Bruni: When Hollywood hype trumps Harvard values

Call me an idealist, but I'd like to think that the halls of higher education are less vulnerable to the siren calls of fame and fortune than other byways of American life are. I'd like to believe in a bold dividing line between academic virtues and celebrity values, between intellectual and commercial concerns.

But Henry Louis Gates Jr., a renowned Harvard professor, and Mehmet Oz, a surgeon on the faculty at Columbia, get in my way.

I link the two because they're both in the news, not because they're equally in thrall to the television camera or identically unabashed peddlers of something other than fact. Oz is by far the more compromised figure. But Gates, too, exemplifies what happens when a lecturer is bathed in bright lights and gets to hang with Ben Affleck, who will soon be on-screen in Batman's billowing cape.

Affleck was a guest last October on the PBS documentary series 'Finding Your Roots,' in which Gates takes luminaries — Sting, Stephen King, Angela Bassett — on journeys into their pasts. Affleck signed up for the trip.

But when he learned that he had a slave-owning ancestor, he asked that the detail be excised, according to communications between Gates and his friend Michael Lynton, the chief executive of Sony Entertainment. Their exchange was part of the hacked Sony emails recently shared by WikiLeaks.

'We've never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found,' Gates wrote to Lynton, going on to fret over the 'integrity' of the series. 'He's a megastar. What do we do?'

Gates left the detail out.

After the disclosure of this late last week, he insisted, unpersuasively, that the cut reflected nothing more than the need to make room for other ancestors of Affleck's who warranted inclusion in the episode.

Regardless, it exposed Gates, a trusted authority on the African-American experience, to accusations that he'd sold out. It diminished him.

But wasn't that inevitable from the moment he hitched scholarship to show business?

'We conflate what a PBS special is with academic work,' Carol Anderson, who teaches at Emory University, told Jamil Smith in the New Republic. 'We have to understand that so much of what we see there is packaged for a nonacademic audience that wants the picture of really deep, intellectual discussion but is not quite ready for what that means.'

What does the audience of 'The Dr. Oz Show' want?

To judge by what Oz gives them, it's winnowed thighs, amulets against cancer and breathless promises of 'magic' and 'revolutionary' breakthroughs.

Oz has morphed not just willingly but exuberantly into a carnival barker. He's a one-man morality play about the temptations of mammon and the seduction of applause, a Faustian parable with a stethoscope.

Many Americans probably had no idea that he remained affiliated with Columbia — he's vice chairman of its surgery department — until they read last week about an email sent to the university by 10 physicians around the country. They accused him of 'promoting quack treatments' for 'personal financial gain' and urged Columbia to sever its ties with him.

He's expected to defend himself on television later this week, and his publicity machine has gone into overdrive, seeking to discredit the physicians and frame the issue as one of free speech.

But don't forget that he was called before a U.S. Senate panel last year to explain his on-air gushing about green coffee extract, raspberry ketones and other faddish weight-loss supplements. Admonishing him, Sen. Claire McCaskill noted that 'the scientific community is almost monolithic' in its rejection of 'products you called 'miracles.' '

Also remember that the British Medical Journal published a study of scores of his show's medical recommendations, saying more than half didn't have sound scientific backing.

And bear in mind that the Sony emails included one that showed Oz to be eager, as Vox reported, 'to use his platform on the show to help expand Sony's fitness and health-tracking devices market.' Sony is one of the producers of 'Dr. Oz.'

But well beyond Oz, there's an unsettling corruption of academia by celebrity culture.

Many professors do double duty as television pundits, even though sound bites, which are inherently unsubtle, run counter to what scholarship exalts. And educational institutions choose speakers largely — and sometimes solely — for their star power. The University of Houston spent $155,000 to schedule Matthew McConaughey for its commencement next month.

Maybe he's more learned than we realize. Or maybe erudition counts for less than buzz, even in those enclaves that are supposed to be about deep, durable things.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for the New York Times.