BY AARON BARLOW

“She may have, and would have been right.” This cavalier dismissal points directly to the corruption at the heart of contemporary academia. It’s a response from MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte to an inquiry from New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo concerning a warning from scholar and entrepreneur Sarah Szalavitz about association with disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

“She may have.” There’s a so-what shrug in those words, for the reality is that most academics have long known what the quest for money has done to them but have decided that they don’t care. They might even say they can’t. The system of our educational institutions has evolved into one where every action and reaction is based on money. Not student retention and advancement (seen only in terms of financial impact), not reappointment and promotion (“How many grants did you receive?”), not program development (“Can you fund this?”), not anything.

Academics know that what they are doing is wrong. But they do it anyway. The huge amounts of money at stake—at the top—are just too tempting. Problem is, there are consequences, as Szalavitz pointed out. Manjoo details some of these in his article.

There are even more consequences than, in this particular, the effective exclusion of women from particular academic discourses. It’s not just the millions that the MIT Media Lab has to play with but the small beer most on the faculty struggle to attain that affects and corrupts us. We don’t follow our true research interests or even the paths that open up to us as we do our work. Like Woodward and Bernstein, but for much less noble purpose, we “follow the money.”

It’s not hard to see why. Whatever our idealism or the passions that lead us into our profession, we are inundated with incentive to make money the heart of our work. Look at most any institutional publication by a college or university: the people most lauded are those who have brought in money. At some schools, the situation is so corrupt that faculty in certain departments cannot expect tenure unless they have succeeded in obtaining grants or have created other funding streams.

Not only has money warped places like the MIT Media Lab but it changes the ways faculty see themselves and their departments. We admire shiny new facilities with names like “Koch” and “Sackler” on them and disparage departments still housed in musty old buildings with classrooms designed for chalk and talk. We see how some professors are getting rich as a result of the grants that bring acclaim and want a little piece of the action.

When the quest for money is involved, research agendas change. Sometimes in subtle ways. The exclusion of women sparked by Epstein is only one of the more minute but consequential examples of how the quest for money can change the focus of an entire enterprise.

The Koch brothers have always had a much more obvious agenda, but faculty have flocked to their money, justifying even the hiring decisions and academic agendas demanded in return, when called out, saying things like “That was a long time ago. I disengaged early on.” That’s from Marshall DeRosa, a professor at Florida Atlantic University—anticipating Negroponte’s more recent comment.

There’s always a way to save face—after the money is conveniently salted away.

The people who provide the money are never disinterested do-gooders, not even if they represent government entities like the National Endowment for the Humanities. They have agendas and ways of seeing things that have led to the rise of a whole new industry of grant writing, people and even organizations within university structures dedicated not to the furthering of scholarship but the tailoring of research to fit desires of people and institutions far removed from the scholarship of any particular area, completed or proposed. Second-guessing these funders (and fitting the proposals to forms) is at the heart of this new business.

Even the current milieu of worship of STEM while consigning the humanities to the ashcan owes a great deal to money and not to any sort of philosophical discussion of the value of, say, history. If History cannot pull in the money that Engineering can, then the fault lies with History. Case closed.

This culture (it had existed before—don’t get me wrong; the AAUP was founded, in part, in order to challenge it) grew quickly over the past generation in response to pullbacks in generalized government funding that once was a bedrock extending beneath even private institutions. Now, it is each to her (or his) own, with recognition that the situations of those who don’t succeed in the funding wars deteriorate each year.

One of the other outcomes of the quest for money is an emphasis on glamour and a balancing acceptance of an underclass of adjuncts and contingent faculty who do the grunt work while the blessed sip champagne on yachts owned by millionaires who, while may be less venal and predatory than Epstein, are corrupting education, nonetheless. Top faculty look to themselves instead of asking, for example, for funding for new permanent faculty lines that could not only allow the adjuncts and contingent faculty to gain a measure of security and, as a result, become better teachers. The elite faculty feather their own nests—no, they are worse: like cowbirds, they are brood parasites, pushing out the less fortunate faculty, the ones, though, who built those nests.

The consequences of applauding money and striving for it in academia are myriad. I have mentioned a few here, but there are many more. Each one is bad; together, they are pernicious. Together, they are endangering what is left of American higher education, replacing it with just another profit center.