Craig Ferguson has discovered the corruption of expert testimony.
He is horrified by faculty from a variety of universities who earn obscene fees for saying just what their corporate sponsors want them to say, or for testifying in defense of Wall Street high rollers, when those billionaire vulture capitalists wind up on trial for a variety of misdeeds--the professor from Columbia School of Business or the Harvard faculty in economics shows up to wow the jury and pleads the case for the vulture.
To any doctor who has ever had the edifying experience of being paid to testify at a malpractice trial, the corruption of the idea of truthful, unbought, expert opinion is no news.
We have a society which is thoroughly corrupt, when it comes to "truth seekers" in academia and the professions.
Reading The Terrible Hours about Charles Momsen,  the man who developed the first devices which could rescue submariners, trapped three hundred feet below the surface in a dead boat, you realize how uncorrupted that sort of engineer is. And you realize how, whatever it's shortcomings, the military, in those days at least, had the power to set aside the corrupting influence of money when mens' lives were on the line.
So it is possible for institutions to be clean and efficient. It's really just a matter of will and character.

If America fails, I'd have to bet it will not be because we have grown more stupid or more lazy, but we have simply failed to understand how corrosive corruption can be.