Overall score: 3 out of 4 (worth reading)
Tom Nichols’ new book, The Death of Expertise: the Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, aims to explain the current culture of anti-intellectualism, marked by a notable public distrust of experts from all fields. The book focuses on the problem as manifested in American culture, and though certain strands of anti-intellectualism are uniquely American, the general affliction has infected many secular democracies, Canada included.
Nichols is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, as well as an adjunct at Harvard and a former US Senatorial aide. His professional specialties are international security and Russia. He is certainly, by any definition, an expert in his own disciplines, and thus had ample motivation to dwell on the subject of this book.
The main thesis of Nichols’ book is that the current wave of anti-intellectualism and public distrust of expert knowledge and advice is worse than it ever has been in modern history. This is a thesis I have long been sympathetic too, but I have always wondered if modern technology (mainly via the Internet) simply allows us to see and hear more about the proud ignorance of a disturbingly large proportion of misinformed American society, one that was perhaps always present. My main interest in Nichols’ book was to see what kind of case he could make for the “worse than ever before” thesis versus the “more visible than ever before” one.
Nichols argues that the modern, unprecedented rejection of expertise has occurred for six broad reasons: (1) bad tendencies of ordinary human nature, including confirmation bias; (2) the commodification of higher education; (3) the rise of the Internet; (4) the “new journalism” of entertainment over information; (5) the false equivalency between an expert erring and an expert knowing nothing; and (6) the confusion between policy-advisers (experts) and policy-makers (politicians). Nichols gives a good treatment of each of these broad points, but I want to focus on the one that interested me the most in this review, as it is the one I have to deal with the most in my own profession: the commodification of higher education.
Post-secondary education in the US (and in Canada) was once reserved for the chosen few: about 5% of the population at the end of World War II. Now, 1 in 3 Americans holds at least a bachelor’s degree, while nearly two-thirds of the population have acquired at least some college education. From a naïve point of view, this seems to be a good thing. How could more education be bad for a society? It can be bad precisely when an undergraduate degree of today equips a person with the equivalent of a high school diploma of 70 years ago. Schools and colleges in North America have dumbed down their curricula and lowered their expectations to accommodate a societal demand for a more egalitarian distribution of credentials, all while raking in ever larger amounts of tuition dollars. As Nichols notes, “schools and colleges have caused this degree inflation the same way governments cause monetary inflation: by printing more paper” (p. 75).
Regrettably, it is not simply that North Americans are getting smarter or that they are better educated. “College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right,” says Nichols (p. 70-71). In my experience, there is large agreement on this issue among teachers in higher education, often in direct contradiction to the feelings of many college and university administrators. The commodification of higher education means that the main function of a college or university is no longer to educate and equip new professionals with rigorous expertise (and to fail those who cannot adequately master these rigours), but is instead to generate revenue. This new model of higher education began to arise after WWII, but it is only since the 1980’s that the customer-driven approach has become the new norm in North America.
Nichols offers plenty of evidence for this disturbing trend, and it’s something that I have witnessed myself, both as a student of various North American institutions of higher education, and now as a postdoctoral researcher and teacher. To take one particularly glaring example, consider the phenomenon of grade inflation. Nichols reports: “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 and over 10 percent just since 1988. 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” (p. 95). See here for the source of those numbers and much more.
I still (mostly) remember the grading scales employed in the local public schools that I attended growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1990’s. The standard scale was as follows:
A+ = 98-100%
A = 95-97%
A- = 93-94%
B+ = 89-92%
B = 86-88%
B- = 83-85%
C+ = 79-82%
C = 76-78%
C- = 73-75%
D+ = 70-72%
D = 68-69%
D- = 66-67%
F = 0-65%
Some of these exact percentages are likely off, but I distinctly remember the B+ to A+ ranges (the ones I was most concerned with), as well as the D+ and F thresholds. Compare this to today’s grading scales in the same school district:
A+ = 97-100%
A = 94-96%
A- = 90-93%
B+ = 87-89%
B = 84-86%
B- = 80-83%
C+ = 77-79%
C = 74-76%
C- = 70-73%
D+ = 67-69%
D = 64-66%
D- = 60-63%
F = 0-59%
There’s been some downward movement, but is it enough to get greatly upset about? Maybe. But let’s return to grade inflation in higher education. During my undergraduate degree at DePaul University in Chicago (2003-06), the standard grading scale was as follows:
A = 93-100%
A- = 90-92%
B+ = 87-89%
B = 83-86%
B- = 80-82%
C+ = 77-79%
C = 73-76%
C- = 70-72%
D+ = 67-69%
D = 60-66%
F = 0-59%
To DePaul’s credit, this seems to be the same scale they currently employ. I got quite used to thinking of an A as 90% and above, a B as 80-89%, a C as 70-79%, a D as 60-69%, and an F as anything less. For an arbitrary scale, this metric-inspired classification seems somewhat reasonable. Compare this scale though to the one employed for undergraduates in most faculties at the University of British Columbia where I teach:
A+ = 90-100%
A = 85-89%
A- = 80-84%
B+ = 76-79%
B = 72-75%
B- = 68-71%
C+ = 64-67%
C = 60-63%
C- = 55-59%
D = 50-54%
F = 0-49%
I’ll be the first to admit that this is an unfair comparison, one that makes UBC look particularly bad. As Nichols’ research assures us though, UBC’s scale of assessment is extremely common nowadays. It’s easy to see how A’s and B’s can account for 80% of all grades given, now that a B- can correspond to the same percentage value that a D did in grammar school.
[NOTE: I am not ready to declare DePaul a model of pedagogic integrity. There are many ways to inflate grades besides actually shifting the percentage scales, including enforcing “no fail” policies on faculty, setting GPA targets, and other schemes hatched by various administrations in the name of increasing revenue. I don’t know if DePaul is guilty of any of these practices one way or another. Therefore, don’t read this as an indictment or an absolution either way.]
What’s more, this grade inflation means that it is often impossible to distinguish graduates with some level of real expertise or mastery of a subject from those who simply showed up. Many college transcripts give only letter grades (my DePaul transcripts did; I am not sure about UBC). It is a massive disservice to potential employers and to the students themselves to remove any semblance of objective meaning from these metrics. I feel particularly incensed for those students who really do exhibit mastery of a subject. Under a system like the one employed in most faculties at UBC, an A+ and an A- can be separated by 20% points. An 80% is a reasonable grade, but there is no way it should ever be lumped into a category so close to a 99%. You got an A+ in Calculus 1? Well, I got an A-, so we know about the same thing. This is another way that expertise has been undermined by the commodification of higher education: it’s hard to value expertise when it is seemingly so easy to acquire, at least in the form of a credential.
Some people will object though: college is hard. Shouldn’t the scale of expectation change with the difficulty level of the material? To this, I say a hard and loud no. It is precisely the increased difficulty, rigour, and expectation of critical thought comprising a higher education that demands a stringent metric. You don’t equip someone with expertise by lowering standards, you simply give them a false sense of their expertise.
This is a point that Nichols drives home repeatedly, and it is a critical one to make. As he notes, “the industrial model of education has reduced college to a commercial transaction, where students are taught to be picky consumers rather than critical thinkers. The ripple effect on expertise and the fuel this all provides to attacks on established knowledge defeat the very purpose of a university” (p. 98). Personally, as an undergraduate, I never thought of myself as a “consumer” of higher education. But I certainly see that mentality as a teacher in higher education now. It is quite common for some students to protest low grades because of the amount of money they are spending to attend the institution. I have often heard the lament, If I’m not doing well enough, then the school/department/instructor is not doing their job. I was accepted here, so I must be good enough to be here. Therefore, my grade must be at least adequate.
Another variant I will hear from some students is that if they show up to class and do all the required assignments, then they deserve an A! Before I heard a student say this to me, I always imagined that merely showing up to class and doing all the assignments guaranteed you a passing grade. (This is a reflection of the educational system that I grew up with, itself a dumbing down of those of past generations, as simply doing the bare minimum was not always a guarantee of a passing grade!) While I am pretty confident in asserting that most faculty would not agree with such a self-entitled expectation, there seem to be an alarming number of administrators at North American colleges and universities who do agree. Thus, the pressure to pass - and not only to pass, but to pass with distinction, high honours, or other festoons of academic pageantry. The customer must always be right. If not, they’ll take their tuition dollars (and residence dollars, and food dollars, and parking dollars) to another institution that will gladly grant that A with a smile and a cheery “Thank you, please come again!”
One more quotation from Nichols: “How to solve all this is a crucial question for the future of American education. In 2016, a Democratic Party presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, said that a college degree today is the equivalent of what a high school degree was fifty years ago — and that therefore everyone should go to college just as everyone now attends high school. In reality, treating colleges as remedial high schools is a large part of how we got here in the first place” (p. 76). The democratization of higher education is a major problem that North America has to grapple with.
The Washington Post just reported that New York is set to become the first state to offer free tuition at all four-year public colleges. This is being trumpeted as a win for progressivism. Ideology aside, I think it is more of a blow to higher education and the future state of expertise in American society. Most Americans recognize that there is something wrong with the state of American education today. But we do not address this problem by printing more degrees. Revenue-driven colleges and universities will gladly take government money in exchange for handing out diplomas: the New York proposal will be an incredible boon to commodified higher education in the state. What it will not do will be to increase expertise, or generate new knowledge, or educate the population. If the public education system is no longer equipping high school graduates with a reasonable bank of knowledge and skills, then it is that system that needs to be revamped. Simply expanding the domain of government-funded education does not address the problem; it ignores it, while managing to actually spend more money than doing nothing at all.
Overall, Tom Nichols makes a convincing case for his thesis that the current strain of anti-intellectualism in American society is both unprecedented and dangerous. His analyses of the commodification of higher education and the rise of the “new journalism” of entertainment over information are well worth the read alone. These two points also provide the strongest evidence that this anti-intellectualism is, in fact, truly new, and not just newly noticed. I am more convinced of the reality of this phenomenon than before I read his book.
The Death of Expertise is worth a read for anyone interested in the growing culture of anti-intellectualism in North America and beyond. And really, that means it should be worth a read for anyone who is capable of reading 200 pages. Sadly, as his analysis suggests, the number of people who fall into that category may be much smaller than we would like to think.
Tom Nichols’ new book, The Death of Expertise: the Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters, aims to explain the current culture of anti-intellectualism, marked by a notable public distrust of experts from all fields. The book focuses on the problem as manifested in American culture, and though certain strands of anti-intellectualism are uniquely American, the general affliction has infected many secular democracies, Canada included.
Nichols is a Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, as well as an adjunct at Harvard and a former US Senatorial aide. His professional specialties are international security and Russia. He is certainly, by any definition, an expert in his own disciplines, and thus had ample motivation to dwell on the subject of this book.
The main thesis of Nichols’ book is that the current wave of anti-intellectualism and public distrust of expert knowledge and advice is worse than it ever has been in modern history. This is a thesis I have long been sympathetic too, but I have always wondered if modern technology (mainly via the Internet) simply allows us to see and hear more about the proud ignorance of a disturbingly large proportion of misinformed American society, one that was perhaps always present. My main interest in Nichols’ book was to see what kind of case he could make for the “worse than ever before” thesis versus the “more visible than ever before” one.
Nichols argues that the modern, unprecedented rejection of expertise has occurred for six broad reasons: (1) bad tendencies of ordinary human nature, including confirmation bias; (2) the commodification of higher education; (3) the rise of the Internet; (4) the “new journalism” of entertainment over information; (5) the false equivalency between an expert erring and an expert knowing nothing; and (6) the confusion between policy-advisers (experts) and policy-makers (politicians). Nichols gives a good treatment of each of these broad points, but I want to focus on the one that interested me the most in this review, as it is the one I have to deal with the most in my own profession: the commodification of higher education.
Post-secondary education in the US (and in Canada) was once reserved for the chosen few: about 5% of the population at the end of World War II. Now, 1 in 3 Americans holds at least a bachelor’s degree, while nearly two-thirds of the population have acquired at least some college education. From a naïve point of view, this seems to be a good thing. How could more education be bad for a society? It can be bad precisely when an undergraduate degree of today equips a person with the equivalent of a high school diploma of 70 years ago. Schools and colleges in North America have dumbed down their curricula and lowered their expectations to accommodate a societal demand for a more egalitarian distribution of credentials, all while raking in ever larger amounts of tuition dollars. As Nichols notes, “schools and colleges have caused this degree inflation the same way governments cause monetary inflation: by printing more paper” (p. 75).
Regrettably, it is not simply that North Americans are getting smarter or that they are better educated. “College is no longer a time devoted to learning and personal maturation; instead, the stampede of young Americans into college and the consequent competition for their tuition dollars have produced a consumer-oriented experience in which students learn, above all else, that the customer is always right,” says Nichols (p. 70-71). In my experience, there is large agreement on this issue among teachers in higher education, often in direct contradiction to the feelings of many college and university administrators. The commodification of higher education means that the main function of a college or university is no longer to educate and equip new professionals with rigorous expertise (and to fail those who cannot adequately master these rigours), but is instead to generate revenue. This new model of higher education began to arise after WWII, but it is only since the 1980’s that the customer-driven approach has become the new norm in North America.
Nichols offers plenty of evidence for this disturbing trend, and it’s something that I have witnessed myself, both as a student of various North American institutions of higher education, and now as a postdoctoral researcher and teacher. To take one particularly glaring example, consider the phenomenon of grade inflation. Nichols reports: “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 and over 10 percent just since 1988. 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” (p. 95). See here for the source of those numbers and much more.
I still (mostly) remember the grading scales employed in the local public schools that I attended growing up in suburban Chicago in the 1990’s. The standard scale was as follows:
A+ = 98-100%
A = 95-97%
A- = 93-94%
B+ = 89-92%
B = 86-88%
B- = 83-85%
C+ = 79-82%
C = 76-78%
C- = 73-75%
D+ = 70-72%
D = 68-69%
D- = 66-67%
F = 0-65%
Some of these exact percentages are likely off, but I distinctly remember the B+ to A+ ranges (the ones I was most concerned with), as well as the D+ and F thresholds. Compare this to today’s grading scales in the same school district:
A+ = 97-100%
A = 94-96%
A- = 90-93%
B+ = 87-89%
B = 84-86%
B- = 80-83%
C+ = 77-79%
C = 74-76%
C- = 70-73%
D+ = 67-69%
D = 64-66%
D- = 60-63%
F = 0-59%
There’s been some downward movement, but is it enough to get greatly upset about? Maybe. But let’s return to grade inflation in higher education. During my undergraduate degree at DePaul University in Chicago (2003-06), the standard grading scale was as follows:
A = 93-100%
A- = 90-92%
B+ = 87-89%
B = 83-86%
B- = 80-82%
C+ = 77-79%
C = 73-76%
C- = 70-72%
D+ = 67-69%
D = 60-66%
F = 0-59%
To DePaul’s credit, this seems to be the same scale they currently employ. I got quite used to thinking of an A as 90% and above, a B as 80-89%, a C as 70-79%, a D as 60-69%, and an F as anything less. For an arbitrary scale, this metric-inspired classification seems somewhat reasonable. Compare this scale though to the one employed for undergraduates in most faculties at the University of British Columbia where I teach:
A+ = 90-100%
A = 85-89%
A- = 80-84%
B+ = 76-79%
B = 72-75%
B- = 68-71%
C+ = 64-67%
C = 60-63%
C- = 55-59%
D = 50-54%
F = 0-49%
I’ll be the first to admit that this is an unfair comparison, one that makes UBC look particularly bad. As Nichols’ research assures us though, UBC’s scale of assessment is extremely common nowadays. It’s easy to see how A’s and B’s can account for 80% of all grades given, now that a B- can correspond to the same percentage value that a D did in grammar school.
[NOTE: I am not ready to declare DePaul a model of pedagogic integrity. There are many ways to inflate grades besides actually shifting the percentage scales, including enforcing “no fail” policies on faculty, setting GPA targets, and other schemes hatched by various administrations in the name of increasing revenue. I don’t know if DePaul is guilty of any of these practices one way or another. Therefore, don’t read this as an indictment or an absolution either way.]
What’s more, this grade inflation means that it is often impossible to distinguish graduates with some level of real expertise or mastery of a subject from those who simply showed up. Many college transcripts give only letter grades (my DePaul transcripts did; I am not sure about UBC). It is a massive disservice to potential employers and to the students themselves to remove any semblance of objective meaning from these metrics. I feel particularly incensed for those students who really do exhibit mastery of a subject. Under a system like the one employed in most faculties at UBC, an A+ and an A- can be separated by 20% points. An 80% is a reasonable grade, but there is no way it should ever be lumped into a category so close to a 99%. You got an A+ in Calculus 1? Well, I got an A-, so we know about the same thing. This is another way that expertise has been undermined by the commodification of higher education: it’s hard to value expertise when it is seemingly so easy to acquire, at least in the form of a credential.
Some people will object though: college is hard. Shouldn’t the scale of expectation change with the difficulty level of the material? To this, I say a hard and loud no. It is precisely the increased difficulty, rigour, and expectation of critical thought comprising a higher education that demands a stringent metric. You don’t equip someone with expertise by lowering standards, you simply give them a false sense of their expertise.
This is a point that Nichols drives home repeatedly, and it is a critical one to make. As he notes, “the industrial model of education has reduced college to a commercial transaction, where students are taught to be picky consumers rather than critical thinkers. The ripple effect on expertise and the fuel this all provides to attacks on established knowledge defeat the very purpose of a university” (p. 98). Personally, as an undergraduate, I never thought of myself as a “consumer” of higher education. But I certainly see that mentality as a teacher in higher education now. It is quite common for some students to protest low grades because of the amount of money they are spending to attend the institution. I have often heard the lament, If I’m not doing well enough, then the school/department/instructor is not doing their job. I was accepted here, so I must be good enough to be here. Therefore, my grade must be at least adequate.
Another variant I will hear from some students is that if they show up to class and do all the required assignments, then they deserve an A! Before I heard a student say this to me, I always imagined that merely showing up to class and doing all the assignments guaranteed you a passing grade. (This is a reflection of the educational system that I grew up with, itself a dumbing down of those of past generations, as simply doing the bare minimum was not always a guarantee of a passing grade!) While I am pretty confident in asserting that most faculty would not agree with such a self-entitled expectation, there seem to be an alarming number of administrators at North American colleges and universities who do agree. Thus, the pressure to pass - and not only to pass, but to pass with distinction, high honours, or other festoons of academic pageantry. The customer must always be right. If not, they’ll take their tuition dollars (and residence dollars, and food dollars, and parking dollars) to another institution that will gladly grant that A with a smile and a cheery “Thank you, please come again!”
One more quotation from Nichols: “How to solve all this is a crucial question for the future of American education. In 2016, a Democratic Party presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders, said that a college degree today is the equivalent of what a high school degree was fifty years ago — and that therefore everyone should go to college just as everyone now attends high school. In reality, treating colleges as remedial high schools is a large part of how we got here in the first place” (p. 76). The democratization of higher education is a major problem that North America has to grapple with.
The Washington Post just reported that New York is set to become the first state to offer free tuition at all four-year public colleges. This is being trumpeted as a win for progressivism. Ideology aside, I think it is more of a blow to higher education and the future state of expertise in American society. Most Americans recognize that there is something wrong with the state of American education today. But we do not address this problem by printing more degrees. Revenue-driven colleges and universities will gladly take government money in exchange for handing out diplomas: the New York proposal will be an incredible boon to commodified higher education in the state. What it will not do will be to increase expertise, or generate new knowledge, or educate the population. If the public education system is no longer equipping high school graduates with a reasonable bank of knowledge and skills, then it is that system that needs to be revamped. Simply expanding the domain of government-funded education does not address the problem; it ignores it, while managing to actually spend more money than doing nothing at all.
Overall, Tom Nichols makes a convincing case for his thesis that the current strain of anti-intellectualism in American society is both unprecedented and dangerous. His analyses of the commodification of higher education and the rise of the “new journalism” of entertainment over information are well worth the read alone. These two points also provide the strongest evidence that this anti-intellectualism is, in fact, truly new, and not just newly noticed. I am more convinced of the reality of this phenomenon than before I read his book.
The Death of Expertise is worth a read for anyone interested in the growing culture of anti-intellectualism in North America and beyond. And really, that means it should be worth a read for anyone who is capable of reading 200 pages. Sadly, as his analysis suggests, the number of people who fall into that category may be much smaller than we would like to think.
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