Although doubtless there is some truth to the image of universities as “ivory towers,” many universities and research institutes have to varying degrees been linked to various publics, either through ongoing debates about societal issues in which both scholars and members of the general public took part or by virtue of close links between certain (local or national) publics and the research underway. Arguably, in the modern world, these linkages between the scholarly world and that of practitioners have been most visible and well developed in the domain of agriculture.
Domestically, as nation-states began to develop in Europe, this initially took the form of attempts to promote the use of medicinal crops and the acclimatization of exotic plants in botanical gardens. Later, they began to promote growth in agricultural productivity. Hence, most agricultural research was from its inception seen as a State activity designed to promote the health and welfare of the population, as well as to maintain political stability by ensuring that food was cheap and abundant.
In contrast, to enhance colonial commerce, it first took the form of botanical gardens that served as plant transfer stations, often valorizing imperial ambitions. Plants of economic value found in one colony could be tested in the gardens and then transferred to other colonies enhancing the value of those colonies to the “mother country.” The Jardin des Plantes in Paris and the Kew Gardens in Britain remain as testimony to these policies.
Today, in a world in which few colonies continue to exist, nearly every nation has some sort of agricultural experiment station where research on crops, livestock, forestry, and/or fisheries is conducted at public expense. Many of these experiment stations and gardens are also involved in education of both the next generation of scientists and a wide range of practitioners.
Furthermore, nearly all of these gardens and experiment stations have at some time engaged in or were linked to some form of extension services, designed to interact with farmers and other persons involved in agriculture broadly conceived. Given the longevity of these relations with various publics in the agricultural sector as well as their ubiquity, their fate under neoliberalism can be seen to be emblematic of the changing relations between research institutes and universities and the publics they claim to serve.
Decline in public support. Arguably even more than in education and research, there has been a decline in interest in and financial support for interaction with the various publics that are or might be interested in dialogues with scholars at universities and research institutes. This is particularly the case with respect to the agricultural sector, where research has been linked to agricultural production for more than a century (Harwood 2012). Some of this is the result of the decline in the size of the farm population and their political clout. In addition, the obsession with research publication has in many places made dialogue with publics at best an afterthought. Part of it is also extension’s difficulty in adapting to a rapidly changing potential clientele that might include environmentalists and consumer advocates as well as technologically sophisticated corporate farms. Indeed, since its inception, extension has tended to promote new technologies on the farm and in the home, and to avoid more clearly controversial issues such as the role of farm labor, conflicts within the agricultural sector, and both rural and urban poverty.
Growth of private extension-like services. From a neoliberal perspective, extension services involve unnecessary and undesirable interference in what otherwise would be a flourishing market in agricultural services. Hence, extension has been particularly squeezed financially in recent years as private services have begun to flourish. However, privatization of extension services has its costs as those without the ability to pay are squeezed out of the newly formed market and the nature of the knowledge imparted shifts. This is true for both the activities formerly promoted by extension as well as similar services provided by other public agencies (Lave, Doyle, and Robertson 2010).
Wider gap between research and extension. Although the model of “the researcher shooting an arrow into the extension agent who shoots it into a farmer” (Bunting 1979) is both empirically mistaken and theoretically bankrupt, it was certainly the case in the past that extension agents generally accepted the innovations developed by researchers and worked to convince farmers to use them. In contrast, today much public agricultural research cannot be used directly by farmers; instead, it is used largely by agribusiness firms, which then market that research in the form of products to farmers.
Decline of public interest research. Although there certainly were no halcyon days of public sector research, public universities and research institutes were established based on the claim that they served the public good. Agricultural research, among the first scientific domains to receive State support, is a case in point. Much of the research produced by agricultural experiment stations involved changing practices rather than developing material technologies. Hence, research focused on improving (agri)cultural and farm management practices. When material objects were produced, they were often in the form of improved seeds; such seeds were largely varietals that could be reproduced by farmers who typically engaged in seed saving. However, such public interest science brings few if any market benefits. After all, in most instances, the results of the research were and remain freely available to anyone who is interested. The decline of research on biological (as opposed to chemical) control of undesired insect pests is a case in point (Warner et al. 2011). The former results in knowledge freely available to all, whereas the latter creates proprietary knowledge available to those who can afford to pay for it. What is true in agriculture is largely true in other domains as well.
Rise of strongly ideological think tanks. Think tanks and foundations such as the Association pour la liberté économique et le progrès social (France), the Institute for Economic Affairs (UK), or the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute (US), often financed by wealthy donors and large corporations, now compete with scholars at public universities and research institutes to engage various publics and develop policies of all kinds. Many of them are connected through the Atlas Network, a project of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (2013) “connecting a global network of more than 400 free-market organizations in over 80 countries to the ideas and resources needed to advance the cause of liberty.” Nearly all of these organizations promote market and market-like solutions to all sorts of problems. Lacking a need to connect and often hostile to academic scholarship, they have been far more effective than academics at developing materials for consumption by the general public.
They have also been highly successful in promoting agnotology (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) (i.e., spreading doubt about anything and anyone who challenges the notion that all problems can be addressed through the market). Hence, they have vigorously attacked those persons and organizations concerned about cigarette smoking, global climate change, the hole in the ozone, acid rain, and a host of other environmental issues. They have even attacked long-deceased Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, for allegedly causing the deaths of thousands of persons.
These think tanks and foundations have used three complementary approaches to agnotology. First, they have worked hard to spread doubt, knowing full well that no scholarly work is ever so certain that it cannot be challenged. Second, and perhaps of greatest concern, they have argued that as self-interested isolates, scientists desire to maximize their human capital and will do anything to promote their views, gain more funding, and increase their salaries and prestige. Hence, the rise in the number of fraudulent papers and other scientific misconduct as a result of New Public Management is “proof” that scientists are merely self-interested. This conveniently gives greater credence to the neoliberal think tanks. Finally, they have argued that the crises noted above are relatively trivial and that addressing them would not require vast (public) outlays.
Moreover, they have invented slogans such as “sound science” and “junk science” to defame their opponents. In addition, they have been actively involved in the publication of a variety of books, pseudo-scientific journals, and reports that claim to show the falsity of widely accepted scientific conclusions. Indeed, “[a] recent academic study found that of the fifty-six ‘environmentally skeptical’ books published [in the US] in the 1990s, 92 percent were linked to these right-wing foundations” (Oreskes and Conway 2010, 236).
Nor have these challenges to universities and research institutes been limited to the natural sciences. Those in the social sciences, humanities, and arts have also been subject to attack. In particular, there have been concerted efforts to reduce or eliminate social science and humanities funding, starting with the US National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s. More recently, neoliberals have attacked social science research in the US Congress, arguing that much of it is irrelevant to national priorities (Weigel 2013).