It Would Have Been So Easy

Why do professors have such a hard time disclosing their conflicts of interest when pontificating on this or that area of their expertise? Every time one of us opines on some controversy and then is found to have a financial stake in how it comes out, the public becomes more skeptical about whether we academics are really engaged in the pursuit of Veritas or in mere cupiditas. The current reductionist movement, that higher education should be evaluated on the basis of measurable outcomes and that any talk of higher ideals is just a cover for featherbedding, only makes our failure to disclose conflicts more embarrassing. And, as I have argued before, universities operate on trust, and without the trust of the public, public support will evaporate. The importance of such disclosures is not obvious to my peers, and some of them resent the suggestion that they should be up front about their investments, outside income, boards on which they serve, and so on, when they are talking about things that affect those entities. I have heard Harvard professors say that they don't want to state up front that they have been paid by a company when they advocate some policy that affects that company --- because disclosing that might give people the wrong idea! They already had their views before they were hired; that was the reason they were hired. Telling people they have a financial interest in something they are speaking about would, they argue, put the cart before the horse. It would be misleading, they think, to say "I think X, and I am being paid by Y," when they already thought X before Y hired them. It would give the public the wrong idea. Rubbish. Any academic who withholds potentially relevant information from the public on the basis that the public will misinterpret it should be thrown out of the academy. Skepticism in pursuit of the truth is our entire game, and the only way our claims can be evaluated is if the relevant information is out on the table. In any case, maybe, just maybe, we are not the best judge of when financial interests might be tilting our judgment. All of which brings me, at long last, to the Aspen Ideas Festival. After watching the video of Walter Isaacson interviewing Drew Faust and Larry Summers, I went to bed grumpy, feeling I had heard it all before. Summers's overall message was that universities need to be bolder and more innovative. Faust was, I thought, more nimble---she had to be because Isaacson gave Summers the first question, and Summers took about 5 minutes to give a set speech, without answering the question. Isaacson conducted a well-mannered dialog, not asking any questions that were too challenging, and the two principals, though they clearly had different roles, treated each other with respect and civility. (Summers was the advocate of change and risk of failure, Faust insistent that changes were actually happening.)