reflecting waves of conformity and rebellion.) Whether marginalised intellectuals actually do become involved in radical action depends on whether there are sufficient numbers and opportunities. Otherwise they may just drop out. Quite frequently it is the best students who drop out.
* Most intellectuals have more to gain through links with the state than with capitalism. The general talents of intellectuals in developing ideas, providing rationales and setting up systems of rational administration have more scope in the state. Leading intellectuals are rather more likely to become inducted into the state as top bureaucrats or political advisors - or even as politicians - than to join the top echelons of corporations. Radical intellectuals have been prominent in left movements, including both social democratic parties and Leninist parties, which aim at using or capturing state power.
Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and objectivity: a crisis in the professionalization of American social science, 1865-1905 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975). An illuminating study in the formation of social science disciplines in the US and how they were built on suppression of prominent criticism of dominant social institutions.
Bill Hannan, Democratic curriculum: essays on schooling and society (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985). Includes a critique of the anti-democratic effect of universities on high school curricula.
Russell Jacoby, The last intellectuals: American culture in the age of academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). A powerful argument about the negative effect of the specialist, careerist university system on intellectual life.
Craig Kaplan and Ellen Schrecker (eds), Regulating the intellectuals: perspectives on academic freedom in the 1980s (New York: Praeger, 1983). Critical analyses of academic freedom in relation to professional power and outside interests.
Gary Rhoades, 'Conflicting interests in higher education', American journal of education, vol. 91, no. 3, May 1983, pp. 283-327. Differentiation in higher education and the role of power differences between academic professionals and the public.
Edward T. Silva and Sheila A. Slaughter, Serving power: the making of the academic social science expert (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984). The development of the US social science profession in the context of corporate capitalism.
On academic merit and advancement see: Lionel S. Lewis, Richard A. Wanner and David I. Gregorio, 'Performance and salary attainment in academia', American sociologist, vol. 14, August 1979, pp. 157-169.
On the political views of academics in the United States see: Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. and Seymour Martin Lipset, The divided academy: professors and politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975).
Case studies of academic criminals include R. Jeffrey Smith, 'Drug-making topples eminent anthropologist', Science, vol. 210, 17 October 1980, pp. 296-299; Clive Gammon, 'The great egg robber', Sunday times (London), 16 June 1974, Focus pp. 17, 19.
On intellectuals, see:
Robert J. Brym, Intellectuals and politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980). A useful survey of views on the political orientation of intellectuals.
M. Cox, 'The politics of the dissenting intellectual', Critique, no. 5, 1975, pp. 5-34. On intellectual opposition in the Soviet Union.
Erik Dammann, Revolution in the affluent society (London: Heretic Books, 1984). Contains material on the power of intellectual elites and their antagonism to popular initiatives.
Barbara and John Ehrenreich, 'The professional-managerial class', in: Pat Walker (ed.), Between labour and capital (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), pp. 5-45. An analysis of the role of occupations based on salaried mental work vis-a-vis the working and ruling classes.
Eva Etzioni-Halevy, The knowledge elite and the failure of prophecy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). A hearty polemic against the pretentions of intellectuals.
Alvin W. Gouldner, The future of intellectuals and the rise of the New Class (London: Macmillan, 1979). Stimulating theses on the role of intellectuals.
George Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, The intellectuals on the road to class power (Brighton: Harvester, 1979). A valuable discussion of the role of intellectuals in social development, especially in state socialism.
Michael Mann, 'The ideology of intellectuals and other people in the development of capitalism', in: Leon N. Lindberg et al. (eds), Stress and contradiction in modern capitalism (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1975), pp. 275-307.