Scholars who pursue advisory roles forfeit credibility with both state and academy

Evidence

There has been no responsible grappling first of all with the central methodological question, namely, What is the value (if any) of speaking about “Islam” and the Islamic resurgence? What, secondly, is or ought to be the relationship between government policy and scholarly research? Is the expert supposed to be above politics or a political adjunct to governments? Bill and William Beeman of Brown University argued on separate occasions that a major cause of the United States–Iran crisis in 1979 was the failure to consult those academic experts who had been given expensive educations precisely to learn to know the Islamic world. Yet what went unexamined by Bill and Beeman was the possibility that it was because scholars sought out such a role, at the same time calling themselves scholars, that they seemed ambiguous and hence not credible figures to the government as well as to the intellectual community. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 143

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s ‘Representations of the Intellectual’ on the tension between intellectual independence and state service. — connects to: University professors are highly conformist and suppress views conflicting with their academy’s beliefs — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 129

Related

• Scholarly independence from institutional power enables critical insights into Islam (similarity 0.79)