"I am Shiva, the Destroyer of Words" The above epigraph from the Bhagavad Gita was mouthed in 1945 not by a raving Nazi propagandist holed up in a Berlin bunker, nor by a corn-cob-pipe smoking Allied general wading ashore on a Pacific island. Rather, the speaker of these words was a university professor--Robert Oppenheimer. In August of 1945, shortly after the destruction of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on humanity. Oppenheimer's exclamation marks a sea change of sorts in the relationship between knowledge and power. Although academic knowledge and political puissance have always been stranger bedfellows, during and after the Second World War, academics delivered into the hands of politicians an incredible amount of power. Stepping out of their classrooms and labs, professors moved into the public arena. Although some--like Fareed Zakaria, Henry Kissinger, and the recently departed David Halberstam--might argue that the importing of academic minds into the public sphere has been salutary, there exists a strong counter-argument that such engagement has not been an unqualified success.
