The UNED--Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia--is only 30 years old--exceptionally young by the standards of ancient Spanish universities like Salamanca, but was founded by the newly established post-Franco democratic government to satisfy a twentieth century need. Not all Spaniards had the time or the resources to take off several years for study on a campus, but all had a right to a university education on a par with any to be found in Spain or elsewhere. The distance-learning UNED now has 180.000 students in a great variety of degree courses, a full faculty and a campus in the Ciudad Universitaria in a green and leafy part of Madrid. The campus is made up of administrative buildings and offices for the Faculties of Education, Political Science and Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, Philology, History and Geography, Economics and Business Studies, Sciences, Law and the Higher Technical Schools of Computer Engineering and Industrial Engineering; it also includes a large and handsome hall for special events, which is where the ceremony took place. I received my Doctorado Honoris Causa in Political Science and Sociology at the same time as Professor Ulrich Beck of the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich. My friend José-Félix Tezanos was padrino [academic godfather] for Ulrich Beck; Profesor Ramon Cotarelo was kind enough to serve as mine and I now wear with great pride my gold ring with the UNED seal.

Each new Doctor was asked to give a fifteen minute speech after receiving his/her degree; this is mine.

Estimado y Excellentissimo Senor Rector, querido Jose-Felix Tezanos, querido Ramon Cotarelo, queridos colegas y amigos; How can I express my gratitude to you and to the Universidad Nacional d’Educacion a Distancia for the great honour you have done me today? This is not a conventional question or an attempt to conform to the demands of an impressive, formal occasion, but a genuine, existential question. How can I thank you? You may understand my concern differently when I explain that unlike many scholars upon whom the UNED has previously conveyed the distinction of Doctor Honoris Causa, I am not an academic. Although I have earned three academic degrees, although I do research, write, publish and sometimes lecture in universities, I am not from the university world and this world has always seemed to me special, somewhat mysterious and probably inhabited by superior beings. So I am grateful, and also proud that with this honorary degree you have accepted me into your world as a colleague and an equal. Perhaps the best way to thank you is to reflect on our motives for choosing our profession. These are, as I understand them - first, the search for truth in so far as we can know it; - second, the pursuit of knowledge and of the skills needed in order to articulate it for others; - third, the attempt to understand the complex social and political reality of the world we live in-- - and finally, for some of us, the ambition to change that reality using the tools of scholarship. While most scholars I think would agree with the first three objectives, some would object to the notion that we have any particular responsibility to try to change politics and society. At the Transnational Institute, TNI, which has been my intellectual home for over thirty years, we take the view that action is an integral part of our lives as intellectuals and we call ourselves “scholar-activists”. This means that as Fellows of TNI, we do research, write and publish but we also intervene in public debates and we are active in the social movements of our own countries and often internationally as well. We may sometimes write for academic journals but we also speak at social forums, protest meetings and movement events. We want our analyses to be useful to popular movements and our work to be understandable to ordinary people. In short we try to be citizens in our professional lives as well as outside them. Please let me explain this choice further. We are progressives and thus our views are usually ahead OF their time, they challenge the conventional wisdom; they are necessarily unpopular with our many political adversaries and therefore they are under threat. Let me tell you also of some specific threats. In the United States today, far-right forces are encouraging university students to monitor professors they consider too far to the left, to report on what they say and to put pressure on the university hierarchy to silence them. A list of professors called the “Dirty Thirty” and a popular book called “The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America” bring back memories of McCarthyism, one of the worst periods in 20th century American history. Younger teachers who do not have academic tenure must be very careful of what they say in class. Many professors admit that these pressures have created a climate of self-censorship that can be quite effective in silencing unpopular or minority opinions. I do not need to remind you that obscurantist forces, often religious, are also at work in Europe. One of the first manifestations was the attempt to silence Salman Rushdie, but there have been many ominous signs since then--some apparently trivial like the affair of the Danish cartoons, but others tragic like the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh. As Spaniards, you know well what I mean; you have had sufficient painful historical experience with the suppression of dissent, either by the Church or by the State. It seems extraordinary that in the 21st century, 250 years after Voltaire, Europeans too must continue to fight this particular war. Voltaire got the sequence right when he said, “I disagree completely with your ideas but I will defend to the death your right to express them”. First should come opposition to odious views, immediately followed by the defence of free expression. This naturally does not mean one can say anything, at any time. As a famous US Supreme Court decision put it, free speech does not include the right to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre and it certainly does not include the right to make public appeals to commit violence and murder. One would also hope that people are intelligent enough to avoid gratuitous, particularly religious, provocations. But I did not want to let pass such a distinguished academic occasion without reaffirming the duty of intellectuals to defend unequivocally the rights of everyone to develop and to express ideas. I will also remain, for the rest of this brief talk, in the domain of ethics. Most if not all of us here today are social scientists and the nature of our work presents us with particular methodological and ethical problems. In the natural sciences, the researcher must verify experimentally whether results conform to hypotheses or not. This approach leaves results open to “falsification” as Karl Popper called it. In the so-called “hard” sciences, a finding, however well established, is always provisional, in case new evidence refutes it. No one has yet managed to disprove Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but according to several recent articles in the New Scientist, credible arguments against the Big Bang are emerging and perhaps even this durable cosmological paradigm may one day be proven incomplete or false. The social sciences it seems to me are quite different. We can rarely perform experiments and all our hypotheses are marked by values. I would argue that in our disciplines there is no such thing as scholarly neutrality, except perhaps for fairly trivial questions. On any large, important issue, consciously or unconsciously, our vision of what constitutes the desirable society will have a defining impact on our work, beginning with the choice of subject. Analysis will also depend on such prior choices; for example, accurate so-called “cost-benefit analysis” depends on asking simple questions, like costs to whom? benefits for whom? The trade-off between, say, CO2 emissions and economic growth is an obvious example; the provision of unemployment compensation and other welfare measures versus reliance on the free market is another. By the very nature of social and political reality, the social scientist is immersed in values all the time, long before even formulating a hypothesis. Because we cannot in my view be genuinely neutral or objective, it follows that the sooner we make our values explicit, the better. I have tried to do this in my own work first by choosing to study primarily the rich and powerful, rather than the poor and powerless. Many people seem to assume that my work centres on the so-called “third world” but that is not the case. Of course, it is much easier to study the poor who cannot protect themselves from scrutiny and have little choice in the matter. Conversely, the richer and more powerful a government, an institution or a social class is, the greater will be its capacity to avoid being analysed and to hide information it does not want to be made public or discussed. Along with secrecy and opacity comes a similar ability to deceive, to use lies and to manufacture ideology masquerading as truth. The work I am doing at present on the right wing in the United States shows that if you have a clear objective and plenty of money, it is possible to transform the entire ideological climate of the nation, perhaps even of the world. A few ultra-conservative American foundations with this explicit goal have spent well over a billion dollars during the past several decades. They have supported individual neo-liberal scholars, research centres, university chairs, scholarly and popular publications, audio-visual media, advocacy organisations and so on to disseminate neo-liberal ideology. They target those they call the “idea legitimisers”, in other words, people like us. They are doing the same thing in Europe and throughout the world. The result is the cultural hegemony of the people and institutions I call the right-wing Gramscians because they have understood the importance of values, ideas and beliefs; they have understood Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony and put it into practice, whereas progressives generally have not. Transnational corporations have also spent large sums and used intellectuals to defend their interests. Think of the long, well-orchestrated battles of the chemical, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries or of the oil and automotive industries using scientists and professional communicators to fight regulation or to disprove global warming. Their efforts have paid off; they have succeeded in casting doubt on the reality of climate change and in slowing efforts to control it, particularly in the United States. The Union of Concerned Scientists has shown how several US government departments have censored and falsified the results of government scientists in this vital area. It can be tempting to do one’s scholarly work inside the dominant paradigm rather than challenging it. The dissident scholar knows from the outset that his or her research is going to be incomplete. If you decide to study the rich and powerful, you will be lucky if you discover even a fraction of the truth. If your work is any good, it will be fought by those that it shows in a poor light. You will have to be extra careful because if you make any mistakes, your targets will pounce upon you and denounce you. You are not going to be invited to posh conferences; you will not become a consultant to institutions that can afford to pay you fat fees. Quite the opposite--you will be called upon to give your time free of charge to good but financially poor causes and you will write and lecture a great deal for no fee at all. The contrast between those who serve the political preferences of the rich and powerful and those who challenge them are nowhere more evident than in the struggle between the Bretton Woods Institutions--the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund--and their critics. Economists know quite well how to design Keynesian-type models based on taxation and redistribution whose goal is to satisfy the needs of everyone in a given society. They also know the elements of the “Washington Consensus” and can design neo-liberal models that concentrate wealth among those who already possess the most assets--money, education, class position, access to land, access to credit and so on. Under the name of “structural adjustment”, the World Bank and the IMF have been imposing the latter model for a generation in nearly 100 countries. If we measure their success or failure using human criteria--nutrition, school enrolments, employment and so on--the results have been disastrous. We have nearly thirty years worth of statistics and case studies showing that neo-liberal models lead to greater inequality and lower growth. We know that “IMF riots” as they are known locally, have taken place in dozens of countries, causing death and destruction because people protest against the damage done to their livelihoods. So is this neo-liberal model “falsifiable”, in Popper’s sense? If everyone agreed that results should be judged on criteria of human needs, it would be falsifiable and we would all consequently admit that the model doesn’t work. Does the available evidence then cause the economists to change their doctrine? No: the response is invariably that failures are the government’s fault, not that of the policy designers. The country has simply not practiced structural adjustment policies long enough or hard enough. Recently, the Bank to its credit commissioned an assessment of its research output and, as we all know, the Bank’s research has been hugely influential. The report was amazingly negative, showing that the Bank’s research is shoddy and a poor basis for policy. Let me quote just one passage concerning the Bank’s claim that trade liberalisation leads to poverty reduction. The report says, “Much of this line of research appears to have such deep flaws that, at present, the results cannot be regarded as remotely reliable”. Professor Robin Broad of American University has also shown in detail how the Bank’s research is designed to provide “paradigm maintenance”, that is, support for policies the Bank plans to apply anyway, for ideological reasons. The Bank’s Public Relations-Communications department has been known to tell researchers in advance which results they are expected to produce in defence of the Bank’s orientations. If a university operated on such a basis, no one would take it seriously, its scholarly output would be discredited and its scholars would be suspect, for good reason. But we still cannot shut down the Bank and the Fund because of their political utility to the powerful. In the end, it is always the rapport de forces, the power equation, that determines the outcome of institutional research. To sum up, I believe that the forces of wealth, power and control are invariably at the root of any problem of social and political economy. The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces, second to write about them clearly, without jargon, in order to give ordinary people the right tools for action; and finally--recognising that scholarly neutrality is an illusion--to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice. This is what I think the tools of scholarship are for and this is how I have tried in my own work to use them. Since injustice is recurrent in human affairs, scholars of this persuasion will alas never lack for work. But there is also great satisfaction in doing it. We know from history that we have helped; that we can continue to help to put certain issues on the agenda, encourage debate and sometimes move crucial questions towards resolution. We have more and more allies. I know dozens of academics using their skills in the service of the larger society: some of them are in this room and I salute and embrace them. The honorary degree you have conferred on me today represents in my eyes recognition for all the scholars here at UNED and in universities, research centres and institutes everywhere who believe that knowledge is one of the most important building blocks of the edifice of justice. We are artisans, we are like stonemasons patiently trying to construct a world we can be proud to inhabit. It is honourable work, and I am deeply honoured that you have chosen to recognise mine. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia El Plural Susan George: impuestos para evitar desigualdades 26 abril 2007