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

by Thomas M. Nichols

When I first arrived at Dartmouth at the end of the 1980s, I was told a story about a well-known (and, at the time, still-living) member of the faculty that in a small way illustrates this problem and the challenge it presents to experts and educators. The renowned astrophysicist Robert Jastrow gave a lecture on President Ronald Reagan’s plan to develop space-based missile defenses, which he strongly supported. An undergraduate challenged Jastrow during the question-and-answer period, and by all accounts Jastrow was patient but held to his belief that such a program was possible and necessary. The student, realizing that a scientist at a major university was not going to change his mind after a few minutes of arguing with a sophomore, finally shrugged and gave up. “Well,” the student said, “your guess is as good as mine.” Jastrow stopped the young man short. “No, no, no,” he said emphatically. “My guesses are much, much better than yours.” Professor Jastrow has since passed away, and I never got the chance while I was in Hanover to ask him what happened that day. But I suspect that he was trying to teach some life lessons that are increasingly resisted by college students and citizens alike: 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. Whether national missile defenses are a wise policy is still debatable. What hasn’t changed, however, is that th...