Commentary on Timothy J. Brennan, “Academic Disciplines and Representative Advocacy”

Abstract

I am going to comment first on the diagnosis Timothy Brennan gives of the problem with academic advocacy, and then on his suggestions for therapy. I will be speaking on the basis of my experience as one of the American Phil osophical Association Congressional Fellows. I worked for one year on the personal staff of Congressman Lee Hamilton (Democrat, Indiana) and was then put on the permanent staff of his subcommittee, the subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In that position I helped to set up many Congressional Hearings, and in par ticular I helped to choose academic witnesses for those Hearings. Since my experience was on Congressional staff, I will speak directly about the role of academic witnesses testifying to Congress. I hope what I say will have relevance to the broader problem addressed by Timothy Brennan, namely the advocacy role of academic witnesses. First, then, his diagnosis. He sees three kinds of harm arising from academic experts giving testimony on occasions where they are explicitly asked or implicitly expected to support a belief held by the client prior to the testimony. The first harm lies in the reduction of the expert's independence and credibility; the second in the injury to the reputation of the expert's discipline (economics, for example, comes to be seen as a rationalization of previously held political opinion); the third in the destructive exploitation of the communicative trust binding society together (society requires the assumption of honest self-representation, especially when the judgements made are the most difficult to verify independently, and academic advocacy puts this assumption in jeopardy). I think these three problems are genuine, but that they all derive from a more fundamental problem which is implicit in Brennan's treatment, and can helpfully be made explicit. The more fundamental problem is that academic advocacy very easily becomes a species of fakery. I use this word in reference