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

by Thomas M. Nichols

I should clarify a few points. First, it’s not news to me or anyone else in higher education that even the best schools have “gut” courses, the class a student can pass by exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide for a set number of weeks. Perhaps it might be shocking for a professor to admit this, but there’s nothing wrong with easy or fun courses. I would even defend at least some of them as necessary. There should be classes where students can experiment with a subject, take something enjoyable, and get credit for learning something. The problem comes when all the courses start to look like gut courses. They exist in the sciences, the humanities, and the social 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.