Academics have a duty to warn society about disasters before they happen

This story has significance for readers across Africa and beyond.

Universities are usually judged by what they produce. We count graduates, publications, citations, patents, research income, companies created, technologies transferred and positions in global rankings. These measures matter because public institutions should be able to demonstrate what society receives in return for the resources entrusted to them.

Yet there is another form of contribution that is far more difficult to count because, when it succeeds, almost nothing appears to happen.

The bridge does not collapse because an engineer raises a concern early enough. A costly programme is redesigned before billions are committed. An institution changes course before dysfunction matures into crisis. A dangerous assumption is challenged before it hardens into policy. There is no commission of inquiry, no dramatic headline and usually no monument to the person who sounded the alarm.

Success, in such cases, can look remarkably like nothing happened. Yet preventing error may be among the most consequential things knowledge can do for a society.

That raises a more demanding question than the familiar debate about academic freedom. Of course scholars must be free to research, speak and disagree. But freedom tells us what academics are permitted to do; it does not fully answer what expertise may oblige them to do. When specialised knowledge reveals that society may be drifting towards a serious and avoidable mistake, what does the person who can see the danger owe everyone else?

Knowledge is usually treated as an asset. It brings recognition, authority and, at times, influence. Yet specialised knowledge can also impose responsibility, because once a person can discern what others cannot reasonably be expected to see, silence is no longer quite as innocent as it was before.

If an engineer has credible evidence that a major infrastructure decision is technically unsound, is remaining quiet neutral? If an economist believes that the assumptions underpinning an expensive national programme are implausible, is saying nothing merely a private choice? If a public health or education scholar detects serious weaknesses in an intervention before thousands are affected, is it enough to publish an elegant explanation of the failure years later?

The principle is uncomfortable but difficult to escape: the more one knows about an avoidable public danger, the harder it becomes to pretend that silence carries no consequence.

This is not an argument for turning professors into prophets. Scholars can be wrong, evidence can be incomplete and experts can disagree fiercely. The obligation is not to claim certainty, but to state honestly what the evidence supports, where uncertainty remains and what might prove one wrong.

Nor does expertise in one field confer authority in every field, and nor should scholarship become a permanent opposition to government. Habitual opposition can be as intellectually lazy as habitual obedience. Evidence may require a scholar to challenge the government, defend an unpopular decision or unsettle business, civil society or the university itself.

The scholarâs duty is neither obedience nor opposition. It is fidelity to evidence.

Professional life, however, contains incentives that are rarely written down but widely understood. One academic becomes known as âdifficultâ, another as âconstructiveâ; one scholarâs criticism is said to damage relationships, while another discovers that accommodation opens doors. People notice these patterns, and patterns have a way of becoming lessons.

The danger is not that academics suddenly become dishonest, but that enough of them begin editing themselves before anybody else has to. Censorship announces itself loudly; self-censorship enters through the side door and, before long, can masquerade as maturity, collegiality or good institutional citizenship.

The professor continues publishing, the university continues proclaiming its commitment to academic freedom and the government continues consulting experts. From the outside, the machinery appears to be functioning. Yet expertise can become domesticated: sophisticated, credentialled and institutionally useful, but increasingly unable to say with sufficient clarity: âThe evidence suggests we may be wrong.â

Expertise that can never inconvenience power is dangerously close to decoration.

A healthy country does not require its experts to sing from the same hymn sheet. It needs them to disagree honestly enough that weak assumptions are exposed before they harden into expensive realities. The purpose of the uncomfortable professor is not to embarrass the government. It is to make error more difficult.

Countries invest enormous resources in expertise: universities, laboratories, doctoral programmes and research councils, all designed to train people to recognise risks, patterns and possibilities that others may not readily see.

Yet a country can invest heavily in producing expertise while simultaneously creating political and professional incentives that make using that expertise against an emerging mistake professionally irrational.

We build the lighthouse, train the keeper and polish the lens â and then make it dangerous to warn the ship.

That is a failure of national design.

The public value of expertise lies not only in explaining yesterday, but in recognising what may happen tomorrow. When infrastructure fails, institutions deteriorate or policy turns disastrous, suddenly everybody can explain what went wrong. Commissions investigate, academics publish and warning signs that once seemed ambiguous become obvious with hindsight.

Postmortems matter, but a country cannot live on postmortems alone. It needs people willing to arrive before the funeral.

After failure, we often ask why nobody knew. Frequently, somebody did. The more important question is what happened to the knowledge. Was it spoken and ignored? Was the messenger attacked instead of the argument? Did institutional processes filter out inconvenient evidence? Or had earlier messengers paid such a steep professional price that everybody else understood the lesson?

A society in which experts regularly identify problems only after they become crises has a failing early warning system.

Speaking is not always shouting. Responsible intervention may mean publishing evidence, advising decision-makers, recording formal dissent, using professional structures or, where necessary, entering public debate. The obligation is not to perform courage, but to ensure that consequential knowledge is not knowingly permitted to disappear into silence.

Nor should experts govern merely because they are experts. Democratic government must make choices involving competing values, priorities and trade-offs that evidence alone cannot resolve. Expertise cannot replace political legitimacy, but political legitimacy does not render evidence optional.

Expertise should not replace democracy; it should make democratic decisions harder to make badly.

Universities must live by the same principle. Reputation, partnerships and stakeholder relationships matter, but they can create a quiet expectation that academics may exercise their freedom only when doing so does not inconvenience the institution. That is not intellectual freedom; it is managed permission.

A university cannot teach critical thinking while penalising inconvenient thinking among its professors. Leaders must distinguish misconduct from discomfort: fabrication, defamation and professional misconduct can legitimately attract consequences, but reputational discomfort produced by rigorous scholarship is something else entirely.

Speaking can carry a price. Relationships change, invitations dry up and opportunities become more complicated. Sometimes the argument is never answered; the character of the messenger becomes a convenient substitute for engaging the message. Truth sometimes sends its invoice to the person who delivers it.

Societies should therefore not demand courage while steadily increasing its price. Academics, too, should be wary of confusing proximity with influence: a scholar who remains in an important room only because nothing they say threatens its assumptions may possess access without influence.

This brings us back to how universities understand impact.

There is no citation count for a disastrous policy abandoned before implementation, no ranking for the bridge that never collapsed because an engineer was heard, and no award for the scholar whose inconvenient analysis caused a department to reconsider. The disaster that does not happen leaves few monuments.

We celebrate what universities produce because production leaves visible traces. Prevention is harder to see. Yet sometimes nothing happening is the achievement: a bad policy was abandoned before money was wasted, an institution changed course before collapse, or a mistake was stopped while it was still only a possibility.

That should force us to ask a question that rarely appears on a university dashboard: what serious mistakes did our knowledge institutions help society avoid?

Perhaps university impact should not be understood only in terms of what knowledge creates. Sometimes its greatest public value lies in what knowledge prevents.

The scholarâs obligation to society is therefore larger than publication. It includes placing knowledge where it can interrupt avoidable error. The government should not expect academics to become praise singers, opposition parties should not expect them to become permanent critics, and universities should not expect them to become custodians of institutional reputation.

Society should demand something harder and more honest: tell us what the evidence says, when it supports what we are doing and when it does not. Tell us what you know, but also what you do not know. Tell us before the money is spent, before the institution collapses and before failure becomes so obvious that everybody suddenly claims to have seen it coming.

And, when necessary, tell us even when telling us carries a price.

Because the most dangerous society is not one without intelligent people. It is one filled with intelligent people who have concluded that intelligence is safest when kept private.

The greatest contribution of universities may not always be the truths their scholars discover. Sometimes it is the truths their scholars are prepared to say while those truths are still expensive. DM

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.