Picture a quiet campus meeting room where eight senior scientists review research proposals.
The first grant under review offers twelve million dollars from the Pentagon to model missile paths. Reviewers nod and stamp the folder approved in six minutes. Six minutes flat. A second application asks for forty thousand dollars to test lead in city drinking water. Here, the committee hesitates. Members question whether the study offers commercial profit, then drop the file in the reject bin.
Nobody at the table acts out of cruelty. Senior faculty simply follow the money that keeps the lights on in their labs.
Society celebrates science as pure, objective truth. We picture curious thinkers chasing facts wherever they lead, standing above political fights.
The university ledger tells a different story. Throughout history, ruling classes decided what science studied, what questions got asked, and who got funded. Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls this elite capture: powerful groups seize public assets and bend them toward private gain.
Inside the academy, the committees and funders who control the money decide what counts as knowledge and what gets discarded.
Science for the Crown
Dividing science into separate fields didn’t arise from pure curiosity. It grew alongside the expansion of European empires.
Early kings funded mapmaking and ocean navigation because they needed ships to reach foreign ports. They funded chemistry to cast stronger bronze cannons. Fields that helped military conquest won royal charters and endowed chairs. Fields that helped ordinary people survive—like herbal healing, soil care, and clean water—were cast aside as folk lore.
That funding pattern is still with us today. Physics and weapons labs draw billions in public cash because governments want military power. Meanwhile, public health clinics fight for scraps. Academic prestige simply tracks value to the state.
The capture also decides whose knowledge counts at all. Indigenous land care, feminist studies of work, and anti-colonial history ask questions the European academies never posed. Universities pushed that work to the margins, then treated the margins as proof the questions weren’t serious. The vocabulary keeps the ranking alive: labs that model missiles are called hard science, fields that study how people live are called soft, and the communities that live with the results get no ranking at all.
Following the Drug Cash
Corporate money drives this capture even deeper.
In drug research, private labs don’t hunt for the cures that would ease the most human pain. They hunt for medicines that produce the longest streams of profit. A drug company will spend a billion dollars on a daily pill for chronic aches in wealthy cities, while ignoring fatal fevers that kill children in poor nations.
When public taxes fund basic breakthroughs in college labs, private drug firms buy the patents and charge five hundred dollars a pill. Commercial markets treat healing as a luxury product rather than a shared human right.
Scientific Cover for Power
Throughout history, rulers used scientific prestige to defend cruelty. When empires wanted to take land or buy slaves, they asked scholars to supply natural reasons.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European doctors measured human skulls to invent racial rankings. Men like Carl Linnaeus and Johann Blumenbach drew charts placing white Europeans at the top. Slave owners pointed to those charts to claim that human bondage was simple biology.
The charts served colonial rule too. When European empires took land in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the same measurements marked the people living there as less evolved. Conquest got a new name: the civilizing mission.
In the twentieth century, the eugenics movement put science to the same work. Francis Galton argued that states should weed out people deemed unfit. In the United States, doctors ran forced surgeries on Black women, poor families, and disabled people to stop them from having children. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the Supreme Court upheld those laws, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Nazi Germany then built state policy on the same hereditary theories and used them to justify killing Jewish, Romani, and disabled people in the Holocaust. The regime presented the murder as a scientific program.
Psychiatry did the same for gender and sexuality. Doctors diagnosed rebellious women with hysteria and locked them away. Major medical groups listed homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973, after gay activists stormed their panels.
Criminology supplied the same service to policing. In the 1870s, an Italian doctor named Cesare Lombroso claimed that born criminals could be picked out of a crowd by the shape of a face or a skull. The theory was wrong, but it was useful. It told police which bodies to watch, and the habit stuck. A century later, the War on Drugs put that old claim to work and filled prisons with Black and Latino people. Stop-and-frisk and broken-windows policing leaned on the same idea: crime lives in certain kinds of people. Black Americans are jailed today at far higher rates than white Americans for similar offenses.
Economics joined in with its own tools. In 1798, Thomas Malthus argued that the poor would always breed faster than food could grow, so famine was nature’s own correction. His math shaped industrial Britain’s New Poor Law of 1834 and its harsher workhouses, which treated poverty as a moral stain instead of the result of low wages and high rents. A later school, led by Milton Friedman, refreshed the argument. Markets, it said, are natural and government is the interference, so deregulation, privatization, and austerity counted as science. Under that framing, cutting a welfare program reads as obeying a law instead of choosing a side.
Change Who Sits at the Table
Seeing elite capture clearly frees us from the myth of neutral science. It helps us see that research budgets are political choices.
Changing that pattern means changing who sits at the table:
First, public funds must prioritize clean water, soil repair, and neighborhood clinics over weapons.
Second, communities harmed by industrial waste must help set research goals.
Third, universities must respect local knowledge alongside peer-reviewed journals.
Fourth, researchers must answer for what their work does. Ethics review has to weigh a study’s human and environmental cost, and the people it touches need a way to push back. A lab that takes public money owes the public that account.
Science remains our sharpest tool for studying the living world. But if it stays in the hands of corporate donors and military planners, it’ll keep serving their priorities.
For a deeper look at how power captures institutions, I recommend Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s book Elite Capture (2022) wholeheartedly.