Dr. Teresa Smith, in a cogent defense of expertise, once asked my class, “Do you know what subjective used to mean?” When we all replied no, and she told us, “in the opinion of experts.”
At the time, she was using the phrase “subjective” as an opposite pole to “objectivity” and the idea of scientific knowledge. But the description stuck with me and was the beginning of my complex relationship with the concept of expertise. As a student, and now as an academic, I have never responded well to the use of expertise as an authority within an argument. I’m skeptical. I’ve seen too many mistakes made, fads promulgated, and “expert knowledge” used indiscriminately and inappropriately, particularly to overwhelm local voices.
But, at the same time, I deeply respect expertise. It’s hard to go to Oxford and avoid that particularl feeling. Indeed, the thing I’m most grateful for at Oxford is the opportunity it gave me to pursue and develop my own expertise. For four years, my mentors encouraged me to read deeply on topics I cared about, then to go and study them up close. I spent four years deeply engrossed in what I thought was important, then trying to understand (and critique) everything I could about that subject.
For me, those ideas were local knowledge, neighborhood participation, and the type of micro-urban policy decisions that happen informally all around the United States. What I read and found deeply challenged my political beliefs and made me reconsider my policy positions. I came out of the DPhil not just with deep knowledge about my subject, but with a deeper sense of my own priorities and starting points for discussion; I came away from Oxford having considered where I was willing compromise and where I wanted to stand my ground.
I believe that is the biggest advantage of the DPhil; the opportunity to take a few years, get out of the echo chamber, read the best research, learn how to critically analyze it, and investigate a topic yourself. The result is a sort of expert knowledge that comes from deep and serious study.
That type of “expert” knowledge is one of the things that has drawn me to academia. It also sharply contrasts with what I’ve seen from many of my undergraduate classmates. Because they haven’t had that same opportunity to slow down, study, and decide what they are about, they don’t have the same intellectual underpinning to their actions. They’ve floated to where the work is, which makes sense from a life perspective, but often results in a faux-expertise that is colored by the type of initiatives they’ve been asked to work on. In other words, their positions are simply that, positions on individual issues, without a core belief system underneath that is built upon study and consideration. Understandably, my friends’ beliefs are often an incoherent patchwork of the issues they’ve been asked to work on.
For examples of faux-expertise, we need look no further than popular academic books. While I love Malcolm Gladwell as a writer and author, it is almost universally true that experts scoff at his analysis in their field (I’ve found this particularly true of his education work). Similarly, I just finished Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. A wonderful book which recently received a great review from Bill Gates. But serious anthropologists consider it flawed academic work, and lament its popularity.
And here is the crux of my conflict with “expertise.” After Oxford, I can’t help but to deeply love and respect those that have pursued, almost to the point of ridiculousness, in-depth knowledge in a particular slice of the world. But too often, those parading as “experts” are a class of policy-makers who have not taken the time to do that. They haven’t thought through their positions and the wider systematic implications. They are a class of consultants, politicians and ideologues who think in power point and not academic references. I’ve become extremely skeptical of the claim of expertise in policy arguments because it is so often a faux-expertise.
That is one of the reasons I’ve created this blog. I know I need constant reminders to slow down and truly think through the implications of my positions. I wanted a hub and a community for a few of my friends to engage in this process. I wanted to bring the experience I had at Oxford, of truly and deeply considering my most basic principles and why I held them, with my friends and any other readers along for the ride. Hopefully, this can be one of the places I bring a little Oxford back home.
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