David Peat

Re-envisioning the Planet 167ciency, cost cutting, and profit making. And so, while innocent academicswere pondering the physical and moral questions of the age,the institutions changed around them to the point where these sameacademics were no longer in control.Today large corporations endow professorial chairs, and universitiesare dependent on donations from businesses and influential individuals.Major research grants are funded directly, or indirectly, by themilitary. In a highly competitive world lecturers are desperate to gaintenure, and that means pleasing the students who grade them as teachers,while at the same time showing to the university authorities thatthey do not intend to make waves. In these and so many other ways theuniversities have become dangerously compromised.At the same time individual scientists, economists, and medicalexperts who are called on to make judgments and disseminate informationare increasingly mistrusted by the general public. When expertsare quoted in a newspaper or interviewed on television, we wonderjust where their vested interests lie. Who awards their grants? Whatoffers to serve on corporate boards have they had? Imperceptibly theacademic world changed and universities today are no longer totallytrusted as places of free and open debate.False MemoriesMaybe the academic world has never been ideal and Byzantine plotsand jealousies have always lurked within its ivory towers. During theMcCarthy era, for example, academics were willing to make publicstatements in order to distance themselves from their colleagues whowere politically suspect. The physicist David Bohm, however, refusedto give names of colleagues when questioned by the House Un-AmericanActivities Committee. In my book, Infinite Potential: The Life andTimes of David Bohm (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1997) I relatean account of a subsequent seminar held at Princeton University, essentiallyto discredit some of Bohm’s work in physics. While it was tobe a debate on technical matters in science, reputable scientists couldnot help using such terms as “Trotskyite,” “traitor,” and “fellow trav-