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

by Thomas M. Nichols

But this book isn’t about why colleges are screwed up. I don’t have enough pages for that. Rather, it is about why fewer people respect learning and expertise, and this chapter, in turn, is about how colleges and universities paradoxically became an important part of that problem.

The most important of these intellectual capabilities, and the one most under attack in American universities, is critical thinking: the ability to examine new information and competing ideas dispassionately, logically, and without emotional or personal preconceptions.

College is no longer a passage to educated maturity and instead is only a delaying tactic against the onset of adulthood—in some cases, for the faculty as well as for the students.

The most competitive and elite colleges and universities have fewer concerns in this regard, as they can pick and choose from applicants as they wish and fill their incoming classes with generally excellent students. Their students will get a full education, or close to it, and then usually go on to profitable employment.

Not only are there too many students, there are too many professors. The very best national universities, the traditional sources of university faculty, are promiscuously pumping out PhDs at a rate far higher than any academic job market can possibly absorb.

The emergence of these faux universities is in part a response to an insatiable demand for degrees in a culture where everyone

College is supposed to be an uncomfortable experience. It is where a person leaves behind the rote learning of childhood and accepts the anxiety, discomfort, and challenge of complexity that leads to the acquisition of deeper knowledge—hopefully, for a lifetime.

toxic combination of insecurity and arrogance

because more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants.

College students may not be dumber than they were thirty years ago, but their sense of entitlement and their unfounded self-confidence have grown considerably.

Children and young adults are more empowered in this process at least in part because loan programs have shifted control over tuition from parents to students. 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.

As a professor at an elite school once said to me, “Some days, I feel less like a teacher and more like a clerk in an expensive boutique.”

that admission to college is the beginning, not the end, of education and that respecting a person’s opinion does not mean granting equal respect to that person’s knowledge.

What happened next transfixed many readers. (Jeffrey Lewis, an arms expert in California, captured and posted the exchange online.) “I can’t find the chemical and physical properties of sarin gas [sic] someone please help me,” the student tweeted. Kaszeta offered his help. He corrected her by noting that Sarin isn’t a gas and that the word should be capitalized. As Lewis later wryly noted, “Dan’s help [met] with a welcome sigh of relief from our beleaguered student.” Actually, it met with a string of expletives.

Colleges and universities also mislead their students about their own competence through grade inflation.

it did in 1960 or even 1980. A study of two hundred colleges and universities up through 2009 found that A was the most commonly given grade, an increase of nearly 30 percent since 1960

Grades in the A and B range together now account for more than 80 percent of all grades in all subjects, a trend that continues unabated.17

In other words, all the children are now above average. In 2012, for example, the most frequently given grade at Harvard was a straight A. At Yale, more than 60 percent of all grades are either A- or A. That can happen now and then in a particular class, but that’s almost impossible across an entire ...

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.

Princeton, Wellesley, and Harvard, among others, established committees to look into the problem of grade inflation. Princeton adopted a policy that tried to limit the faculty’s ability to give A grades in 2004,

an experiment that was rolled back by the faculty itself less than a decade later. At Wellesley, humanities departments tried to cap the average grade at a B+ in their courses; those courses lost a fifth of their enrollments and the participating departments lost nearly a third of their majors. Experienced educators have grappled with this problem for years. I am one of them, and like my colleagues, I have not found a solution.

Another way colleges and universities enhance the notion that students are clients, and thus devalue respect for expertise, is to encourage the students to evaluate the educators standing in front of them as though they are peers.

College isn’t a restaurant.

As entertaining as these evaluations are, they all encourage students to think of themselves as the arbiters of the talent of the teachers.

There are dozens of books and articles out there about how colleges and universities have become havens of political correctness, where academic freedom is suffocated under draconian codes enforced by ideologues among the students and the faculty.

many colleges have become hostages to students who demand that their feelings override every other consideration.

student activism is a normal part of college life. Adolescents are supposed to be passionate; it’s part of being a teen or a twentysomething.

You have a degree? Well, I did a Google search!

Do not believe everything you read on the Internet, especially quotes from famous people. Abraham Lincoln (probably)

fact, who is anyone to argue with anyone? In the Information Age, there’s no such thing as an irresolvable argument. Each of us is now walking around with more accumulated information on a smartphone or tablet than ever existed in the entire Library of Alexandria.

Sturgeon angrily responded by noting that the critics were setting too high a bar. Most products in most fields, he argued, are of low quality, including what was then considered serious writing. “Ninety percent of everything,” Sturgeon decreed, “is crap.”

1994, there were fewer than three thousand websites online. By 2014, there were more than one billion sites.1 Most of them are searchable and will arrive before your eyes in mere seconds, regardless of their quality.

The good news is that even if Sturgeon’s Law holds, that’s still one hundred million pretty good websites. These include all the major news publications of the world

The Internet is the printing press at the speed of fiber optics.

The free movement of ideas is a powerful driver of democracy, but it always carries the risk that ignorant or evil people will bend the tools of mass communication to their own ends and propagate lies and myths that no expert can dispel.

Obviously, nonexperts are not always wrong about everything, nor are experts always right. Once in a blue moon, a teenager can get it right and a team of doctors can get it wrong.

Learning new things requires patience and the ability to listen to other people. The Internet and social media, however, are making us less social and more confrontational. Online, as in life, people are clustering into small echo chambers, preferring only to talk to those with whom they already agree.

2014 Pew research study found that liberals are more likely than conservatives to block or unfriend people with whom they disagreed, but mostly because conservatives already tended to have fewer people with whom they disagreed in their online social circles in the first place.

people using the Internet assume that everyone is equally intelligent or informed merely by virtue of being online.

This is a rule very few people would use in real life, but on the Internet, the intellectual narcissism of the random commenter displaces the norms that usually govern face-to-face interactions. This strange combination of distance and intimacy poisons conversation.

The Internet is the largest anonymous medium in human history. The ability to argue from a distance, and the cheapened sense of equality it provides, is corroding trust and respect among all of us, experts and laypeople alike.

“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.”23 This is especially dangerous now that social media like Facebook and Twitter have become the primary sources of news and information for many Americans, and experts trying to break through this shell of political insularity and self-assured ignorance do so at their peril.

Thankfully, a German scientist, Johannes Bohannon of the Institute of Diet and Health, wrote

paper that was published in a journal and then joyfully covered in press throughout the world, and he verified what we have all suspected all along: chocolate is really good for you. Except Johannes Bohannon doesn’t exist. Neither does the Institute

of Diet and Health. The journal that published the paper is real, but apparently it is less than scrupulous about things like peer review and editing. “Johannes” Bohannon was in fact a journalist named John Bohannon, who was (in Bohannon’s words) “part of a team of gonzo journalists and one doctor” ...

headlines behind die...

Experts face a vexing challenge: there’s more news available, and yet people seem less informed, a trend that goes back at least a quarter century. Paradoxically, it is a problem that is worsening rather than dissipating. Not only do people know less about the world around them, they are less interested in it, despite the availability of more information than ever before.

Social scientists and pollsters have long recognized that younger people have usually been somewhat less attuned to politics and serious issues. But the difference has been greatly sharpened.4 Those respondents are

saw something from a source I happen to like and it told me something I wanted to hear.”

The short answer where journalism is concerned—in an explanation that could be applied to many modern innovations—is that technology collided with capitalism and gave people what they wanted, even when it wasn’t good for them. I realize that criticizing journalism and the modern news media puts me at risk of violating the Prime Directive for experts: never tell other experts how to do their jobs.