Kris Hundley has a disturbing article on how faculty positions at Florida State University were bought and controlled by a wealthy businessman.
What’s most disturbing is that the dean, David W. Rasmussen, does not see anything wrong with giving control of who is hired to someone with an agenda to push, and having to send annual reports, “about the faculty’s publications, speeches and classes” to maintain funding.
The claim is that this adds to the diversity of ideas, but so is introducing intelligent design into a biology class. When certain ideas are promoted not on their merits but because of the money behind them, that is a fundamental corruption of the idea of academic freedom. It is certainly possible that the people hired for these positions are sincere in their beliefs and intellectual arguments, but it’s going to be just a tiny bit hard for them to change their minds given where the money’s coming from.
Indeed, the main problem is likely not that certain ideas might become more accepted in the scientific community when they shouldn’t be — the peer-review process does a fair job of safeguarding against this, at least in the long run — but that in the interim it introduces erroneous, agenda-driven ideas to policy-makers. Ideas that now have a semblance of academic credibility because they come from a university (which is supposed to have some allegiance to truth and impartiality), and can be used to bolster arguments that come from other sources that might be more known for their bias. If you say something loud enough, using enough different voices, it begins to sound like consensus.
This seems another sad, brazen step in the corruption of universities as bastions of intellectual thought and freedom.