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Musicmystery -> RE: The Death of Expertise (1/28/2017 9:42:49 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DaddySatyr
The quote from the article in the OP enticed me to click on the link. Good job.
It's not a bad piece, but I think he goes a little off the rails, in a couple of places and I think he's myopic in one important place:
quote:
Another reason for the collapse of expertise lies not with the global commons but with the increasingly partisan nature of U.S. political campaigns. There was once a time when presidents would win elections and then scour universities and think-tanks for a brain trust; that’s how Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski and others ended up in government service while moving between places like Harvard and Columbia.
This is the code of the samurai, not the intellectual, and it privileges the campaign loyalist over the expert.
Those days are gone. To be sure, some of the blame rests with the increasing irrelevance of overly narrow research in the social sciences. But it is also because the primary requisite of seniority in the policy world is too often an answer to the question: “What did you do during the campaign?” This is the code of the samurai, not the intellectual, and it privileges the campaign loyalist over the expert.
I have a hard time, for example, imagining that I would be called to Washington today in the way I was back in 1990, when the senior Senator from Pennsylvania asked a former U.S. Ambassador to the UN who she might recommend to advise him on foreign affairs, and she gave him my name. Despite the fact that I had no connection to Pennsylvania and had never worked on his campaigns, he called me at the campus where I was teaching, and later invited me to join his personal staff.
Universities, without doubt, have to own some of this mess. The idea of telling students that professors run the show and know better than they do strikes many students as something like uppity lip from the help, and so many profs don’t do it. (One of the greatest teachers I ever had, James Schall, once wrote many years ago that “students have obligations to teachers,” including “trust, docility, effort, and thinking,” an assertion that would produce howls of outrage from the entitled generations roaming campuses today.) As a result, many academic departments are boutiques, in which the professors are expected to be something like intellectual valets. This produces nothing but a delusion of intellectual adequacy in children who should be instructed, not catered to.
There was a time in this country, when our halls of higher education taught students facts, even in the "social sciences". There was a kind of "neutrality" in how facts were presented.
That's not true, anymore. There are few people who do not acknowledge the liberal bent of so many of our higher institutions of learning. I've been fortunate to be taking some classes at my local community college and, even with the over-all moderate feel, here (Democrats who oppose abortion, for example), some instructors are decidedly hard-core liberal and down-right militant in their delivery.
Why, then, would say a conservative politician look first to a college grad about whom they know nothing? In today's day, a college grad has likely been indoctrinated rather than educated. There are exceptions, obviously. All of these damned conservatives are going to school somewhere [:D] Ben Shapiro springs to mind; a Harvard educated Jewish lawyer who's slightly to the right of Kaiser Wilhelm.
I think that because our institutions have become such purveyors of propaganda, there needs to be an advanced "vetting" process to determine exactly what kind of graduates are entering the political workforce.
Michael
I don't know, Michael. Those liberal instructors exist, though many more feel their job is not to tell students what to think, but to develop their skills.
One of my old students, back when I taught a rigorous professional writing course, is in charge of all the correspondence coming out of a conservative GOP Congressman's office in Indiana. He was hired precisely because of the economy and clarity stressed in the class. And I'm fine with that. That's why we taught it him.
Another is a news director for NPR. That's OK too.
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