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.

as a former college admissions officer noted, more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants.

Even without these financial pressures, the stampede toward college by unprepared students is also due to a long-standing culture of affirmation and self-actualization that forbids confronting children with failure.

There is also the more general trend, however, that parents for some decades have abdicated more and more decisions about many things to their children.

email encourages a misplaced sense of intimacy that erodes the boundaries necessary to effective teaching.

the informality of communication between teachers and students is one more example of how college life can contribute to the eroding respect for experts and their abilities.

Some of them, of course, treat children as their equals because they have absorbed the idea that the students really are their peers, a mistake that hurts both teaching and learning.

The solution to this reversal of roles in the classroom is for teachers to reassert their authority.

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.

Every campus has “default majors,” chosen when a student has no real idea what to do, some of which are off-ramps from more demanding programs after students learn the limits of their abilities.

The problem comes when too many courses start to look like gut courses. They exist in the humanities, the social sciences, and yes, even in the sciences, and their numbers, at least by my subjective judgment, are growing. No field is immune, and a look through the offerings of many programs around the country—as well as a compilation of the grades given in them—suggests that what were once isolated professorial vices are now common departmental habits.

colleges” and served that purpose well. Their history or English departments fulfilled the perfectly useful function of producing history and English teachers.

There’s nothing wrong with personal fulfillment or following your bliss—if you can afford it.

The fact remains, however, that taking a course at a regional college with an overworked adjunct is usually a lot different than studying at a top university with an accomplished scholar. It might be true, but saying so immediately generates huffy cries of snobbery, and everyone walks away angry.

Studying the same thing might give people a common language for further discussion of a subject, but it does not automatically make them peers.

Why is grade inflation happening? We answer this with a question: Who wants tougher grading standards? Administrators want high graduation rates. Departments want to attract students to enroll in their courses and major in their subject areas. Faculty who are easier graders are rewarded with higher scores in teaching evaluations. Furthermore, as colleges increase the number of adjuncts they employ, these less-stable faculty members may worry more about the impact of student satisfaction and enrollment on their continued employment, and increase grades accordingly.21

The problem, of course, is that no one university or program can take a stand against grade inflation without harming its own students: the first faculty to deflate their grades instantly make their students seem less capable than those from other institutions. This, as Rampell correctly noted, means that the default grade is no longer the “gentleman’s C” of the 1950s, but a “gentleman’s A,” now bestowed more as an entitlement for course completion than as a reward for excellence.

Student ratings are most useful in spotting trends; a multiyear look at evaluations can identify both the best and the worst teachers,

Evaluating teachers creates a habit of mind in which the layperson becomes accustomed to judging the expert, despite being in an obvious position of having inferior knowledge of the subject material.

clients are happy, a college’s reliance on evaluations forces weaker or less secure teachers to become dancing bears, striving to be loved or at least liked, so that more students will read the reviews and keep the class (and the professor’s contract) alive for the next term.

reason to surrender to it. And make no mistake: campuses in the United States are increasingly surrendering their intellectual authority not only to children, but also to activists who are directly attacking the traditions of free inquiry that scholarly communities are supposed to defend.

Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what’s true and what’s false, and where they learn to follow a model of scholarly inquiry no matter where it takes them. Instead, many colleges have become hostages to students who demand that their feelings override every other consideration.

Interestingly, this is a subject that often unites liberal and conservative intellectuals. The British scholar Richard Dawkins, something of a scourge to conservatives because of his views on religion, was perplexed by the whole idea of “safe spaces,” the places American students demand as a respite from any form of political expression they might find “triggering.” Dawkins minced no words: “A university is not a ‘safe space,’ ” he said on Twitter. “If you need a safe space, leave, go home, hug your teddy and suck your thumb until ready for university.”

In some ways, the convenience of the Internet is a tremendous boon, but mostly for people already trained in research and who have some idea what they’re looking for.

Can fifty million Elvis fans really be wrong? Of course they can.

The deeper issue here is that the Internet is changing the way we read, the way we reason, even the way we think, and all for the worse. We expect information instantly. We want it broken down, presented in a way that is pleasing to our eye—no more of those small-type, fragile textbooks, thank you—and we want it to say what we want it to say. People do not do “research” so much as they “search for pretty pages online to provide answers they like with the least amount of effort and in the shortest time.” The resulting flood of information, always of varying quality and sometimes of uncertain sanity, creates a veneer of knowledge that leaves people worse off than if they knew nothing at all. It’s an old saying, but it’s true: it ain’t what you don’t know that’ll hurt you, it’s what you do know that ain’t so.

The major problem with instantaneous communication is that it’s instantaneous. While the Internet enables more people to talk to each other than ever before—a distinctly new historical condition—everyone talking immediately to everyone else might not always be such a good idea. Sometimes, human beings need to pause and to reflect, to give themselves time to absorb information and to digest it. Instead, the Internet is an arena in which people can react without thinking, and thus in turn they become invested in defending their gut reactions rather than accepting new information or admitting a mistake—especially if it’s a mistake pointed out by people with greater learning or experience.

This happens because after enough time surfing, people no longer can distinguish between things that may have flashed before their eyes and things they actually know.

The way in which a lot of wrong guesses can be milled into one big right guess is a well-established phenomenon. Unfortunately, the way people think the Internet can serve as a way of crowd-sourcing knowledge conflates the perfectly reasonable idea of what the writer James Surowiecki has called “the wisdom of crowds” with the completely unreasonable idea that the crowds are wise because each member of the mob is also wise.

So who needs experts? If we ask the same question enough times, or set enough people to work on the same subject, why not rely on their collective wisdom instead of seeking the flawed or biased opinion of only a handful of self-anointed Wise Ones?

A good question to ask is what *kind* of questions are better answered by crowd sourcing?

volunteers do what interests them at any given time, while professionals employ their expertise every day. A hobby is not the same thing as a career. As a saying attributed to the British writer Alastair Cooke goes, “Professionals are people who can do their best work when they don’t feel like it.”

And on some subjects, Wikipedia is a perfectly serviceable source of information. As the MIT article noted, articles are skewed “toward technical, Western, and male-dominated subject matter,” so when it comes to tangible—and, more important, uncontroversial—information, Wikipedia has succeeded in bringing together a lot of data in a reliable and stable format.

What people misunderstand about Wikipedia and other online resources, and about the wisdom of crowds in general, is that knowledge is about a lot more than assembling a box of factoids or making coin-toss predictions. Facts do not speak for themselves. Sources like Wikipedia are valuable for basic data as a kind of perpetually updating almanac, but they’re not much help on more complex matters.

Teachers, especially, know that the same material delivered at a distance or on a screen has a different impact than personal interaction with a student who can ask questions, furrow a brow, or show an expression of sudden understanding.

And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness. Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin. Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant.

Experts trying to confront this kind of stubborn ignorance may think they’re helping, when in fact they’re basically trying to throw water on a grease fire. It doesn’t work and only spreads the damage around.

as Megan McArdle wrote in 2016, “Even if we are not deliberately blocking people who disagree with us, Facebook curates our feeds so that we get more of the stuff we ‘like.’ What do we ‘like’? People and posts that agree with us.”27

To put this in perspective, the average American home in 1960 had three television stations available to it along with eight radio stations, one newspaper, and three or four magazines.6 By 2014, the Nielsen rating organization estimated that the average US home had 189 television channels (60 more than it had in 2008) with consumers tuning in consistently to about 17 of those channels.

“How can you say you don’t care what your customers think?” Alan Murray, who oversees online news at the Wall Street Journal, said in 2015. “We care a lot about what our readers think. But our readers also care a lot about our editorial judgment. So we’re always trying to balance the two.”

Worse, their daily interaction with so much media makes them resistant to learning anything that takes too long or isn’t entertaining enough.

Radio is where it all began; more accurately, radio is where people first immersed themselves in endless news and talk, in a medium that was supposedly killed off by television in the 1960s but found new life at the end of the twentieth century.

The growth of new kinds of media and the decline of trust are both intimately related to the death of expertise.

Conservative talkers may have been able to bring forward debates that major television networks would prefer to have ignored, but they also intensified the voices of people who think that opinions are as good as facts, and that experts are no smarter, and far more mendacious, than anyone else.

The modern media, with so many options tailored to particular views, is a huge exercise in confirmation bias. This means that Americans are not just poorly informed, they’re misinformed.

This mindset, and the market that services it, creates in laypeople a combination of groundless confidence and deep cynicism, habits of thought that defeat the best attempts of experts to educate their fellow citizens.

This is partly the fault, as so much is these days, of “academizing” what used to be a trade. Rather than apprenticeships as part of a career track that includes writing obituaries and covering boring town meetings, journalism and communications are now undergraduate majors. These departments and programs crank out young people with little knowledge about the subjects of their correspondence. They are schooled in the structure of a story but not in the habits or norms of the profession. Many of them, accustomed to posting their deep thoughts online since high school, do not understand the difference between “journalism” and “blogging.”

The market’s focus on form rather than content, the need for speed, and the fashionable biases of the modern university combine to create a trifecta of misinformation.

“The key,” as the hoaxers later said, “is to exploit journalists’ incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that’s literally what you’re doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.”29

have four recommendations for you, the readers, when approaching the news: be humbler, be ecumenical, be less cynical, and be a lot more discriminating.

Be humble. That is, at least begin by assuming that the people writing the story, whatever their shortcomings, know more about the subject than you do.