The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

Written by: Thomas M. Nichols

I am never quite so aware of how quickly technology changes our world than when a book, frozen in the time it was written, demonstrates how different a place we occupy now than when the book came onto the market.

This book, pre-COVID-19 pandemic, pre-2024 election, pre-release of ChatGPT to the public, dates the conversation around expertise and intellectualism and academia in important ways as I read it in October 2025.

I was looking forward to this book on the campaign against expertise, institutions of knowledge, and science, and found myself disappointed in the lines of thinking it followed.

An entire chapter is dedicated to students at the undergraduate level and states that students owe their professors / teachers / lecturers “docility”. Docility is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as, “the quality of being quiet and easy to influence, persuade, or control”. The author appears to conflate this with being ‘easy to be taught’ that he believes is part of the learning contract for university that is not being upheld by students.

Human to human respect is one thing, an important experience in the classroom, but power over wherein one person is right and the other is wrong or couldn’t offer a valuable challenging perspective is another. At one point it’s even stated that if a teacher states that they learn just as much from their students, that they aren’t very good teachers. Which really demonstrates how position, power, and even age might be more valuable to the author than a genuine exchange of knowledge. I suspect a child development expert, mental health expert, or education expert, if consulted for this book, would have supported some other lines of thinking that are research-backed.

In the same line of thinking throughout the book, I kept considering that experts are not OWED trust simply for having expertise on a subject. There was no meaningful engagement with the ways trust has been undercut through corruption, unfair funding practices, and power hungry professionals. He does acknowledge how trust can be broken when experts get things wrong and calls for experts to take the responsibility for repair, but there was nothing about how distrust has been sown through other avenues such as stakeholder involvement in funding, parasocial relationships when professors or researchers hit the public speaking circuit or post online, or politics in research.

Experts, like every other person, need to build trust and not expect it to be given freely.

Additionally, the conclusion holds a powerful quote, that I am going to paraphrase as I listened to this as an audiobook, that I would have found to be a more interesting storyline for the book: ‘we don’t know how to school the public’. The author places a lot of the blame on the public, ‘lay people’, for not upholding their end of a social contract, but spends no time reflecting on how experts let down the public but building up a system that does not reward regular engagement with the public.

There is no widely celebrated CV section for tenure-track professors to list the ways they made their knowledge, research, or theories accessible to the public in a way that would make them more competitive than publications would. There is no funding for helping academics become better storytellers. There is no encouragement for social media presences, blogs, or community teach ins; all are viewed as a distraction from ‘serious’ scholar work that leads to expertise.

I kept going back to how much more interesting, and appropriately placing the blame, in discussing the way knowledge builders have failed the public, rather than the other way around which does not address the power dynamic in a meaningful ways.

It is true, many experts do not know how to talk about or share their work with people outside of their field, or outside of their level of education, and that does meaningfully impact how people value knowledge, research, and science.

Are there many other factors at play, especially here in 2025? Absolutely.

And even so, the conclusion this book comes to is that the public is to blame and I don’t think it is to be successful in bringing in more people to value expertise created in the academy.