In 2017 Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and Adjunct Professor at the Harvard Extension School, published The Death of Expertise with Oxford University Press. This book is a call to action, a warning that “everyone is drowning in data,” which is a problem because, as Nichols argues, citizens lack the capacity to separate good data from bad, to evaluate truth versus fiction, or to even understand the depths of their own ignorance (Nichols, 143). This is a problem, because it is “ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those who are more educated and experienced than themselves” (Nichols, 208). Thus, Nichols points to a collapse in expertise among those who hold university degrees, while highlighting the much bigger problem of the widespread denigration of experts among the public that may lead to a collapse of society. As an expert in history–I have a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee–with more than 20 years of experience teaching, I agree with Nichols on his fears about the lack of respect for expertise in our the U.S., but I’m saddened by his inability to recognize how we got here.To start with, I’ve tried to separate my personal feelings from my analysis of this book. I was eager to read The Death of Expertise because of my personal encounters with those who don’t understand or value expertise. I’ve also watched the problem play out in the public sphere with a great deal of trepidation. However, as I read Nichols’ book, I found myself increasingly alarmed, irritated, and at times outright offended by his elitism, his refusal to approach his subject critically, and his unwillingness to follow his own advice about how to understand the world. I found myself having to step back and ask myself if I was reacting to his book out of my feelings of anger and being personally affronted, or if it was because of anything wrong with the book. After careful consideration, I decided it’s genuinely because this is a bad book. That’s unfortunate, because Nichols makes some good points, but these are drowned out by his poor use of evidence–in most cases his lack of evidence–and the biases he wears on his sleave.So why is this book problematic? The first two chapters are on “Experts and Citizens” and “How Conversation Becomes Exhausting,” which I often found myself nodding along to. However, as an expert at critical analysis–I’ve written dozens or hundreds of critical reviews of books both in class and for academic journals, not to mention my decades of training and experience applying this skill–I found myself with “a sense that something ‘isn’t right,'” which Nichols points to as a hallmark of someone who combines expertise with experience (Nichols, 33). That led me to pause and think about why, and it immediately became clear. In a section on the “Rise of the Low-Information Voter” Nichols discusses the wildly inflated estimates citizens make for how much foreign aid the U.S. government supplies to other nations (Nichols, 25-28). The problem is in his assertion that this is anything new. I agree with Nichols that specific mistaken beliefs such as this one about foreign aid is a real problem, but he doesn’t even make an effort to provide any evidence that the problem is new. In fact, this section follows another with the subheading, “So it’s Not New. Is it Even a Problem?” But the assertion that there has been a “rise” of the “low-information voter” is an empirical claim that can be tested, yet Nichols provides no evidence that voters in the 21st century know less about foreign aid than those in the mid 20th century or the 19th.This problem of making empirical assertions lacking any evidence runs throughout the book, and frequently lapses into the realm of outright insult. Chapter 3 is devoted to “Higher Education,” with the subheading “The Customer is Always Right.” This chapter takes a multi-pronged approach of attacking students for their laziness, ignorance, and feelings of self entitlement, attacking institutions of higher learning for becoming corrupted by market forces, and attacking faculty for lack of proper expertise. The short version of what Nichols argues in this chapter is that too many students now attend universities, which compete for these students by offering water slides and climbing walls rather than quality education, as well as pressuring faculty to give good grades for limited effort. The faculty themselves are often unprepared to provide a quality education anyway, lacking the expertise necessary to do so even if they wanted to, since so many “generic universities” as Nichols calls them crank out individuals with graduate degrees without the necessary resources (Nichols, 88-95). This chapter is a perfect example of what’s wrong with The Death of Expertise. Nichols supports his assertions with 21 footnotes, and of those only three are from peer-reviewed sources. The rest are a mish-mash of online newspapers, blog posts, and magazine articles. Even those questionable sources provide not a single iota of evidence that any of the issues Nichols points to is new. Do students today learn less than those of the 1960s or 1860s? Are faculty in Nichols’ so-called “generic universities” less good at their jobs than those of elite institutions? Does grade inflation, which is at least a documented issue, indicate that students today are learning less than those of the past?My gut-instinct about that last question is a sold maybe, but as a scholar, I know the problem of working from gut instinct, and Nichols doesn’t bother to even try to provide evidence to support the various claims he makes that any of the issues he sees with modern higher education are in any way new. As Roger L. Geiger explores in American Higher Education Since World War II, the implementation of the G.I. Bill after World War II brought a much higher percentage of men to college than the U.S. had ever seen before. Furthermore, those students were older, more career-oriented than generations past, and this influx had ripple effects as increasing numbers of students were drawn to college. However, in recent decades funding for higher education has been slashed in most states, not only causing students to take on more debt but also to be more likely to have to work part or full time in order to attend college. Thus, students today are more interested in how they will pay off the increasing amount of debt they incur in college, and how the education they’re obtaining will help them in their careers, than students prior to World War II were. But those students were drawn from a much smaller pool of relatively affluent individuals who were less concerned about their futures because many of them could fall back on family wealth. There were certainly fewer of those students who came to college in need of remedial education in math or writing, fewer still with learning disabilities or in need of mental health care, not to mention that minorities had far fewer chances for higher education during what Nichols clearly thinks of as the “good old days” of higher education.Nichols mentions none of those issues. Perhaps he doesn’t because in spite of stating that he comes from a working-class background, he has always either attended or taught at elite institutions, which might mean that he just doesn’t know what students at non-elite schools are like, or what it’s like to teach at one of the “generic universities” he mocks. I guess it’s easier to depend on caricature and cling to elitism than it is to do even the minimal research necessary to learn about schools that aren’t Harvard, the history of education, and any of a number of other points Nichols makes authoritative statements about.Nichols elitism and fondness for the good old days regularly gets in the way of his understanding of the problem he writes about. For example, in chapter 4, “Let me Google that For You,” he spends considerable time discussing the information about quack cures and misinformation found on the internet. Those are real problems, but Nichols again fails to acknowledge that people have always had a weakness for quackery. From the use of magical talismans in the middle ages to the tonics and elixirs of the 19th and 20th century (or today for that matter), quack treatments have always been big sellers, as detailed by historians such as Roy Porter whose Quacks: Fakers and Charlatans in Medicine could have disabused Nichols of the notion that the modern penchant to turn to questionable medical “treatments” is in any way new.However, it’s chapter 5 on “The ‘New’ New Journalism” where Nichols really trips over his own elitism. He regularly tosses around empirical statements with no support, such as “not only do people know less about the world around them, they are less interested in it,” meaning less than people of some undefined past period I presume, but Nichols doesn’t tell us who he’s comparing people today to, or what evidence there is that modern people are any more ignorant than those of some undefined past (Nichols, 137). Far worse, though is when he complains about celebrity news crowding out more important stories. As with much of this book, there is a kernel of truth in Nichols’ complaint that the past presence of expert gatekeepers who decided what counted as news “wasn’t entirely a bad thing” (Nichols, 141). However, his nostalgia for a period when “the public saw the world as it was viewed by the corporations who ran the networks” is eye-popping (Nichols, 141). Take the “me too” movement as only one example of an issue ignored by these corporations of the past. It wasn’t that powerful men weren’t committing sexual assault and harassment in the past, it was just that news organization prior to the late 20th and early 21st century ignored this problem. Or what about the issue of police brutality against African Americans? For most of American history, this issue was most often ignored or seen as no problem at all. Maybe Nichols doesn’t think about these things, though, because he’s not a historian– and it shows. It’s hard not to snort when he waxes nostalgic about the good old days of the news if one knows anything at all about the history of yellow journalism.None of this is meant to indicate that Nichols isn’t pointing to a real problem in America today. Too often both citizens and policy makers ignore or outright attack expertise, and this problem is demonstrably worse today than it was in the past. Nichols sometimes gets the reasons right, such as when he discusses the rise of people such as Rush Limbaugh or organizations such as Fox News. However, he completely ignores the larger problem of corporations actively funding propaganda against climate change and the experts who do scientific work in this field, religious organizations that attack science relating to gay rights or birth control and the experts who work on related topics, or the right-wing politicians who promote these forms of propaganda. That last point gets to the heart of why this book fails on so many different levels to live up to its promise. Nichols doesn’t want to discuss the role of conservatives who attack expertise. Whether this is because of his personal political convictions or because Oxford University Press doesn’t want to alienate those readers, this is a regrettable oversight. Given the large number of empirical claims that lack any evidentiary base, it’s even more regrettable that this book passed the muster of peer review, and that Oxford chose to publish it.