  I'm reading Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins , originally published in 1967 & revised two years later, in 1969. It's fascinating & still relevant. These various factors---access to power, shared ideology, professionalization---may or may not be deplorable in themselves, but there can be no doubt that they interact so as to pose a serious threat to the integrity of scholarship in fields that are struggling for intellectual content and are thus particularly susceptible to the workings of a kind of Gresham's law. 
