Unfortunately, too many academics retreat into narrow specialisms, allow themselves to become adjuncts of the corporation, or align themselves with dominant interests that serve largely to consolidate authority rather than to critique its abuses. Refusing to take positions on controversial issues or to examine the role they might play in lessening human suffering, such academics become models of moral indifference and examples of what it means to disconnect learning from public life. This is a form of education, as Howard Zinn notes, where scholars publish while others perish. Even many leftist and liberal academics have retreated into arcane discourses that offer them the safe ground of the professional recluse.

"Higher Education Under Siege: Implications for Public Intellectuals," Thought and Action (Fall 2006), p. 64