In fact, I have quite a bit less trust in experts than most people have.  When I learn that something that strikes me as, at least, capable of being reasonably doubted is the overwhelming majority opinion of experts, I become very suspicious.  Moreover, this has long been my attitude–not just recently, but since before Citizendium, or Wikipedia for that matter.  Let me explain why, and remove the puzzlement these claims must provoke.

First, however, let me explain why I respect and honor experts.  If they really are experts, and not just “the most knowledgeable person in the room” on a subject, it is because they have so goddamn much knowledge about their subject.  Even if I disagree with an expert’s views on controversial issues, I stand in awe when it is clear that they can explain and evidently understand so much.  Knowledge per se is deeply important to me, and not just correct memorized information, which computers can ape, but deep understanding.  It is extremely satisfying to have demystified something that was previously puzzling, or to have come to a more complex understanding of something that seemed simple, though I earlier did not understand it and it was not simple.  A person has my respect who has grasped much of what is, to me, still mysterious and complex about a subject.

Still, my respect only goes so far, because I am aware of a certain problem with expertise and especially with the social nature of contemporary research.  People are sheep–even very smart people, trained in critical thinking.  When there is a “consensus” or “broad agreement” in many fields, it becomes politically difficult to express disagreement.  If you do, you seem to announce yourself as having some serious personal flaw: stupidity, ignorance of your own field, not being current on the literature, possessing poor judgment, or being ideologically motivated, dishonest, or unbalanced.  This is true not just in obviously controversial or politically-charged debates, it is also true about completely abstract, apolitical stuff that no one outside of a discipline gives a rat’s patoot about.

Thus, due to the lemming-like conformity among many researchers, academic agreement tends to feed on itself.  An attitude becomes the only one worth expressing, even if, on the more objective merits of the evidence itself, such confidence is not warranted at all.  Such biases can swing 180 degrees in one generation (think of behaviorism in psychology).

I don’t know enough about intellectual history to say for sure, but I suspect things weren’t always quite as bad as they are now.  I suspect that academic conformity has been growing at least since I was in college myself, anyway.  There have been intellectual trends or “schools of thought” for millennia, of course, and when scholarship was dominated by the Church and religion–in medieval times and to a lesser extent until the 20th century–certain points of doctrine were held with easily as much dogmatism as one can find anywhere in academe today.  But in the last century, some causes of academic conformity have certainly grown more powerful: academic success is gauged based on how much one has published and in high-ranking journals, while researchers are expected to build upon the work of other researchers.  There is, therefore, an economic incentive to “play it safe” and march in lockstep with some particular view of the subject.  This situation has become even more dire both due to the extreme competition for jobs in academe and research, and due to the literal politicization of some fields (i.e., the devotion of whole disciplines to political goals).

This problem has become so pronounced that I find it is impossible really to evaluate the state of knowledge in a new field until I have come to grips with the leading biases of researchers–how professional conformity or political dogma might be giving an aura of certainty or consensus to views that ought, in fact, to be controversial and vigorously discussed.

I could cite several instances of unwarranted confidence in academic dogma from the fields of philosophy, psychology, and education, but frankly, I don’t want to offend anyone.  Academics, of course, don’t like to be called sheep or dogmatists.  Besides, I think my point will be more effective if I let people supply their own examples, because you might disagree with mine.  Care to discuss some in comments?

Let me conclude with a prediction.  Contrary to some, the Internet is not going to limit the prerogatives of experts; they have important roles to play in society, and we cannot function at our best without our most knowledgeable people in those roles.  But one of the more interesting and often delightful aspects of the Internet is that it provides a platform for people with nonstandard views.  It will also–it does not yet, but it will–provide a way to quickly compare current views with views from the past.  These two comparison points, nonstandard and historical opinion, were not so readily available in the past as they are or will be.  The easy availability of these dissenting views will make it increasingly obvious just how dogmatic academe has been.  Indeed, this has already started, and is one reason why experts and academics as a group have taken some hits to their credibility online.  Finally, I observe that, for all the ovine nature of researchers, youth often loves to smash idols, and new “education 2.0,” degree-by-examination, badge, and other schemes might make such nonconformist idol-smashing a better career option.  I suspect we will see a crop of younger researchers making careers on the newly-viable fringes of academe by pointing out just how ridiculously overblown certain academic dogmas really are–and students eager to save on tuition and get a broader perspective will flock to tutorials with such independent scholars.

A vice president at Excelsior e-mailed me to point my attention to Excelsior’s new “10K Degree Program.”  Now, not having first-hand experience with Excelsior, I can’t endorse the program, but if I were a high school junior or senior who had not been accepted to a college, I’d definitely give Excelsior’s program a serious look.  My favorite argument for such degrees, quite apart from the arguments about cost and the abundant free college-level content online, is that one-on-one education by the tutorial method is more pedagogically sound than the lecture, text, and exam method used at many universities.  The advantages are similar to the advantages of homeschooling–only at the college level.  Such a system, only expanded and found in all 50 states and around the world, is a key component of my notion of how higher education might be revitalized in light of the Internet revolution.

Whenever I think about Mozilla’s Open Badges project, I can’t help but think that Excelsior’s program is a bird in hand.  I’ll be surprised if the badges idea ever goes anywhere, mainly for the following argument: a badge is a credential; to have any appreciable practical use, a credential has to have credibility; credibility can be conferred only by careful evaluation by experts of examinations or work; and experts don’t work for free.  This requires something similar to an accredited degree-by-examination program–like Excelsior’s.  To be sure, there is a need for a cheap, widely-accepted, credible credentialing process that is beyond traditional degrees.  But that is already available, it seems.  The market just needs to be expanded and, perhaps, updated.

The Open Badges program promises “a simple framework that’s open to all.”  But they sometimes write as if Open Badges is mainly about letting people define their own badges, which they then claim on their own say-so.  ”What’s wrong with that?” my fellow free knowledge advocates say.  Well, it’s great to trust others when it comes to letting them participate in a wiki or a software project.  That’s a little risky, but it often works.  It is a completely different kettle of fish to trust others uncritically when they make claims about their own qualifications.  That’s just naive–just look at the false claims people already make about their skills on their resumes.

Insofar as Open Badges wants badges conferred by objective third parties, based on real quantifiable achievements–MIT might be one of them–then we’re back to talking about things like accreditation and solid credential-granting bodies.  But as long as the open badges system has reliable checks in place that establish that badges can’t be claimed when they haven’t been earned, I’ll be a supporter of open badges, too.  But I think that the more anarchistic free culture types aren’t going to like such a result, and, as happened with Wikipedia, their influence is bound to spoil the Open Badges project.  We’ll see.

Excelsior, at least, has already solved the credibility problem.  They may not be a top-tier institution, but an Excelsior degree is a real degree–and a very inexpensive one, too. 

(I have no relationship whatsoever to Excelsior and am commenting only out of a long-standing personal interest in distance and alternative education.)

• Dumbing down college education, by grade inflation and lowering standards, can’t continue forever.  The nature of education itself demands limits.  At some point, a college degree will inevitably become meaningless, as many have said, and employers will need something with more objective value.  We might already be at that point.

• As I’ve said before, education is one of the last industries to be truly, deeply affected by the Internet revolution.  The Internet tends to decentralize things and place matters in the hands of individuals–features I support.  The way to do this is simply to build a movement toward awarding degrees by examination.  (Trout mentions this.  I have too, many times in the past.)

• This means that students, to earn their degrees, would not have any course requirements.  Only exam requirements.  And exams should be administered and graded by bodies independent of any course-offering group.  Basically, as a former college instructor, as a former student and father of future students, and as someone stuck in a society overburdened with degreed people who don’t necessarily know their stuff, I want a system of higher education that is bullshit-free.  I want the value of degrees to be both substantive and stable.

• Of course, universities might look askance at such programs (though they do exist).  But employers will not, especially if such programs are expanded.  Speaking as someone who has occasionally done hiring, I personally do have my doubts about the intellectual attainments of people regardless of their degrees.  I know I can’t be alone.  Society in general needs degrees to mean something.  Well, then, let’s expand the movement toward degrees by examination and portfolio review.

• If degrees by exam were to become widespread enough, I suspect they would cast doubt on the value of traditional degrees–and universities would start instituting serious exit exams.

• What should be especially appealing to ed techies about this idea is that it frees up the whole system to reinvent itself as a support network for students taking exams.  Courses and universities might continue–but rebooted.  In addition, a plethora of online and informal offerings might bloom.

• If I wanted to work on this problem, I would work not toward exit exams from universities, but toward nation-wide testing services.

• My guess is that someone could redo Excelsior College and attract serious venture capital for it.  (Wouldn’t surprise me if this were already happening.)

• Students who hated studying wouldn’t have to study–unless they wanted a degree.  Then they would have a real incentive to study, go to class (or other method of exam prep), and demand rigor.

• I remember the sort of students described by Trout, who were furious at any rigorous requirements, bored by everything, and had a pathetic sense of entitlement.

• I don’t fault college-age students for thinking that university education is overpriced.  I fault them for thinking (if they do) that it is a waste of time, if they study hard.  Of course, they can make it a waste of time by taking easy courses and/or not studying.

• I say, let the students escape their “boring” classes.  Then let them just try to earn a degree in a revitalized system that has fewer economic incentives to “dumb down” the requirements for a college degree.  Frankly, I wonder how many recent college grads would actually pass an examination system and thereby prove that they deserve their degrees.  Pretty far south of 50%, I’d hazard, supposing the exams were well designed, administered, and graded.

• To an extent, then, I support something like a system of educational “badges.” (But not all versions.)

• Perhaps such a system should be used for high school diplomas.  Why not a national system of examinations that allows students to establish just how much they know and what their skills are?  Then we can dispense with the meaningless diplomas that are basically certificates of attendance.  One of the most effective ways of real K-12 educational reform would be that students don’t get a degree until they have passed an exam (again, not just objective, but also written and oral, and perhaps even practical as well).

• I might not mind if the government established that such a diploma system must be used by homeschoolers as well, if they want to claim to have a high school diploma.  The homeschoolers have to pass the same exams to get their diplomas.

David, I didn’t mean to be unpleasant in my Twitter responses to you. I’m still grateful to you for agreeing to be a WatchKnow (now WatchKnowLearn, and now in the able hands of Dr. Joe Thomas) advisory committee member. I didn’t mean my remarks personally or even especially confrontationally–I was just giving you my honest reaction, in response to your call for comment. I care about this because I’ve written about something similar, and as someone who has started an ambitious project that got away from him, I see significant potential for that happening here. I also care because I really think that something like this may well lie in our future. So let me develop my points more fully.

1. About the word “badge.” As the above discussion [on Wiley's blog] makes plain, this talk of “badges” marks this whole endeavor as one started by boys, or former Boy Scouts. On a marketing point, I would worry about losing some traction with the female majority of the college-going public. Speaking for myself, I don’t like the talk of “badges” because this implies that hard-won credentials are merely bragging rights, or a mark of authority, of the sort Boy Scout badges or police badges are. I have a Ph.D. but I don’t put my diploma on display like a “badge”; that’s bad taste [unless you're a doctor, in which case the diploma serves as an important selling point]. Also, you aren’t reporting much thinking about how this whole project will be received by academia; academics are not apt to find “badges” very compelling.

2. So, let’s talk about the whole idea of academia confronting this endeavor. Far be it from me to speak for academe (you’re the paper-publishing professor, not me), I think this deserves some consideration.

Let’s begin here. You say, “the gold standard for learning credentials is acceptability by employers.” I’m not sure what this means, exactly. Is this a statement about what degree-seeking students (the customers of universities) believe, what “society in general” believes, or what is really, in fact, the highest conceivable standard in your own personal opinion?

When it comes to evaluating someone’s B.A. in Philosophy, do you want to say that “the gold standard” is “acceptability by employers”? Would that mean that I am a better philosopher if my degree has a better chance of getting me hired? Speaking as a formerly under-employed philosophy major, that sounds utterly ridiculous. A degree is, objectively speaking, supposed to indicate some actual level of intellectual attainment in the field. Surely you don’t mean to say that, if an employer hires me for such-and-such a degree, that indicates that I have reached that level of attainment in the field? Of course it doesn’t mean that.

3. Speaking as someone who hires people from time to time, to help with my projects, what I’m looking for depends entirely on the job. When I was looking for a voiceover person, the absolute only thing I cared about was the quality of her performance. But when I was hiring editors for an educational website, I was looking for the ability to write, as well as do or understand other things that a college education trains to do or understand. In that case I required a college degree and in fact was strongly preferring an M.A. in the relevant subject area.

Suppose I were hiring ten years from now and, lo, a dozen candidates lacked an M.A. but had “badges” that, the candidates (or some organization) claimed, was “equivalent” to an M.A. So how do I evaluate this claim of equivalence? My mind might have already been made up (I know that various companies are hiring such grads with no more complaints, so far, than they have about their recent college grads). But if it is up to me, I am going to look at the process whereby the “degree equivalent” is granted.

If a “badge” is the sort of thing that by common practice almost anybody can define, and then claim, then I’m not likely to take it seriously, and most others won’t either. In other words, the badge is a credential and a credential has to have, well, credibility. If supposed credentials are granted as easily as diploma mill “degrees,” the whole endeavor will–obviously, I think–not get off the ground. Some geeks might go about claiming to have all sorts of “badges,” but when it comes to hiring, I will ignore such self-claimed badges.

Your blog makes it very clear that you don’t propose a system in which badges are self-claimed. You want badges awarded by some sort of objective body. That is, of course, as it should be. (By the way, why not Excelsior College? They’ve been doing this, although they award things that they call “degrees” instead of “badges.”) But what do you imagine this objective body would look like?

The impetus behind your proposal, and the Mozilla white paper (which I read a version of a while ago), does not seem so much to be to make credentialing cheaper and more lightweight, as it is getting it away from academe altogether. Well, why? Come on now–do you really think that a Google employee is going to be able to evaluate a “badge” portfiolio better than a professor of computer science, who has long experience doing exactly this sort of thing?

4. You mention that badge evaluation might be, somehow, “crowdsourced.” This is a startling claim. It is one thing to crowdsource an encyclopedia article or software. We know why those work, at least as well as they do work. Why on earth think that evaluating credentials is something that could be accomplished Wikipedia-style? Perhaps (I doubt this, but just suppose) you are proposing that people vote on whether a person has made the grade. Well, I obviously don’t know, but I seriously doubt you’ll get many volunteers to do the hard work of portfolio evaluation–unless identified personalities are involved and the evaluation is not done in “blind” fashion. I mean, if people can get “badges” by getting a thumbs up from some benchmark number of people in a community of practice–boy, count me out. You mention gameability; that very suggestion positively screams gameability, precisely because personalities are involved. If the crowdsourcing is suitably double-blind, I doubt you’ll get many volunteers. In my experience, people volunteer for the fun stuff. They don’t volunteer for the real gruntwork; you have to pay people for that.

I’m guessing that you think that grading should be kept as independent of personalities as possible, and moreover, you agree with me that employers and graduate schools etc. are going to care, a lot, about the quality of the “badge” evaluation program. Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that this is going to end up calling in the professionals–the experts, in whatever field. After all, if I’m looking at two candidates, one of which was credentialed by some outfit I’ve never heard of, and the other of which was credentialed by Harvard, well, I’m going to respect the “badges” of the latter quite a bit more, won’t I? Surely the “badges” as recognized by more prestigious institutions will be worth more. And even if, in the move to bring this sort of system into the online world, there is some shuffling of players (say, Harvard makes the switch to an online badging system, but Yale is late to the game and fails), that won’t stop there from being competitive credentialing.

I think a lot of the starry-eyed dreaminess about this whole venture stems from the fact that it would seem to take credentialing out of the hands of elites and put into the hands of the masses. Well, I really don’t think that’s going to happen. Why should it? Indeed, what about your project, insofar as it is plausible, puts credentialing in the hands of the masses?

Well, the credentialing isn’t put into the hands of the masses. It is put into the hands of people who are willing to take money from people to evaluate exams, portfolios, etc., in exchange for small and large credentials. The only thing that makes this more “open” is the fact that one does not have to enroll as a student at an institution in order to get the credential. And that is something I’ve supported, wholeheartedly, at least since 1995.

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Let me add something I didn’t put on David’s blog.  I find that a lot of the talk about Web 2.0 (and 3.0) stuff is, in a certain way, very unreflective.  The whole idea of Open Badges is very interesting, but it absolutely demands a careful philosophical examination of a whole series of questions.  But I don’t see a lot of evidence that this sort of thinking has been done by many people in that whole movement, or scene, or whatever it is.  Despite a rather flimsy white paper and support by a major foundation, Mozilla seems to be going off half-cocked.  And let me tell you something–it’s one thing to go off half-cocked when you’re making an encyclopedia.  It’s another thing altogether if you’re proposing a way to compete with universities.  Surely, if there’s one thing that absolutely demands careful forethought, it’s the design of a system that attempts to replace [or even credibly compete with] university education.

First, let me concede that I left a lot unsaid.  Of course, what I left unsaid ended up being said, sometimes ad nauseam, in the comments, and a few points I found to be quite enlightening.  On the other hand, I find a lot of geeks thinking that they understand aspects of higher education that they really don’t.  I’m not sure I can set them right, but I’ll try to make a few points anyway.

I am going to do what I’ve always done, since the 1990s, when something I’ve written elicited a much greater response than I could possibly deal with: make a numbered laundry list of replies.

1. How dare you accuse all geeks of being anti-intellectual? I didn’t; RTFA.  I know there are lots of very intellectual geeks and that geekdom is diverse in various ways.  I’m talking about social trends, which are always a little messy; but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to discuss.

2. There’s a difference between being anti-intellectual and being anti-academic. Maybe the most common response was that geeks don’t dislike knowledge or the intellect, they dislike intellectuals with their academic institutions and practices.  First, let me state my geek credentials.  I’ve spent a lot of time online since the mid-90s.  I started many websites, actually learned some programming, and managed a few software projects.  You’ll notice that I’m not in academe now.  I have repeatedly (four times) left academe and later returned.

I agree that academia has become way too politicized.  Too many academics think it’s OK to preach their ideology to their students, and their tendency to organize conferences and journals around tendentious ideological themes is not just annoying, it is indeed unscholarly.  Moreover, speaking as a skeptically-inclined philosopher, I think that some academics have an annoying tendency to promote their views with unwarranted confidence, and also to pretend to speak authoritatively on subjects outside of their training.  Also, in many fields, the economics of academic advancement and publishing has created a tendency to focus on relatively unimportant minutiae, to the detriment of broader insight and scholarly wisdom.  Also, I completely agree that college work has been watered down (but more on that in the next point).

Having admitted all that, I’m still not backing down; I knew all that when I was writing my essay.  Please review the five points I made.  None of them is at odds with this critique of academe.  Just because some experts can be annoyingly overconfident, it doesn’t follow that they do not deserve various roles in society articulating what is known about their areas of expertise.  If you deny that, then you are devaluing the knowledge they actually have; that’s an anti-intellectual attitude.  If you want to know what the state of the research is in a field, you ask a researcher.  So even if your dislike of academics is justified in part, it does not follow that their word on their expertise is worth the same as everyone else’s.  Besides, most of my points had little to do with academics per se: I also had points about books in general, classics in particular, and memorization and learning.

3. Just because you think college is now a bad deal, economically speaking, it doesn’t follow that you’re anti-intellectual. Well, duh.  I didn’t really take up the question whether the present cost of college justifies not going, and I’m not going to get into that, because I don’t really think it’s relevant.  Let’s suppose you’re right, and that for some people, the long-term cost of college loans, combined with the fact that they won’t get much benefit from their college education, means that they’re justified not going.  My complaint is not about people who don’t go to college, my complaint is about people who say that college is “a waste of time” if you do go and are committed.  Maybe, for people who don’t study much and who don’t let themselves benefit, it is a waste of time.  But that’s their fault, not the fault of college.  I taught at Ohio State, which is not nearly as demanding as the college I attended myself (Reed), and I saw many students drifting through, not doing the reading, not coming to class, rarely practicing their writing skills.  I also saw people who always did the reading, always came to class, participated regularly, and were obviously benefiting from their encounter with great writing and great ideas.  Moreover, how college affects you isn’t “the luck of the draw.”  It depends on your commitment and curiosity.  This is why some partiers drop out and come back to college after five or ten years, and then they do great and finally enjoy themselves in class.

Finally, may I say again (I said it first in the 1990s, and also a few days ago), it is possible to get a degree by examination from programs like Excelsior College?  This way, you bypass the expense of college and pick all your instructors for a fraction of the cost.  This entails that you can get intellectually trained, as well as earn a real college degree, without going into debt.  This would be my advice to the clever ex-homeschoolers who claim that it is college that is, somehow, anti-intellectual.  Put up or shut up, home scholars: if you really are committed to the life of the mind, as you say, and you’ve already got experience directing your own studies, why not get a degree through independent study with academic tutors, and then take tests (and portfolio evaluations) to prove your knowledge and get the credential?

4. The people you’re describing are not true geeks; they are the digerati, or “hipsters,” or leftist academics who were already anti-intellectual and then started doing geek stuff. Uh, no.  I mean, you’re probably right that some anti-intellectual thinkers who weren’t geeks have started talking about the Internet a lot, and they have a big web presence, so now they might appear to be part of geekdom.  But they aren’t really, by any reasonably stringent definition of “geek.”  Besides, if you look at my article, you’ll see that that’s what I said (such people fall into the category of “digerati”).  My point is that claims (1)-(5) started circulating online among geeks, and they are, each of them, commonly spouted by lots of geeks.  Take them in turn.  (1) Anti-expert animus is a well-known feature of the geek thought-world.  Wikipedia became somewhat anti-expert because of the dominance of geeks in the project.  (2) Of course, the geeks at Project Gutenberg love books, but all too often I see comments online that books went out in the 20th century, and good riddance.  One of the leading idols of the geeks, Clay Shirky, essentially declared books to be a dying medium, to be replaced with something more collaborative.  (3) It is obvious just from the comments here on this blog, and elsewhere, that some geeks find the classics (that means philosophy, history, novels, epics, poetry, drama, religious texts, etc.)  to be a waste of time.  They don’t have the first clue about what they’re talking about.  (4) The first time I saw the idea discussed much that Internet resources mean we no longer have to memorize (and hence learn) as many facts was among Wikipedians in 2002 or so (when it was totally dominated by geeks, even more than it is now).  (5) The whole college-is-a-waste-of-time thing is a not uncommon geek conceit.  It’s not surprising in the least that a founder of Paypal.com would spout it.  It’s easy for computer geeks to say, because they can get well-paying jobs without degrees.  In many other fields, that’s (still) not true.

5. But I’m an intellectual, and I know that learning facts is indeed passe.  The things to be learned are “relationships” or “analysis” or “critical thinking.” Oh?  Then I claim that you are espousing an anti-intellectual sentiment, whether you know it or not.  I’m not saying you’re opposed to all things intellectual, I’m saying that that opinion is, to be perfectly accurate, a key feature of anti-intellectualism.  Look, this is very simple.  If you have learned something, then you can, at the very least, recall it.  In other words, you must have memorized it, somehow.  This doesn’t necessarily mean you must have used flashcards to jam it into your recalcitrant brain by force, so to speak.  Memorization doesn’t have to be by rote.  But even if you do a project, if you haven’t come to remember some fact as a result, then you don’t know it.  Thus I say that to be opposed to the memorization of facts is to be opposed to the learning, and knowing, of those facts.  To advocate against all memorization is to advocate for ignorance.  For more on this, please see my EDUCAUSE Review essay “Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age.”

I know that this is an old and common sentiment among education theorists–which is a shame.  Indeed, the educationists who say that it is not necessary to memorize the multiplication table are implying that it is OK for kids to be ignorant of those math facts.  (No, it’s not OK.  They should know them.)  Anyway, it might have started with misguided educators, but it is becoming far too common among geeks too.

6. The Internet is changing, that’s all.  Most people are anti-intellectual, and they’re getting online. No doubt about it, the Internet has changed greatly in the last five to ten years.  And it might well be the case that the average netizen is more anti-intellectual than in the past, in the very weak sense that more stupid people and uneducated people are getting online.  This might have been clever to say, if my point had been, “Folks online seem to be getting anti-intellectual.”  But that isn’t at all what I said or meant.  If you will review the evidence I marshalled, you’ll see that the people I’m talking about are not the great unwashed masses.  I’m talking about geeks and the digerati who presume to speak about geeky things.  And their influence, as I said, has been growing.

7. Americans are anti-intellectual.  Geek anti-intellectualism is just a reflection of that. Think about what you’re saying here; it doesn’t make much sense.  I claim that geeks are increasingly anti-intellectual, or increasingly giving voice to anti-intellectual sentiments.  This is a trend, which many people are discussing now because they recognize it as well.  American anti-intellectualism, a well-known phenomenon, goes back to colonial days, and was rooted in our distance from the erstwhile European sources of intellectual life as well as the physical difficulty of frontier life.  The pattern of anti-intellectualism I discern is a relatively recent phenomenon, which has grown up especially with the rise of the Internet.

8. Conservatives never were the anti-intellectuals; it was always the liberal lefties! Glenn Reynolds linked my post, and so some conservatives grumbled about my line, “Once upon a time, anti-intellectualism was said to be the mark of knuckle-dragging conservatives, and especially American Protestants.  Remarkably, that seems to be changing.”  Well, I hate to wade into politics here.  I used the passive voice deliberately, because I did not want to endorse the claim that anti-intellectualism is the mark of “knuckle-dragging conservatives” (I don’t endorse this phrase, either).  All I meant to say is that this is one of liberals’ favorite things to say about American fundamentalists.  I was about to, but did not, go on to say that actually, among the home schooling crowd, liberals and libertarians tend to go in for “unschooling,” which is relatively (and not necessarily) hostile to traditional academics, and it is conservatives who go in for  uber-academic Latin-and-logic “classical education.”  I didn’t say that, because I knew it would be distracting to my point.  So I’m kind of sorry I made the remark about conservatives, because it too was distracting to my point.  Suffice it to say that there are plenty of knuckle-draggers, so to speak, everywhere.

9. Are you crazy?  Geeks are smart, and you’re calling geeks stupid by calling them anti-intellectual. You didn’t know that “anti-intellectual” does not mean “stupid,” apparently.  There are plenty of anti-intellectual geeks who are crazy smart.  They aren’t stupid in the least.  You also must distinguish between having anti-intellectual attitudes or views, which is what I was talking about, and having anti-intellectual practices. There are plenty of intellectuals in academia who are anti-intellectual.  (There are Jewish anti-Semites, too.)  Just think of any progressive education professor who inveighs against most academic work in K-12 schools, describes academic work that involves a little memorization and practice as “drill and kill,” wants the world to institute unschooling and the project method en masse, has nothing but the purest P.C. contempt for the Western canon, advocates for vocational education for all but those who are truly, personally enthusiastic about academics, wants academic education to be as collaborative as possible rather than requiring students to read books, which are “irrelevant” to the fast-changing daily lives of students, and channeling Foucault rails against the hegemony of scientists and other experts.  Well, such a person I would describe as an anti-intellectual intellectual.  The person might well write perfectly-crafted articles with scholarly apparatus, read classics in her field, and so forth.  It’s just that her opinions are unfortunately hostile to students getting knowledge (in my opinion).

10. But the liberal arts are a waste of time.  Studying Chaucer?  Philosophy?  History?  The vague opinionizing is pointless and facts can be looked up. If you believe this way, then I have to point out that virtually any really educated person will disagree with you.  Once you have received a liberal education, your mind expands.  You might not understand how, or why it’s important, but it does.  That’s why people devote their lives to this stuff, even when it doesn’t pay much, as it usually doesn’t.  If you haven’t studied philosophy, you can’t begin to understand the universe and our place in it–I don’t care how much theoretical physics you’ve studied.  There are aspects of reality that can be grasped only by critically examining the content of our concepts.  Similarly, if you haven’t read much literature and especially if you are young, then you are very probably a complete babe in the woods when it comes to the understanding of human nature and the human condition; that’s why people read literature, not so that they can sniff disdainfully at others over their lattes.

11. What you call “anti-intellectual” is really “anti-authority.”  You’re merely defending the prerogatives of snooty intellectuals whose authority is on the wane. This is one of the most common and often snarkiest replies I’ve run across.  But it’s also a very interesting point.  Still, on analysis, I’m going to call it flimsy at best.  I’m going to spend quite a bit of space on this one.  Feel free to skip to down to the end (“In Sum” before “Conclusion”).

Let’s distinguish between being opposed to knowledge in its various forms, on the one hand, and being opposed to the prerogatives of intellectuals, on the other.  I claim that the path many geeks are headed down really has them opposed to theoretical and factual knowledge per se. I think the evidence I offered supported this reasonably well, but let me try to make it a little more explicit.

Consider point (1), about experts.  (“Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known.”)  That certainly looks like it is about the prerogatives of experts.  If for example on Wikipedia I encountered people saying, for example, “Experts need to prove this to us, not just assert their authoritah,” that would be fair enough.  That’s not anti-intellectual at all.  But going farther to say, “You merely have access to resources, you don’t understand this any better than I do” and “You’re not welcome here” is to fail to admit that through their study and experience, the experts have something more to contribute than the average Joe.  If you can’t bring yourself to admit that–and I submit that the stripe of geek I’m describing can’t–then your attitude is anti-intellectual.  (Some people are refreshingly honest about just this.)  Then what you’re saying is that specialized study and experience do not lead to anything valuable, and are a waste of time.  But they lead to knowledge, which is valuable, and not a waste of time.

Point (2) (that books per se are outmoded) also, admittedly, has a little to do with intellectual authority–but only a little.  One of the reasons that some geeks, and others, are welcoming the demise of books is that they resent a single person set up as an authority by a publisher.  They say that publishing can and should be more like a conversation, and in a conversation, there shouldn’t be one “authority,” but rather a meeting of equal minds.  So perhaps those who are pleased to attack the medium of books couch their views as an attack on authority.  Perhaps.  But when I defend books, I really don’t care about authority so much.  Of course, when thinking adults read books, they don’t read them it in order to receive the truth from on high.  They are interested (in argumentative books, to take just one kind) in a viewpoint being fully and intelligently canvassed.  As some of the geeks commenting do not realize, and as some people don’t realize until they get to graduate school, it frequently requires a book–or several books–to fully articulate a case for some relatively narrow question.  Scholars should be praised, not faulted, for being so committed to the truth that they are willing to write, and read, discussions that are that long.  The fact that publishers have to pick authors who are capable of mounting excellent arguments at such length doesn’t mean that their readers are supposed simply to accept whatever they are told.  At bottom, then, to oppose books as such is to be opposed to the only way extended verbal arguments (and narratives and exposition) can be propagated.  An indeterminately large collaboration can’t develop a huge, integrated, complex theory, write a great novel, or develop a unified, compelling narrative about some element of our experience.  If you want to call yourself intellectual, you’ve got to support the creation of such works by individual people.

Point (3), about the classics, has almost nothing to do with the prerogatives of authority.  The shape of the Western Canon, if you will, does not rest on anybody’s authority, but instead on the habits of educators (school and university) as an entire class.  You’re not rebelling against anybody’s authority when you rebel against classics; you are, if anything, rebelling against the ideas the classics contain, or against the labor of reading something that is demanding to read.  In any case, anybody who comes down squarely against reading the classics is, to that extent, decidedly anti-intellectual.  Face it.

Point (4), which has us memorizing as little as possible and using the Internet as a memory prosthesis as much as possible, has absolutely nothing to do with authority.  If you’re opposed to memorizing something, you’re opposed to learning and knowing it.  That’s quite anti-intellectual.

Point (5) concerns college, and on this many people said, in effect, “I oppose the stupidity of an overpriced, mediocre, unnecessary product that rests on the alleged authority of college professors.”  Then it looks like you’re criticizing the authority of professors, and so you think I’m defending that.  Well, to be sure, if college professors had no significant knowledge, which (as I think) gives their views some intellectual authority, then there would be no point in paying money to study with them.  But I can defend the advisability of systematic college-level study (I choose these words carefully) without making any controversial claims about the authority of college professors.  I do not, for example, have to assume that college professors must always be believed, that they are infallible, that we should not be skeptical of most of what they say (especially in the humanities and social sciences).  After all, most professors expect their students to be skeptical and not to take what they say uncritically; and only a very dull student will do that, anyway.  If you didn’t know that, it’s probably because you haven’t been to college.  So, no.  I am not merely defending the authority of college professors.  I am personally quite critical of most scholarship I encounter.

In sum, I know that libertarian geeks (I’d count myself as one, actually) love to rail against the prerogatives of authority.  You’d like to justify your anti-intellectual attitudes (and sometimes, behavior) as fighting against The Man.  Maybe that is why you have your attitudes, maybe not.  In any case, that doesn’t stop said attitudes from being anti-intellectual, and your issues don’t mean that I am especially concerned to defend the prerogatives of authority.  I am not.

Conclusion

I think I’ve hit most of the high points.

One thing I didn’t discuss in my original essay was why geeks have become so anti-intellectual, especially with the rise of the Internet.  Here is my take on that.  Most geeks are very smart, predominantly male, and capable of making an excellent livelihood from the sweat of their minds.  Consequently, as a class, they’re more arrogant than most, and they naturally have a strong independent streak.  Moreover, geeks pride themselves on finding the most efficient (“laziest”) way to solve any problem, even if it is a little sloppy.  When it comes to getting qualified for work, many will naturally dismiss the necessity of college if they feel they can, because they hate feeling put-upon by educators who can’t even write two lines of code.  And the whole idea of memorizing stuff, well, it seems more and more unnecessarily effortful when web searching often uncovers answers just as well (they very misguidedly think).  What about books, and classics in particular?  Well, geek anti-intellectual attitudes here are easily explained as a combination of laziness and arrogance.  The Iliad takes a lot of effort, and the payoff is quite abstract; instead, they could read a manual or write code or engineer some project, and do a lot more of what they recognize as “learning.”  The advent of new social media and the decline of the popularity of books are developments that only confirm their attitude.  It doesn’t hurt that geek is suddenly chic, which surely only inflates geek arrogance.  If they admit to themselves that there is something to philosophy, history, or anything else that takes time, hard study, and reflection to learn, but which does not produce code or gadgetry, then they would feel a little deflated.  This doesn’t sit well with their pride, of course.  They’re smart, they think, and so how could they be opposed to any worthwhile knowledge?

So it shouldn’t be surprising that some (only some) geeks turn out to be anti-intellectual.  This is no doubt why many people said, in response to my essay, “This is just what I’ve been thinking.”

I admit this is news to me: a “Thiel Fellowship” has been set up by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, which encourages tech entrepreneurship by under-20-olds with the requirement that the recipients not go to college for two years.  Peter Thiel, as it happens, has B.A. and J.D. degrees from Stanford, so it’s a fair question whether he would have taken his own advice.  I recently had a similar reaction to Ken Robinson, Ph.D.

One of the fellowship recipients, 19-year-old Dale Stephens, wrote a provocatively-titled essay reprinted in CNN.com: “College is a waste of time.”  As a former college instructor, I’d give it a C.  The essay’s argument is undeveloped; its thesis, that college is a “waste of time,” gets only the scantiest support.  Moreover, I can’t help but observe that this is a short and dogmatic essay, well exemplifying the generation of self-important, dogmatic young techies that dominate discourse about the Internet these days.

Let me preface these remarks by saying, first of all, that I too sort of dropped out of the academy.  I had wanted to be a philosophy professor from the age of 18.  But, a few years before finishing my dissertation, I became disillusioned with academia–it’s a familiar story.  I did finish my Ph.D. in Philosophy, though, partly because Jimmy Wales promised to increase my salary once I earned the degree.  My complaint, anyway, was that academic research tends to reheat arguments and focus on the trivial, which is an inevitable feature of the publish-or-perish economics of academic hiring.  But I wouldn’t recommend that college students drop out, if they want and have the aptitude for jobs that require college degrees.  Skipping graduate school, well, that’s another question.

So what is Stephens’ argument that “college is a waste of time”?  It is more or less a laundry list of complaints about college:

1. College rewards “conformity rather than independence.”

2. College rewards “competition rather collaboration.”

3. College rewards “regurgitation rather than learning.”

4. College rewards “theory rather than application.”

5. College actually reduces “creativity, innovation and curiosity.”

6. “Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity” in college.

7. College is very expensive.

8. But “there are productive alternatives to college,” as one can see in the lives of people “who never completed or attended college.”

9. LinkedIn, Facebook, StackOverflow, Behance, and other sites together allow us to document our accomplishments and get them “socially validated,” and evaluation of acccomplishments on such sites will take the place of college degrees for hiring purposes.

10. Therefore, college is a waste of time.

The trouble with this argument is that the premises are in some cases quite questionable, and those that have merit do not support the conclusion.  I’ll make some comments on each.

Premise 1: whether college rewards conformity rather than independence really depends on the field.  In the humanities, for example, conformity to P.C. is pretty rigorously enforced, and one can never be quite sure if endorsement of the professor’s idiosyncratic views is expected or not.  (As a rule of thumb, if a professor spends a lot of time trying to convince you of something not everyone in the field believes, then throwing it back in his or her face isn’t a good idea if you want the best grade.)  On the other hand, most professors find attempts to think originally and creatively refreshing, and they reward attempts, or successful attempts anyway; I did.  Also, don’t confuse the conformist attitudes of your fellow students with your professors, who, even if they are dogmatic or ideological, generally have some appreciation for genuine intellectual creativity.  As to science, in the basic courses anyway, “independence” is beside the point; either you learn the material or you don’t.  Bottom line: college as it is done today tends to make people more ideologically “pure” or conformist, but also frequently better able to range across a wide landscape of intellectual possibilities.

Premise 2: if Stephens is actually saying he’d prefer more groupwork, I’m surprised; I really hated groupwork in the classes I took.  Collaborating in Wikipedia or Citizendium is one thing–that can be amusing.  Collaborating on a college paper or assignment, on the other hand, is usually tedious and annoying, at least in my experience.   Anyway, let’s suppose college does rewards competition rather than collaboration.  Why is this bad, even by Stephens’ lights?  Stephens, like the anti-intellectual types who perennially talk down college, seems to think that what is important in evaluating college as an institution is its ability to prepare students for thriving careers.  This is not really correct, but suppose it is.  Well, the marketplace is full of competition, so prima facie getting practice competing isn’t bad preparation.  It is true, to be sure, that collaboration also happens all the time in business; but let me assure you that doing more groupwork in college will not help you in the slightest, especially in courses like philosophy and chemistry, unless you are in an applied field.  For example, if you’re doing film production, then by golly I’m sure practice in collaborative film production is exactly what’s needed.  But then, in such fields, it’s easy to find college programs where just such collaboration happens regularly.

Premise 3: does college require regurgitation rather than learning?  ”Regurgitation” is itself a frequently regurgitated concept, a favorite of disaffected high school students and educationists alike, according to which memorization for a test is criticized because the facts tend not to be understood, or “digested,” properly.  Well, it depends on the college and the student, first of all; at Reed College, most of work done outside of science and math took the form of essay writing, and little regurgitation took place.  Granted, at many state colleges there is a lot of teaching to the test, and I can’t disagree that this is unfortunate.  My advice if you are at such an institution is to find professors who by reputation do inspire learning, one way or another.  Just bear in mind that some professors who use textbooks, lecture, and examinations do manage to produce excellently-prepared students who can do much more than just “regurgitate” undigested information.  Things would be different if your peers were better students who could be expected to attend class and do the reading and understand it; then, professors would be able to do more with them.  Anyway, is this enough to justify quitting college?  Not at all.  After all, whether one really learns the subject in a lecture-text-examination scheme really is up to the student.  If you really want to learn, you will.

Premise 4: of course college requires more “theory” than “application”–but maybe this isn’t a very clear proposition.  Anyway, college is about the deep reasons for things, or the theory.  Community colleges, technical colleges, and professional programs are about how to do specialized vocational tasks such as managing a business, writing code, and designing.  College, by contrast, is about expanding the mind and training the understanding.  The idea that college is better if it is “applied” is just wrong, because, quite frankly, there is no substitute for careful reading and analytical writing, for working through difficult calculations, and so forth, if you want to train the mind.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply anti-intellectual, or, in other words, simply doesn’t care about training the mind.  If like Sir Ken Robinson they are already educated, then no doubt they take such training for granted, probably having forgotten the sorts of things they had to do–which some students find very tedious–in order to get the sort of intellectual training they use daily.  If they are not well educated, they probably have no idea of what they’re missing out on.  In some cases, this attitude is just a matter of sour grapes from students who couldn’t make the grade.

Premise 5: does college reduce “creativity, innovation and curiosity”?  Surely not.  I mean, the stuff about ideological indoctrination aside, college instructors labor hard to wake minds up to possibilities that they cannot see and, in many cases, actively resist.  The ability to see possibilities is a crucial component of creativity.  As to curiosity, mine was certainly heightened by my college education, but then, I went to Reed, and Reed is different.  Still, if you arrive at college intellectually curious, there are challenging programs even at state colleges which cater to your curiosity more than the usual lecture-text-exam courses will.  But I suspect that Stephens, like many, is complaining that college already has a body of knowledge to teach, and  instead of letting him think whatever he likes, he would have to learn what they have to teach.  Well, yes.  Critical and scholarly thinking is in some tension with creative thinking.  You might get very enthusiastic about some half-baked idea of your own, which is creative, innovative, and inspires your curiosity–only to be confronted, unpleasantly, by your professor saying, “Have you noticed that you’re actually contradicting yourself?” or “You need to cash out your central concepts, and when you do, you’ll find that your basic claim is trivial,” or “That’s a plausible hypothesis, but a whole body of research done back in the 1970s actually showed it to be a blind alley.”  Now, if you’re the sort of person–say, an insufferable egotist, or passionately dogmatic–who hates to be told that his cherished ideas are wrong, then being swatted down casually by your professors is going to sting quite a bit.  But then, until you lose your ego and dogmatism a little, you’re probably incapable of being educated.  It might be a good idea to get out into the real world for a few years–where your egotism and dogmatism will probably be beaten out of you anyway.  Then you might be ready for college.  This happens quite a lot.

Premise 6: failure is punished instead of being treated as a learning opportunity?  This is just a fallacy: failure is both. The fear of failure is, of course, the only thing that motivates most students to study.  Besides, if you do fail (to get the right answer, or to pass a whole exam or a course), then usually you have the “opportunity” to do better.  Who is stopping you?  Only yourself and your wounded ego.  Finally, failure in the real world can have a lot harsher consequences.  Whether you take these consequences as a “learning opportunity” is up to you.  What is certain is that there is no effective system for getting an education that does not feature copious identification and correction of mistakes, a.k.a. failure and learning therefrom.

Premise 7: yeah, college is very expensive, much more than it should be.  Can’t argue there.  But did you know that if you love homeschooling, you can do the same thing at the college level and then get degrees by examination, e.g., from Excelsior College?  Anyway, the reason college is expensive is that the market values it.  When the market stops valuing it so much, expect the cost of college education to drop.  (This is something a college student learns in ECON 101.)

Premise 8: are there productive alternatives to college?  Well, of course.  Degrees by examination are one example.  Or simply go to work instead of college, and, one hopes, you will be productive.  I concede Stephens’ more full-bodied point here, that it is possible to have a meaningful career without college.  Whoever denied that?  But if you are 20 years old, you are not making a decision under certainty (a concept you’d pick up in Intro to Logic).  You don’t know, if you drop out of college, what the likelihood is that you will remain in uninspiring jobs or an uneducated person.  But you do know this: if you stay in college, then the chances of your getting the best opportunities are better than if you drop out.  It is, of course, a fallacy to assume that you’ll be another Steve Jobs (who dropped out of Reed).

Premise 9: social networks will replace college degrees as credentialing services?  Of course they won’t, and Stephens does not even begin to mount a defense of this radical claim.  Employers, like it or not, see college degrees as evidence that candidates probably have some baseline amount of training in reading, writing, critical thinking, and basic knowledge.  For most jobs that require much thinking and articulate communication, a college degree is still necessary because employers still need some rough guarantee of the mastery of these skills.  In this way, sadly, a college degree has come to replace what was formerly supposed to be guaranteed by a high school diploma.   The busy professionals who do the hiring for both large and small concerns need ways to cut down the amount of work they do.  Trust me, my young padawans, they do not have time to peruse your blog for evidence of basic skills attainment, they know that LinkedIn profiles and online resumes are easily padded, and they know that number of “friends” means nothing (except maybe time spent online collecting friends).  Maybe the Internet will find a new credentialing method (I argued for a new sort of educational scheme myself a few years back–essay is now offline), but you’ll have to confront an institution and do the sort of things you do in college if you want to get the credential, of that I’m pretty certain.

My main objection to Stephens’ essay, and the reason that he gets a C from me, is that he mainly misunderstands the purpose of education.  College education in the sense of liberal education, which is what is normally meant by a “college education,” is not vocational training at all, but training of the mind.  This is not something trivial like being able to play chess, or just another skill like being able to swim.  We are our minds, by and large.  A good liberal arts education changes our minds and in so doing changes our personalities, our ability to understand what’s going on around us, our ability to react appropriately, and how we feel about life and the world.  When in college himself, Peter Thiel no doubt read this in J. S. Mill’s Utilitarianism:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool 
satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different 
opinion, it is becausethey only know their own side of 
the question. The other party tothe comparison knows both 
sides.

Stephens’ argument seems to rest mainly on the assumption that the reason we should go to college is so that we can succeed in the work world.  I know that is why many people do go to college; but it is not, so to speak, the reason they should. College’s purpose, and the reason that it is not “a waste of time,” is that it improves us in a way that simply going into the work world, even the work world 2.0, will not.  In saying this I don’t mean to defend every aspect of the institution of college education, because of course I don’t.  And I might well recommend that my little boys get their degrees by examination when they are old enough (of course, it will be up to them).  But generally, college education is recommendable because it improves the mind.