My foundational reference for collegiate professionals would have to be a 1960s book The New Brahmins (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.163.3862.60)
The obvious reality is that even our news organizations today have donned the ecclesiastical robes and methods of preachers of an authoritarian religion. Not just professors anymore. Politicians too.
It is indeed difficult for a serious challenger to get traction against the authoritarians, which leaves the field of dissent open to the clueless, the ignoramus, the spectacular demonic speculator.
I would not just expect a basketball star, a long-ago star, to be the most informed on a subject far off the hardwood, so I chose to just delight in his freedom, especially since he does, I believe, qualify his views with appropriate humility by saying it's just his idea, he's not the next nobel laureate on the topic. He advances no original research, no scholarly review of the work others have done. It's more, I think, a populist trying to please if not support ordinary people in their questions, ideas, and issues.
No one should expect me to be the authority of last resort on any subject.
I have a few friends who I knew during their medical school days. I used to buy my own copies of their textbooks. My wife is a nurse, a very credible nurse, who in her field often tells doctors what they need to know. It's a matter of real life experience in the specialty. It takes a young MD oh maybe three or even ten years of practice to absorb the experience a nurse of thirty years has taken in. No one should just assume doctors are right. Two or three opinions are generally helpful. Often it is a matter of perspective or point of view. What I hate most is the insurance/tort-driven standard procedures which take the wind out of the intellectual sails of any well-intentioned practitioner with active cognition.
Research doctors/scientists do have to pay attention to their funding and the winds of political change wafting through the halls of the NIH and other government or even private funding sources, to get grants which must be obsequiously bowed and scraped for.
I can't really expect political activists working the streets to care about all that, I know. There are few, if any effective points of leverage than can dislodge the boulders of "the way things are". But I essentially agree with you that the most productive arena for involvement is in the streets.
The obvious reality is that even our news organizations today have donned the ecclesiastical robes and methods of preachers of an authoritarian religion. Not just professors anymore. Politicians too.
It is indeed difficult for a serious challenger to get traction against the authoritarians, which leaves the field of dissent open to the clueless, the ignoramus, the spectacular demonic speculator.
I would not just expect a basketball star, a long-ago star, to be the most informed on a subject far off the hardwood, so I chose to just delight in his freedom, especially since he does, I believe, qualify his views with appropriate humility by saying it's just his idea, he's not the next nobel laureate on the topic. He advances no original research, no scholarly review of the work others have done. It's more, I think, a populist trying to please if not support ordinary people in their questions, ideas, and issues.
No one should expect me to be the authority of last resort on any subject.
I have a few friends who I knew during their medical school days. I used to buy my own copies of their textbooks. My wife is a nurse, a very credible nurse, who in her field often tells doctors what they need to know. It's a matter of real life experience in the specialty. It takes a young MD oh maybe three or even ten years of practice to absorb the experience a nurse of thirty years has taken in. No one should just assume doctors are right. Two or three opinions are generally helpful. Often it is a matter of perspective or point of view. What I hate most is the insurance/tort-driven standard procedures which take the wind out of the intellectual sails of any well-intentioned practitioner with active cognition.
Research doctors/scientists do have to pay attention to their funding and the winds of political change wafting through the halls of the NIH and other government or even private funding sources, to get grants which must be obsequiously bowed and scraped for.
I can't really expect political activists working the streets to care about all that, I know. There are few, if any effective points of leverage than can dislodge the boulders of "the way things are". But I essentially agree with you that the most productive arena for involvement is in the streets.
