I’m unloading a kind of orphaned document here this week. It’s a formal response to a RAND report called Truth Decay that I originally was working on for the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. I ended up thinking it wasn’t quite right for the Aydelotte’s platform but, well, I wrote it and it’s done and I figured it would be a waste not to put it somewhere. So here it is.
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
In his book The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols observes “Americans have reached the point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy.” This thought, widely echoed across the American public sphere in recent years, drives many academics (who already have other reasons to be unhappy with the state of affairs in their profession) into a profound state of despair.
In 2018, Jennifer Kavanaugh and Michael D. Rich published Truth Decay, a report on behalf of the RAND Corporation that analyzed what they saw as a major shift away from “facts and data in political debate and policy decisions” in the United States, a shift that they argue is damaging civil society and producing worse outcomes in decision-making at all levels of governance. They offer an explanatory framework that foregrounds three historical moments as also marked by “truth decay”: the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression, and the social upheavals and political division of the 1960s and 1970s. Kavanaugh and Rich use these three eras to identify important causal mechanisms that have produced increased public mistrust of “facts and data” and a related decline of trust in institutions. These include in their view the general cognitive challenges of evaluating information, major changes in mass media and information dissemination, gaps between educational institutions and changing information systems, and political polarization. They also argue that these underlying systemic or structural causes of public alienation from factual or evidence-driven discourse and decision-making have been exploited by both domestic and foreign interests seeking financial and political advantage from “truth decay”. The report offers suggestions of what might be done in our present moment to reduce some of the structural foundations of mistrust in facts and data, including an expanded research engagement with the problem and measures to counter the influence of interests seeking to widen this mistrust.
The authors of Truth Decay are surely correct that in order to judge why–or even whether–we presently live in a time of accelerating or increasing public mistrust in expert knowledge, we have to examine history. While I would accept many of the insights of Truth Decay, I would argue that some of the tensions between expert institutions and wider publics in American life (and arguably at a wider global scale) are recurrent or continuous. I want to focus on the role of experts and academic institutions themselves in undercutting their own authority, inadvertently or otherwise, and to consider what (if anything) experts might do for themselves to bolster or reconfigure the trust between themselves and wider publics.
Faculty across a wide range of institutions certainly seem to want to change that relationship in the present moment. Among academics, alarm at the current predominance of highly politicized contempt for facts, knowledge and expert opinion (often is seen as nearly identical to a contempt for college and university faculty) is a major driver of collective anxiety while also inspiring feelings of profound helplessness. For many, the current turn seems like an extraordinary rupture with previously stable and productive norms of the post-1945 American order. Academics and the publics who trust them tend to believe that expertise moves naturally towards greater accuracy and reliability, and that expert knowledge develops naturally from the acquisition of educational credentials and professional discipline. Some fields of expert or scholarly knowledge are more inclined to self-reflexive doubt about whether they will know more or know better as time goes along. But even self-critical fields tend to believe in their own erudition and the value of their expertise.
So what does an expert attention to expertise itself uncover? The authors of Truth Decay note that in the past, apparent increases in mistrust for institutions associated with expertise and knowledge were partially resolved by changes in accountability, transparency and professional practice within key institutions such as journalism. This is an important acknowledgement that in some respects, public mistrust in expertise may have underlying causes that are not merely the result of instrumental political mobilization or some deep anti-intellectual predisposition in American life, but are instead reasonable or plausible formations arising out of historical or contemporaneous relationships between experts and their publics and clients. Sometimes there are valid reasons for trust in expert authority to be subject to decay or erosion. Along these lines, the following eight tendencies seem particularly important:
Being Wrong
Scholars in any field can be relatively sanguine about being found to be wrong in their findings or claims, as long as they made those claims based on responsible, diligent research. (Though reputation and ego sometimes drive a scholar to hold the line on previous work even when subsequent research has substantially refuted it.) The mainstream articulation of the scientific method celebrates the provisional nature of scientific knowledge and views falsification as an expectation, but humanists and social scientists also expect that their interpretations and arguments will be replaced or overriden by subsequent work. Experts outside the academy may be slightly less welcoming to acknowledging error, often because they have become known for a particular idea or ‘brand’, but most would at least notionally acknowledge their expertise as subject to revision and correction.
Just for this reason alone, some skeptical public wariness about expert-supported policies and laws is reasonable. Scientists, social scientists and other experts prefer to foreground a history of successful policies that stemmed from expert knowledge and to frame consequential errors of fact and judgment over the same time period as aberrant and exceptional, or as the fault of the people who implemented expert guidance, not the underlying processes of knowledge production that led to the guidance. It’s hard to say what a comprehensive spreadsheet tabulating “successful policies based on accurate knowledge” and “failed policies based on inaccurate or biased knowledge” might show as the apportionment between the two. (A third population, “inconveniently accurate knowledge that policy-makers have continuously refused to use or consult because it contradicts their political imperatives”, would potentially be larger than either of the other groupings.)
Almost every person alive today on the planet has at some point has had at least passing contact with a substantial mistake by experts. Expert framings have called for, justified, and shaped many post-1945 military conflicts in pointlessly destructive or misguided ways, whether via doctrines like the domino theory or in-conflict knowledge production about the efficacy of specific strategies and tactics. Expert advice has shaped the large scale management of international and national economies with doctrines like “structural adjustment” that have caused unnecessary misery for an entire generation. Poorly-tested pharmaceutical or therapeutic interventions have killed, maimed or harmed many people across the world. Facilities and procedures whose safety was attested to by experts have turned out to have obvious (and in many cases known) flaws and failures that have harmed numerous people.
These episodes are all public knowledge, and in many cases, the errors are freely conceded by subsequent groups of experts looking back at their predecessors. Even if we carefully historicize different kinds of mistakes, different formations of expertise and political power involved in the making of mistakes, and different eras of relative suppression or dissemination of information about expert error, we have to start by recognizing that some wariness about expertise is reasonably based on truthful memories of inaccuracy and its consequences.
Scientism
This is perhaps the closest of these roots of antagonism to experts to the classic argument advanced by Richard Hofstader about anti-intellectualism in American life.
In his book Science Under Fire, an intellectual history of American arguments about the authority and nature of science, Andrew Jewett discusses how pre-1939 concerns about behavioralism and social psychology combined with postwar triumphalism about science, technology and the research university fueled a complex negative reaction among intellectuals, religious leaders, and self-identified humanists to “scientism”, a reaction that had manifestations on both the left and the right and touched the wider public in a variety of ways.
Jewett observes that some pre-1939 experts who identified either as scientists or with an extreme form of positivistic outlook that they attributed to science came close to conforming to a public persona that we may sometimes regard now as a caricature, essentially a fusion of the Professor from Gilligan’s Island and Oswald Cabal in the closing monologue of H.G. Wells’ Things to Come: “All the universe or nothing, Passworthy? Which is it to be?”, e.g., believing that science was the only meaningful source of expert authority and that science should govern all human domains and activities. Most actual scientific practice since 1945 in the U.S. and elsewhere has been far more domain-specific and circumscribed in its claims of authority (indeed, some substantial proportion of scientists have pointedly insisted on the importance of research and inquiry that has no direct application and no immediate relevance to the human condition).
Nevertheless, some proportion of scholars and public figures who identify as scientists or as proponents of science reproduce some of the tropes of “scientism”: reducing most questions and problems to manageable scientific concerns, casually asserting the superiority of scientific thought and methods at all junctures, and showing contempt for humanistic thought and religious sentiment. These figures are often either scientific popularizers like Neil de Grasse Tyson or they are scientists or scientistic thinkers (both natural scientists and social scientists) with a public profile like Richard Dawkins.
Such scientistic public figures often imagine that they are in the frontlines of a battle against what Carl Sagan referred to as “the demon-haunted world”. This self-appointment is often accompanied with a self-flattering labelling of themselves as “new rationalists” who are trying to redirect both public discourse and collective action. The dispositional character of scientism is frequently costly to its aspiration to exert influence over policy outcomes by fueling strong negative reactions from people and groups whose treasured truth claims and methods are not scientific. Rightly or wrongly, many people bristle when being told what to do by someone who claims to be more rational, more scientific, and more disinterested than most of the rest of the world. Moreover, much as people remember past errors by experts, there are instances in popular memory where scientism’s claim of being above or outside normative ethical concerns has led to serious ethical lapses. In many areas of genuinely dangerous research such as atomic weapons, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence, some experts who most resemble the caricature of “scientism” have argued quite seriously (and dangerously) that any consideration of ethical or political issues or any acknowledgement of the authority of democratic publics over science is an intolerable constraint on their right to decide what is best. Though that view is uncommon among actually credentialed and practicing scientists or science-aligned experts, it nevertheless keeps a deeper history of suspicion and opposition to expert authority in play in the present--as the covid-19 pandemic has amply demonstrated.
Technocracy
Technocracy, a political system where disinterested experts exercise either primary or secondary authority over policy-making and rule-making, has a complicated intellectual and practical history in the United States. In many other nation-states and in supranational organizations like the European Union, technocracy is still used unapologetically as a straightforward description of some forms of political power or as an aspiration for same, and at times in the United States, rule by experts has been described as a good alternative for partisan legislative and executive authority, or as the principle that should guide long-term work in civil service.
On the other hand, the ferocity of contemporary hostility to the “deep state” among American conservatives since the ascension of Donald Trump has precedence on both the right and the left since the 1960s. David Halberstam’s 1972 dissection of Vietnam War planning, The Best and the Brightest, centrally identified the hubris of experts within the Kennedy Administration as a central cause of the war. Halberstam’s line of argument has been echoed in many other indictments of postwar American military, social and economic policy from the building of massive housing projects like Cabrini-Green in Chicago to structural adjustment and other approaches to economic development associated with the “Washington Consensus”, where bad outcomes of policies have been attributed to the distinctive combination of expert short-sightedness and relatively unrestrained and unaccountable expert access to governmental power. Mistakes in expert thinking in the university or elsewhere may be an issue in their own context, but raise far greater concerns when experts have direct governmental authority or very nearly so through exclusive influence or access to policy-makers.
The issue in the last seventy years in the United States is not merely mistakes made by technocrats (which would really just be a specific form of expert error) but when technocratic power has been seen as fundamentally anti-democratic both sociologically (being restricted to a narrow elite constituted through exclusive credentialization) and procedurally (being unaccountable and inaccessible to wider publics). Particularly on the right, that has fueled suspicions aligned with Hofstader’s famous characterization of a “paranoid style” in American political culture. Even when technocracy is seen as providing good outcomes, it provokes concerns by its very nature.
The Weakening of the American Academy
The previous histories weigh against expertise in the present through memory and rumor, through a kind of peripheral awareness of news headlines, episodes, repeated tropes structuring public debate. Allusions to the history reinforce skepticism and hostility to expertise (and allow interested parties to stoke that hostility for their own reasons, as the Truth Decay report notes). But there are also material changes to the service economies that surround and constitute expertise that have made it more vulnerable to attack. The first is that in the United States and to a lesser extent many other nation-states since the mid-20th Century, expertise’s strongest rooting has been in research universities, both public and private. Most experts between 1950 and the early 2000s received their training in universities, used university credentials as the central authenticating proof of their expertise, and in many cases were employed directly as faculty within higher education for at least part of their career. While some professionals have also acquired certification by a professional association and/or some form of government body to practice, the precondition of those additional forms of licensing is almost invariably some form of degree conferred by an accredited or licensed educational institution.
In the United States, the casualization of academic labor and the defunding of public higher education have worked in tandem to weaken the authority and influence of experts situated within the university, giving them far less ability to rein in or deauthenticate people selling their knowledge within the wider market or to subject them to rules of conduct such as conflict-of-interest procedures.
Moreover, while the role of the Internet in creating a “cult of the amateur” may be exaggerated, it certainly has eroded the privileged access of university-based expertise to publication and broadcast platforms that were controlled by a concentrated group of experts and producers who tended to defer to the academy in granting access to their platforms while at the same time dramatically enabling the control of for-profit publishers over the dissemination of scholarly work--essentially giving the academy as an institution less authority over expertise at both ends of knowledge production.
Essentially, the academy from the 1920s onward tethered expertise to a form of professionalized respectability and provided meaningful rewards to those who stayed within the norms of the profession, which included a non-market ethos of responsibility to accuracy, erudition, critical thinking, open dissemination of research outcomes, and large-scale scholarly collaboration. As the academy has been eroded by the casualization of faculty and the capture of scholarship by corporate publishers, more and more people claiming expertise have felt free to do so without fear of professional sanction or disapproval from academics (including some who are actually employed by universities).
For Sale to Highest Bidder
What has further enabled this wider and less governed circulation of expertise is the growth of lucrative markets for expertise where what is being bought is the credentialed authority of an expert and not the actual substance of their expert knowledge. Perhaps the best and most documented example of this is the coordinated mobilization of people authenticated as scientists by the tobacco industry described by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Simpson in their book Merchants of Doubt, which the authors see as a direct antecedent of similarly extensive (and cynical) mobilizations of paid-for experts to cast doubt on climate science.
But these secondary markets for expert opinion are far more pervasive than that. For example, experts who are paid to be compliant witnesses who deliver reliably similar assessments in civil and criminal trials all around the United States, or experts who skillfully manipulate drug trials or other research to meet the needs of industrial clients seeking approval or distribution of a product. Within the academy, scholars in many fields are increasingly urged to be entrepreneurial, which sometimes simply is pushing them to sharpen their competition with each other for resources or students, but is also meant to encourage them to find sources of institutional and personal revenue via grants, consultancies, and the like.
In many secondary markets for expert opinion, there is a profound mismatch of held credentials to the opinions being rendered–philosophers assessing the efficacy of drug treatments for physical ailments, electrical engineers dissecting climate science, media studies scholars offering expert opinions about the evidence for the structural failure of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks, social psychologists building arguments about human gender via an assessment of the reproductive biology of lobsters and so on. If the opinion or assessment meets the need of the purchaser or the purchaser’s target audience or clients, then any educational credential at a sufficient level is good enough. Moreover, many of these experts operate with few or no institutional constraints–the adversarial basis of the US court system, for example, allows lawyers to call expert witnesses whose credentials receive no vetting by the courts and whose possible conflicts of interest are only revealed if the opposing counsel chooses to challenge the authority or probity of expert testimony.
This contributes to the overall trust problem for expert claims and expert authority at a wider level precisely because these markets by their very nature are radically uninterested in doing anything about experts-for-hire who will say anything if someone pays for it to be said–regardless of whether the low quality of this expertise degrades the value of the overall commodity. In the contemporary American public sphere, everyday citizens are largely correct if they conclude that the overall quality of much expert opinion showcased in mass media or called upon in political life and civic institutions is uneven at best due in part to new forms of unrestrained commodification.
Experts as Rentiers
There are also older markets for expertise that play a role in public distrust, rooted in the economics of professionalization first established in the early 20th Century. Where professionalization was most successful in creating a steady business for accredited professionals, it generally involved recruiting governments to create licensing regimes that legally restricted provision of certain services to accredited professionals, sometimes accompanied by ongoing regulatory monitoring. To some extent, the successful highwater mark of American unionization between 1950-1980 (and the continuing power of unions in some other national economies) reproduced this strategy, requiring consumers to use the services of accredited workers where unions controlled the supply or authentication of the accreditation. However, a few of these restrictions predate the appearance of modern credentialed expertise, most notably the accreditation of lawyers in some form and some form of examination or educational credential for civil service in many premodern states.
While many domains of expert assessment have had never had any legal constraint or licensing regime formally placed on them–anyone can assert that they have an authoritative understanding of neural networks, particle physics, 18th Century English poetry or the history of the American Civil War–but many of the institutions seeking that kind of expertise would still require and vet professional credentials from any employee or contractor. However, cataloguing the number of specific jobs where licensing by a government is almost invariably required for someone to do particular kinds of work still produces a lengthy list: home inspectors, architects, land surveyors, realtors, master electricians master builders, emergency medical technicians, nurses, doctors, police officers, lawyers, health inspectors, elevator inspectors, notary publics and many more. The list varies between jurisdictions in the US and around the world–some US states, for example, restrict relatively few professions with licensing requirements, while others are expansively devoted to licensing regimes. In many cases, there are grey markets where professionals may possess some form of certified professional credential that closely parallels a licensed position where consumers have a choice to make use of non-licensed services, and in many cases if someone hiring services wants to pay anybody at all to do certain kinds of work, that is their prerogative. (Indeed, “right to repair” laws often seek to require manufacturers to allow individuals to freely do their own work with appliances and structures that they personally own.) Licensing regimes often apply primarily to the direct intersection of expertise and the maintenance of governmental information such as cause of death, deed transfers, inspections of buildings and equipment, interactions between public infrastructure and private property and so on.
Nevertheless, expert rentiers–like non-experts holding regulatory licenses that may have a limited supply like taxi medallions and liquor licenses–can create considerable resentment from non-licensed rivals who regard their own expertise as comparably valuable and are sometimes epistemologically opposed to licensed experts. For example, licensed medical professionals inspire skepticism and frustration among a range of rivalrous professional groups who are infrequently or never licensed: homeopaths, naturopaths, doulas and others. (Other groups that may represent alternative treatment pathways are nevertheless frequently covered by licensing regimes, such as chiropractors and acupuncturists.)
Moreover, consumers who feel forced to pay for expert services may imagine that without regulation, they might have been able to find an acceptable cheaper alternative. That feeling has been exploited to fuel anti-union sentiments, but also has stoked populist anger not just about the cost of services but their exclusivity for much of the last century. A characteristic example might be the career of John R. Brinkley, who sold expensive colored water and offered to transplant goat genitals into men who had experienced impotence from the 1920s to the 1940s, helping to spur the American Medical Association’s campaigns to regulate quack medicine. Brinkley’s popularity and financial success, along with many other provisioners of patent medicines and unconventional medical therapies, was fueled by popular resentment of the monopoly held by licensed medical professionals. In the end (as in many similar cases), even though the damage to many Brinkley’s patients vindicated the case for licensing, resentment of the privileged economic position of licensed or even simply certified professionals nevertheless continues to undercut the authority of experts.
Experts and Social Class Under Neoliberalism
While experts, particularly within the academy, are sometimes able to credit or acknowledge many of the issues raised in this essay, a much more difficult problem to discuss and reckon with is the class position of many American experts within the global economy that has taken shape since the 1980s.
To some extent, this issue is a more specific but also overridingly important version of the issues already discussed. The privileged position of some experts within a regulated market economy that has also placed a premium on technocratic authority within the state and the public sphere naturally suggests that the socioeconomic status of many professionals, including within the academy, has been upwardly mobile since at least the 1920s and 1930s. Notable increases in public funding for higher education and the vast expansion of the federal government in the 1950s and 1960s further accelerated this trend.
Characterizations of economic trends since the 1980s vary in their emphasis and their assignment of responsibility (or blame) for transformations over this interval, but there is broad agreement that wealth inequality has increased significantly and that educational credentials have become an increasingly essential precondition of access to any labor market paying more than a minimum wage. Equally, while there is widespread disagreement about whether the increasing political influence in the United States and many other nations of factions that are variously termed “populist”, “ethnonationalist”, or “far right” is primarily based on class conflict or social inequality, there is at least some reason to think that the consequences of globalization and financialization have played some role in the ascendancy of authoritarian ethnonationalism. In any event, resentment of experts, intellectuals and academia are a fairly significant component of “culture war” in the United States and elsewhere over the last thirty years.
The degree to which experts are not just rentiers with regulatory monopolies over certain areas of service but also identifiably associated with at least one fraction of elite social power is a frequently discomforting thought for many academics and professionals because many of them tend to sympathize with critiques of widening income inequality and feel (justifiably and accurately) that their own living standards, autonomy and status have been badly eroded by the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a perishingly small number of corporate leaders and top government officials and the accompanying ascendance of a managerial culture that trusts metrics more than human beings and has persistently worked to treat all forms of labor as disposable and interchangeable, regardless of the value or necessity of the work involved.
Anyone worried about contemporary popular hostility and mistrust directed at expertise and knowledge work has to try to grasp this nettle in some fashion, to understand how and when experts are associated with class hierarchy, widening inequality and a neoliberal social order whether or not they want or acknowledge those associations.
Expertise, Epistemology and Affect
Many fields of expertise note the cognitive difficulty of accepting the evidence and truth that their authority depends upon. The authors of Truth Decay focus on this primarily in terms of confirmation bias and the role of prior experiences and framing worldviews that make it difficult for many people to accept information or facts which contradict their own situated knowledge or prior beliefs. Social psychologists and cognitive scientists have also documented the extent to which certain kinds of hard-wired quantitative biases make it difficult for many people to truly understand the meaning of very large numbers, to accurately evaluate probabilities, or to truly understand many mathematical or statistical models, all of which are important to how many bodies of expertise interact with policy-making and decision-making.
A deeper problem that is harder for many academic experts to fully perceive and appreciate is that most scholarly knowledge is profoundly provisional, inherently partial, and compiled via collective or collaborative processes that are so vast in scope across time and space–even in highly specific fields–that they are difficult for any individual expert to fully track or account for. The process of academic training generally seeks to reconcile aspirant scholars to these propositions, and to the extent that it succeeds in doing so, that lifelong professional perspective may elide just how emotionally and cognitively exhausting this vision often is. Even when one truth replaces another for the best of reasons, because of new evidence or improved research designs, wider publics that are perfectly willing to abandon confirmation bias or prior frames and trust in the new truths can find it hard if those truths have serious material, practical or emotional impact on everyday life. Many scholars remind students, colleagues and publics that an interpretation, argument or research finding laid out in a new publication will always be open to challenge or disagreement. The orthodox version of the scientific method laid out in many university courses enshrines the provisional nature of all findings and theories, a point that is often exploited by those interested in aggravating “truth decay”, who dismissively observe that such-and-such is “just a theory”.
Even within academic life, while most scholars not only accept but embrace the provisional character of the truths or knowledge they produce and disseminate, other affective dimensions of scholarly knowledge production frequently cause serious emotional distress or alienation. Many scholarly experts testify to an accelerating feeling of “imposter syndrome” over the course of their careers, a sense that even as their own expert knowledge accumulates, their sense of commanding authority over their fields of expertise steadily diminishes as the scale of what is known, knowable and unknown becomes clearer. Add to that a weariness with the deeply seated assumption in many fields that processes of knowledge production and accumulation must be driven by antagonistic challenges and debates rather than collaborative or mutually supportive relationships–a view that many see as especially linked to masculine attitudes towards expert authority. Both of these are perspectives which frequently leak out into wider public culture, and often implicitly invite wider publics to share in the weariness and alienation that professionals may experience within their own professional worlds–or to emulate the antagonistic or factional character of some forms of knowledge production.
Solutions and Strategies
Many of these issues lie at a deeper level than conventional policy-oriented solutions can reach. They are deeply intertwined with the habitus of expert institutions, most particularly academia, or they are a part of social hierarchies and their surrounding ideologies. This does not make them insoluble, but it does mean that the work of engaging these issues is more akin to social transformation or political mobilization than it is a matter of implementing highly concrete steps from a commanding position of leadership or institutional authority.
That said, even broader projects of transformation and engagement can also be concrete or specific. With that in mind, a few suggested directions might be as follows.
Rebuild job security and compensation in higher education. Many of the issues stemming from the commodification and deprofessionalization of expertise call back to the dramatic weakening of tenure and faculty governance, which has forced many highly trained experts who would have previously been strongly attached to high standards of professional probity to either leave academic employment altogether or to have little investment in maintaining the reputation of their institutions.
Rebuild shared governance in higher education and extend it to other institutions that employ large numbers of credentialled experts. Professionalization in the 20th Century helped to feed some of the problems described in this essay, but professional authority over the structures and practices within their characteristic workplaces generally made the probity and truthfulness of expert knowledge into a core value of those institutions. Hospitals that are effectively run by insurance firms and pharmaceutical companies, universities that are controlled by corporate or political boards and by managers with no faculty experience, think tanks that exist only to express the political ideology of two or three wealthy donors, etc. are institutions with weak or eroding commitment to the accuracy and autonomy of knowledge produced within their walls.
Reclaim all aspects of scholarly publishing from for-profit publishing firms; make open access the universal principle underlying the dissemination of scholarship. Peer review remains one of the great potential sources of accuracy and reliability in the wider circulation of knowledge and information, but the stranglehold of for-profit publishing firms largely prevents peer-reviewed scholarship and the norms attached to it from circulating outside of academic institutions. There is nothing about this situation that is inevitable. The production of scholarship is underwritten by academic institutions as a part of faculty labor, as is the work of peer review. The publishers pay for neither, receiving the work of scholars for free and then in turn charging the institutions that supported that work for access while restricting the rights of authors and their universities to disseminate what they have produced. Wider publics are able to use this wealth of knowledge only through the voluntary generosity of the publisher, never systematically. As a result, the most reliable and curated knowledge is only partially (at best) available for consultation through numerous search instruments as well as sources of public information like Wikipedia.
Undercut “for sale to the highest bidder”; extend out academic systems of review and accountability to work done by experts in other institutions and for other clients. A simple example of this is the work of expert witnessing in civil and criminal trials, which generally have no vetting at all save whatever the attorneys on the opposite side of a case might bring up in court in order to impugn or challenge the credibility of such a witness. This shouldn’t be left to that late point in the process. We should be using systems comparable to peer review in order to qualify or authenticate an expert’s authority prior to their being heard in a court of law as an expert. Right now there are networks of experts-for-hire that attorneys can bring in for testimony who will more or less attest to almost anything that the client needs attested to.
Promote an expert code of conduct that discourages making strong claims about research findings outside of or prior to peer review. Enlist institutional leaders in enforcing this code of conduct by refusing to promote research findings that have not undergone peer review. This is already regarded as a significant breach of good behavior among many STEM researchers, and invariably attracts strong criticism whenever a research team releases results prior to evaluation. And yet sometimes university administrations help promote work of this kind. Among social scientists, there is less caution, despite the fact that some research claims made in haste can quickly enter into social media discussions and public policy circles. The goal here is to generally discourage forms of “entrepreneurial” self-promotion that provide an incentive to release research outcomes prematurely, not to curtail general engagements between scholars and the public sphere.
Continue to encourage the publication of negative results in scientific and social science journals. Provide grant support and institutional support for the work of replicating results. Meta-research across a wide range of academic disciplines and fields has suggested that publications and tenure systems that overvalue statistically significant results and punish or discourage dissemination of negative results have created a system that encourages various forms of manipulation in experimental design, data collection and analysis, some of them implicit or unconscious, that manipulate research outcomes and contribute to the accumulation of misleading or inaccurate knowledge. The “crisis of replication” now affects many fields and is seriously undercutting the overall authority of expert analysis.
At least talk about credentialism and inequality in more forthright ways within higher education. More ambitiously, work to reform or transform the way that credentialism contributes to inequality in accessing labor markets. We need at least to review justifications for existing credentials requirements and to ask skeptical questions about any selective employment evaluation that uses general degrees as a basic filter rather than as an indication of specific competency.
Encourage (and reward) public writing by academics that explains how experts in various fields produce knowledge and translates the work of scholarly experts into broader debates and discussions. While complaints about the supposed inaccessibility of academic work are sometimes exaggerated or are voiced in no-win formulations that dismiss existing public writing by scholars as irrelevant or insufficient, this kind of work is important and is frequently unappreciated or unrewarded institutionally.
Build stronger alliances with other professionals whose institutions have also been strongly eroded or undercut by managerial interests who do not have expert knowledge about that professional field. For example, doctors increasingly find their professional judgment undercut by insurance professionals and business managers. Despite the serious problems associated with the rise of the professions, professionalization created an important protected space where expertise had genuine authority within a set of key modern institutions. If expertise is losing authority more broadly, that has something to do with the erosion of that autonomy within those key institutions. Doctors, professors, lawyers, psychologists, and many other professionals share a common interest in pushing back on this development.