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

by Thomas M. Nichols

The story was in part based on studies that claim that one in four (sometimes reported as one in five) women in America’s colleges and universities will be sexually assaulted. Claims like these helped to enable the Rolling Stone hoax, when the statistics themselves and the studies on which they were based should have raised concerns. As Slate’s Emily Yoffe wrote in 2014, “the one-in-four assertion would mean that young American college women are raped at a rate similar to women in Congo, where rape has been used as a weapon of war.”25 Another study central to this dire narrative later turned out to have included “college aged men” who were as old as seventy-one, whose average age was over twenty-six, and none of whom actually lived on a college campus. But no matter: the statistic is out there now more as a slogan than as a fact, and anyone arguing about it will say, understandably, that “they saw it in the news.”