The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

by Tom Nichols

In 2016, a Democratic Party presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, said that a college degree today is the equivalent of what a high school degree was fifty years ago—and that therefore everyone should go to college just as everyone now attends high school. Six years later, President Joe Biden tried to push through a large-scale forgiveness of student debt—but without any effort to alleviate the conditions that encouraged all that debt in the first place. Both Sanders and Biden avoided the reality that treating colleges as remedial high schools is a significant part of how we got here in the first place. The larger point, however, is that the cumulative result of too many “students,” too many “professors,” too many “universities,” and too many degrees is that college attendance is no longer a guarantee that people know what they’re talking about. The failures of the modern university are fueling attacks on the very knowledge those same institutions have worked for centuries to create and to teach to future generations. Intellectual discipline and maturation have fallen by the wayside. The transmission of important cultural learning—including everything from how to construct a logical argument to the foundational DNA of American civilization—is no longer the mission of the customer-service university.