Regarding Princeton, Ralph Nader has discussed a type of flawed intellectualism that he sometimes found there as a student:
“One day in the spring . . . I noticed noticed there were dead birds on the pavement between the campus buildings . . . a few days later I saw more such birds . . . I noticed that during the day groundskeepers would be spraying with huge hoses those [surrounding] trees. It turns out it was DDT. At that time . . . no one thought DDT was dangerous to anybody but insects. Well it turned out it was dangerous right there to birds. I went down to the Princetonian, the college paper, and tried to persuade them to do a story . . . and they said, “Naw, there’s nothing wrong. We have some of the best science professors in the world . . . if they had any idea it was harmful, it would be stopped” . . . But that taught me a very important lesson. One, that newspaper people can get very jaded . . . Second, that you might know something, like an expert chemistry professor, but if you are not interested in a problem, or if you have a dual allegiance, like perhaps you might be a consultant to one of the companies that produces the pesticide, you are not going to apply what you know . . .”