Quotes from Thomas M. Nichols

To faculty everywhere, the lesson was obvious: the campus of a top university is not a place for intellectual exploration. It is a luxury home, rented for four to six years, nine months at a time, by children of the elite who may shout at faculty as if they're berating clumsy maids in a colonial mansion. A

When citizens are always performing for each other, they expect accolades and instant psychic rewards, even if they have not earned them, and they become angry and resentful if they do not get them.

This was the same warning José Ortega y Gasset gave when he wrote Revolt of the Masses in 1930: "The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."24 "I'm as good as you," Screwtape chortles at the end of his address, "is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies.

The American Dream cannot produce "rags to riches," but it has, as Strain puts it, delivered reliably on the promise of "rags to comfort.

What is different today, and especially worrisome when it comes to the creation of educated citizens, is how the protective, swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students and thus dissolves their ability to conduct a logical and informed argument. When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.

No society could survive—and surely no society could be decent—if everybody in it were able to communicate everything. —Daniel J. Boorstin

Many of the people who campaign against established knowledge are otherwise adept and successful in their daily lives. In some ways, it is all worse than ignorance: it is unfounded arrogance, the outrage of an increasingly narcissistic culture that cannot endure even the slightest hint of inequality of any kind. By

Experts can go wrong, for example, when they try to stretch their expertise from one area to another. This is not only a recipe for error, but is maddening to other experts as well.

Trump survived all of this, seized the Republican nomination, and won, because in the end, he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America's nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.

Colleges are supposed to be the calm environment in which educated men and women determine what's true and what's false, and where they learn to follow a model of scholarly inquiry no matter where it takes them. Instead, many colleges have become hostages to students who demand that their feelings override every other consideration.

Knowing things is not the same as understanding them. Comprehension is not the same thing as analysis. Expertise is a not a parlor game played with factoids.

Once again, as humanity has managed to do with everything from fire to nuclear energy, we have found a great tool that can advance human civilization. And once again, we are at risk of using it to destroy ourselves. Connectedness, only so recently a marvel and a blessing, is now a curse.

This is why the collapse of the relationship between experts and citizens is a dysfunction of democracy itself. The abysmal literacy, both political and general, of the American public is the foundation for all of these problems. It is the soil in which all of the other dysfunctions have taken root and prospered, with the 2016 election only its most recent expression.

The sheer size of our interaction with the virtual world, and the speed with which that world has enveloped all of us, has created a vast and yet lonely space, where we are both too connected and too isolated at the same time.

In a passage often cited by Western conservatives and especially loved by American libertarians, the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek wrote in 1960: "The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good.

Populism actually reinforces this elitism, because the celebration of ignorance cannot launch communications satellites, negotiate the rights of US citizens overseas, or provide for effective medications, all of which are daunting tasks even the dimmest citizens now demand and take for granted. Faced with a public that has no idea how most things work, experts likewise disengage, choosing to speak mostly to each other rather than to laypeople.

The Internet, however, is nothing like a library. Rather, it's a giant repository where anyone can dump anything, from a first folio to a faked photograph, from a scientific treatise to pornography, from short bulletins of information to meaningless electronic graffiti. It's an environment almost entirely without regulation, which opens the door to content being driven by marketing, politics, and the uninformed decisions of other laypeople rather than the judgment of experts. Can

Yes, it is unbridled ego for experts to believe they can run a democracy while ignoring its voters; it is also, however, ignorant narcissism for laypeople to believe that they can maintain a large and advanced nation without listening to the voices of those more educated and experienced than themselves.

The constant ability to see into the lives of our neighbors, to compare ourselves to strangers, to be in constant contact with the entire planet day and night, is unnatural and pushes the human mind far beyond its capacity for reason and reflection.