THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The definition of the word "professional" is that you get paid for what you do. If you get paid for what you do your professionalism is ALWAYS biased.

A lot of bias comes from wanting to get paid more for what you do. Professional electricians and carpenters will naturally prefer union shop rules that keep people who are not union certified from being electricians or carpenters, because this decreases the number of people who can compete with them and keep their wages down.

This rule holds for working folks and it holds for highly educated professionals like doctors. Whatever reduces the power and income of doctors will be opposed by most doctors, and every one of those doctors will think he is being purely objective.

The fact is that doctors know more about medicine than the rest of us do. So why don't we just let doctors decide all public policy on medicine?

We don't turn public medical policy entirely over to doctors because we know doctors have biases. We also know that doctors don't even know they have those biases. But they're there, or we could let a panel of doctors take over Medicare, no questions asked.

Generals know more about the military than we do. So would you be willing to turn all questions of military expenditures and when and where to go to war over to generals?

Anybody who wanted to do that would be provided with a free visit to the funny farm.

"In Your Professional Judgement..."

We always hear the phrase, "in your professional judgement," and we think that means we are talking to a person who is trained to look at the facts objectively, cooly, and without taking sides.

That NEVER happens.

The person you are asking to be "a professional judge" in a particular specialty has earned his status as a professional precisely by being part of a very narrow group. You cannot spend four years in pre-medicine, four years in medical school, two years in internship, two to five years in specialization, all among professionals in the same field, and come out of all that without at least a lot of the attitudes of all the people who have trained you, worked with you and, above all, decided that you are the kind of person they want in their profession.

Professional Objectivity Is An Oxymoron

The Supreme Court just got rid of all the minimum sentencing laws that Congress passed to keep professional judges from letting career criminals back on the streets.

What else would you expect? Professional judges will naturally feel that the only people who should sentence criminals are other professional judges.

The United States Supreme Court is one of the three branches of the Federal Government. So when it comes to a conflict between state and Federal authority, the Supreme Court will consistently favor Federal power.

Everybody but me agrees that the United States Supreme Court IS the Constitution of the United States. Now if the Supreme Court IS the Constitution, and we are a country which is under the Constitution, then the Supreme Court, meaning the Constitution, is above the other two branches of government.

George McGovern declared that anybody who opposed racial busing was an enemy of the United States Constitution, because the Supreme Court had made its decision. I ran into this totally uncompromising argument in busing debates in congress.

In one press discussion for my congressman boss, I said the question on busing was whether the balance of powers between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary actually existed.

It does not.

The courts rule absolutely.

"Professional Objectivity" Is Man's Most Dangerous Myth

My last book, Why Johnny Can't Think, iis about a similar disaster caused by this "professional objectivity" nonsense.

Our universities and colleges have gotten themselves a monopoly and they are exploiting it exactly as any rational person should have said they would sixty years ago when the GI Bill of Rights dumped billions of dollars into sending World War II "veterans" (most of whom had never heard a shot fired) for a free college indoctrination.

This Greatest Generation was ideal to absorb the idea that professors should rule the world.

The whole Greatest Generation had been beaten into dog-like obedience in the Obedience Training courses called Basic Training. They were a total break with earlier Americans, who thought in terms of individual action and personal judgement.

They worshipped government. And their professors told them that leftist professors were the Objective Professionals who could provide an objective assessment of reality to them. Businessmen were greedy. Military men wanted money that should go into social action.

In class, no student ever asked whether the professional professor might have some biases of his own.

As happens in many cases, the minute the discussion began in class the important point was already agreed on. Everybody assumed that, while military men and doctors and businessmen were all biased, professors were discussing things objectively.

And all the discussion tended to reinforce the conclusion that military men and businessmen were not to be trusted (which is true), and professors and their big government plans were objectivity itself.

Professional objectivity, you know.

Professorial objectivity, you know.