Academic Capture

Conflicts of interest are a serious problem in scholarship. Transparency and discounting, while necessary, are insufficient to protect the marketplace of ideas. Why?  Founder effects and dilution of expertise, explain Maurice E. Stucke and R. Alexander Bentley. To protect the integrity of academia, we must also encourage the injection and consideration of new and contradictory unconflicted ideas.

Richard R. John recounts how in the twentieth century the once-mighty Bell System, whose descendants include today’s Verizon and AT&T, waged a powerful decades-long public relations campaign, including the funding of history books and research centers, to persuade the public that its success rested in technological imperatives and economic incentives rather than a favorable regulatory landscape. Though the Bell PR campaign failed to stop three highly effective antitrust suits, it succeeded in establishing a story about management, competition, and innovation that many Americans—including several of today’s Big Tech critics—have uncritically repeated.

Texas Instruments’ TI-84 calculator has been the standard graphing calculator for American students for twenty years, despite its high cost and lack of innovation. Barak and Eli Orbach explore how Texas Instruments created its entrenched calculator monopoly and the lessons it offers educators as they grapple with the emerging possibilities of artificial intelligence in the classroom.

In new research, Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu, and Ingrid M. Werner ask if academic research exhibits political slants. They develop a new measure of the political slant of research and study how it varies by discipline, demographics, and the political party of the sitting United States president. Finally, they show that their measure is related to the researchers' personal political ideology, suggestive of an ideological echo chamber in social science research.

That scholarship often reflects conscious and unconscious biases has long been an open secret in academia. On April 22, Professors Christian Leuz, Anat Admati,...

Researchers discovered that the introduction of Uber had negative impacts on transportation, findings that required cooperation with public authorities when Uber refused to share...

Following the Uber Files leaks, transportation expert Hubert Horan explains why Uber is “hopelessly uneconomic” and how its engagement with policymakers and academics aided...

The Guardian’s exposé on Uber’s strategy of engaging with top academic researchers to produce corporate-friendly research calls to mind concerns regarding academic lobbying and...

One objective of political finance is to hold power to account. However, gatekeeping, both direct and indirect, is keeping important work from being conducted...

On Friday, ProMarket published a piece by Renée Adams about the impact of academic gatekeeping in political finance. Do you have a similar story...