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

by Tom Nichols

A more prosaic motivation behind this name game is to find new funding streams by grafting graduate programs onto small colleges. The competition to pull in more money and the consequent proliferation of graduate programs have thus forced these new “universities” into a degree-granting arms race. Not only are schools adding graduate programs in professional degrees like business administration, but many of them are bloating their undergraduate programs with additional coursework for a master’s degree. Faced with this competitive pressure from other schools doing likewise, some of these fledgling universities then step up their game and add doctoral programs. And because these small schools cannot support a doctoral program in an established field, they construct esoteric interdisciplinary fields that exist only to create new credentials. It’s not hard to see how this ends up creating degrees that do not signal a corresponding level of knowledge.