The Fraud of Academic Expertise

Michael Strong writing for TCS Daily makes the case that academic expertise, outside of the hard sciences, is a fraud being sold to a public conditioned to trust professors of higher learning.

Put Your Money Where Your Theory Is: The credibility of academia is based on the notion that professors are "experts in their field" who have achieved their position by means of a track record of exemplary scholarship. In the hard sciences, where "exemplary scholarship" is based on scientific work that is consistent with empirical research, this credibility is based on a solid foundation. Outside the hard sciences, the foundation for the credibility is more tenuous.

But without a responsibility to compare their conclusions with empirical realities, academic disciplines float off into the ozone. … Academics outside the natural sciences play shenanigans and their stock just keeps floating in thin air. … For the past hundred years we have assumed that the university "brand name" that gave us science and technology could also supply high quality thought, decisions, and judgment regarding politics and society. We were wrong. What to do now?

The Author heads up an organization named the Flow Project and he is most defiantly not a conservative in the current use of the term. What he has realized, however, is that leftist socialism has corrupted classic liberalism and needs to be purged from the educational culture.

Taking the Left Out of Liberal: We liberals should sharply distinguish “liberal” from “Leftist.” The latter characterized by anger, hatred, bullying, intransigence, and intellectual dishonesty. These spiritual diseases, legacies of the French Revolution and its Terror, began to infect liberalism in the early 20th century. This ugly spirit has contaminated much of academic life outside the hard sciences, economics, and business schools. As a consequence, many of the ideas and attitudes in the humanities and social sciences are profoundly, tragically misguided.

Conservatives who have been paying attention these last six years should understand the ivory towers need a thorough housecleaning. I suggest starting with the budget.