Where are the UK's public intellectuals?

The Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University, Terence Keakey, has been lamenting the negative and distorted incentives generated by the 'Research Assessment Exercise' (which most people outside the higher education sector will be blissfully oblivious to) and its impact on the funding of universities.

"The Research Assessment Exercise is killing British universities as centres of public thought. Once, British universities fostered some of the most important public intellectuals in the world, but today British academics are rarely known outside their disciplines.The most influential living intellectual in the world is Noam Chomsky; in 2005, the readers of the British magazine Prospect voted him precisely that...

He made the leap from brilliant researcher to public intellectual exactly 40 years ago, in 1967, when he published his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" in the New York Review of Books. That responsibility, Chomsky wrote, is to "expose the lies of government". Chomsky places that responsibility on his fellow academics...

Over the past 40 years, Chomsky has campaigned against American foreign policy, but it has been primarily as an academic that he has made his impact, showing by careful scholarship that American foreign policy is institutionally dishonest...

...today most people know that everything George Bush says is untrue...

MIT's support for Chomsky has been solid: even when it was receiving 80 per cent of its research income from the Department of Defense, Chomsky could launch his jeremiads without internal criticism.

But MIT is an independent university, and there is no RAE in America. Consequently, MIT's physics department can process as many defence grants as it wants, but the linguistics department, where Chomsky works, is free from governmental pressure...

The President of MIT answers solely to the trustees, who are alumni, donors, and proud of MIT's academic independence. But the real master – and paymaster – of a British vice-chancellor is the Government. Of course a troublesome Chomsky in Britain would be discouraged...

If our universities are to reassume their proper role of speaking truth unto power, they will have to value scholarship and public engagement as strongly as they now value research. We should, as a first step, ditch the RAE and identify proper funds and proper incentives for leisure and thought at work."

On the positive side he has a point about the paymaster dictating the agenda, which doesn't fit too comfortably with he role of the academic to explore truths (rather than expose lies). Though a campaign to facilitate leisure time (by which he really means scholarship and thinking time) for academics is unlikely to win too many advocates in modern media circles; and I suspect his satirical claim that everything George Bush says is false may well be taken out of context should anyone in Whitehall or Washington come across this call for a change to university funding structures.