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"Scholars today are unwilling to take on the problem of colleagues who use their credentials to write pseudoscholarship that is eagerly snapped up by the conservative right wing. Examples? The Bell Curve, of course--no one with credentials in genetics or educational psychology takes that book seriously, yet because the remaining author and others associated with the book have tenured positions…it has the imprimatur of the academy….
A second example would be English professor Elaine Showalter's book Hystories, which asserts that Gulf War Syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome are not real diseases….
My third example comes from economics, where radical no-government libertarians have captured the public limelight in policy. Claiming to use neoclassical economic theory, they in fact derive their theories from the classical economists….
In a world where there are no rules of scholarship or journalism or evidence, where everything is opinion and all opinions are alike, the market wins. And the market is very, very conservative."
--Mary Schweitzer, associate professor of history, Villanova University, in a letter to the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998.
