I don't suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that [ Michel] Foucault had used the phrase "speaking truth to power." I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase.

As for academics, I do not see why their responsibilities as moral agents should differ in principle from the responsibilities of others; in particular, others who also enjoy a degree of privilege and power, and therefore have the responsibilities that are conferred by those advantages.

What Wikileaks exposed is kind of superficial in a way.

Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.

That's the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.

The responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity.

America is a very fundamentalist society. It's like Iran in the degree of fanatic religious commitment.