Below is the review of The Death of Expertise by Thomas Nichols as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the June 2018 issue. It has some good points, but from Mr. Nichols twitter posts, it is apparent he is a neocon and there is a theme of follow us experts, even if we occasionally err and start a dumb war.
At the Long Hill Institute we are happy to defer to expertise in fields as diverse as medicine or plumbing, though such disciplines occasionally see failures.
In areas such as foreign policy, to say the record is less than stellar is to be guilty of gross understatement. The book is a defense of the class that Mr. Nichols is part of and is less than convincing.
The Death of
Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters by Thomas M. Nichols
Consumers of news programs might be surprised to learn expertise
is dying. After all, on television and radio and in print there is a
surfeit of men and women who hold themselves out as possessed of special skill
and are willing to discuss or indoctrinate at length on whatever arcane branch
of knowledge they claim.
According to Tom Nichols there is a problem. His The Death of
Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
documents the crisis.
Have graduate schools been shuttered by a regime bent on
suppressing intellectual inquiry? Not at all. The problem is more that the non-experts do
not properly defer to the specialist caste
Tom Nichols is an expert. Many of the talking heads
infesting the airwaves with the claim are not. The author has a long list
of credentials that include degrees and posts of importance. Currently,
he is a Professor at the US Naval War College in Newport, RI. He also teaches at the Harvard Extension
School. Even more impressive, Nichols is an undefeated five-time Jeopardy
winner.
Professor Nichols does provide example after example to prove his
case. He tells us we need experts well versed in their disciplines.
He is especially upset with people who, after a google search, call
out accomplished professionals with superficial online knowledge. The anti-vaccine
movement comes in for his ire. A few
celebrities get a hold of an idea and soon the usual inoculations we all got
are questioned by people with law degrees and acting credits. It is
hysteria and he is dead on with that and other examples.
The problem is, it is not as new as Tom might have it. There
has always been something coming along to attack established knowledge.
Sometimes it actually turns out to be valid but more often, it is just a
fad, and oft a dangerous one, but it is not new.
It was about 1975 and I had a passenger in my cab who wanted to
tell me about a cancer treatment that what passed for big pharma at the time
wanted to suppress. The quack cure that
was Laetrile was big and in its day, went as “viral” as could happen back then.
I had heard about it as it was hard to avoid and was at least thankful my
fare was not a Moonie trying to convert me.
Before the internet, the country was filled with mass fads such as
new age crystals and bookstores had shelves filled with the self-help tomes
that came and went. In those primitive times the world was going to end
because of “acid rain.”
Tom is a smart guy and a man as knowledgeable as he is should not be
a victim of presentism. Neither should we dismiss his concerns out of
hand. The internet, unlike the stacks in
the library, will give us an answer in seconds. Research is easy and
easily wrong, but without technology, intellectual mischief is still possible.
Where he is on solid ground is his chapter on education. The
34-page section amplifies the findings of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against
Education reviewed in the April issue of this magazine.
According to Tom, “““College graduate” today means a lot of
things. Unfortunately, “a person of demonstrated educational achievement”
is not always one of them.” After stating that, he then goes on to praise
the university system for its strengths before getting back to what’s wrong.
Mass education means that there is an increasing “commodification”
of college. Attendees are treated as “clients rather than as students”.
He is right, but it could not be otherwise in a buyer’s market.
Nichols teaches at the Naval War College in Newport and is thus
more aware of the college scene in Rhode Island. His observation as to
what goes on at the most prestigious school in our sister state may be
representative:
“Parents of students at Brown University, for example are shelling
out some serious money so their children can take part in things like “Campus
Nudity Week.” (One female Brown participant said in 2013 that “the negative
feedback” about the event “has helped prepare her for life after college.”
One can only hope.)”
As to what college has become for many all over the country he
quotes a graduate of a California party school about, “those magical seven
years between high school and your first warehouse job.”
Spending a good deal of time in the Pioneer Valley, your reviewer
can attest to the truth of what the author writes about. The college
towns of Amherst, Northampton and South Hadley seem nothing so much as a theme
park, an academic Disney World. The locales are saturated with bars,
restaurants and trendy shops. There is
an occasional bookstore, but hardly an overabundance.
Surely, however, the young are learning and will be able to carry
on as experts to replace Tom and his class as the next generation.
Nichols’ writing does not inspire confidence.
The student today, he notes, sees him or herself as the
professor’s equal. They are insulted by a bad grade or correction.
Undergrads expect professors to be available 24/7 via email and are demanding
in tone on that medium.
Add to that grade inflation, almost everyone gets an A, and it
does not bode well for the future of expertise.
Expertise itself is defended by the author vigorously. He
does admit that the cognoscenti are not without error. Sometimes it as if
he is saying, on the one hand we need the big thinkers, on the other hand, boy,
can they blow it. So why the book and why now?
Nichols was part of the nevertrump movement. Trump, as he
illustrates in Pages 211 through 213 was the anti-intellectual candidate.
As a member of the class of heavy thinkers, he would naturally be against
the yahoo. That does not mean Tom does
not have a case.
The professor admits to his mistakes as an expert on Russia, but
notes he was too young to be part of the prior cohort in the field who failed
to see the fragility and coming demise of the Soviet Union. A little
research outside the book reveals that he was for the 2003 Iraq invasion. Nichols does not really cover that other than
to say that public skepticism is warranted when people who got that wrong
return to give advice. Ya think, Tom?
In fact, the vast majority of intellectuals were for the invasion
and few if any careers suffered for their foolishness. The great unwashed
have every right to be skeptical, if not downright cynical about their betters.
Can we do without a stratum of intellectuals studying the great
issues of the day? You might think your reviewer is calling for “off with
their heads.”
No, as flawed as they may be, they are a necessary component of
the body politic. A road map tells us our position on land. Political scientists, social scientists and historians
and others tell us our position in time and in history.
We just have to remember their predictive track record will never
be anywhere near flawless.
