At this year’s Levin Family Dean’s Forum, The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols took on higher education.
The moderator for the 2026 School of Arts & Sciences Levin Family Dean’s Forum, Lauder Professor of Political Science Brendan O’Leary, opened his conversation with this year’s speaker, Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols, by reciting some recent article headlines from the magazine in which Nichols offered a variety of criticisms of President Donald Trump W’68. “My critics will say that I have Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Nichols replied. “But this president is a threat on so many levels to so many things. I try to write about other things now and then, but this is what draws my attention.”
There were plenty of those other things discussed during the March 3 forum as well. Nichols—a former professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College who has also taught at Dartmouth, Georgetown, and in Harvard’s extension and summer programs—lamented that “most of the world’s nuclear weapons are now in the hands of people who are either authoritarians or have authoritarian impulses, like the president,” but added that, rather than nuclear war, the greatest current threat is “the collapse of the constitutional order in the United States” under Trump’s assaults.
While many in the audience at the Penn Museum’s Harrison Auditorium may have been nodding along with those sentiments, when O’Leary turned to a discussion of Nichols’s book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, the target of his criticism hit closer to home. Those remarks by Nichols, excerpted below, have been lightly condensed and edited. —JP
“I remember, when I started at Dartmouth, one of my colleagues coming to me—because I was the undergraduate advisor for the department—and saying, ‘I feel like a clerk in an expensive boutique,’ a quote that I put in the book. And I found that in trying to advise students, their sense of entitlement is greater than I had remembered from my college and graduate education. I went undergraduate to Boston University, I did a master’s at Columbia, and then I was a TA and PhD candidate at Georgetown. And [at Dartmouth] I was constantly stunned by some of the interactions.
A student came in and said, ‘I decided that I want to be a Central European commercial expert, get a master’s degree maybe, go to Berlin.’ ‘You know,’ I said, ‘that’s a great idea. How’s your German?’ She said, ‘I have to learn German?’ I said, ‘What’s your language?’ ‘I placed out of Spanish.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not really useful in Berlin.’ And she gave me a look—nice kid, but she gave me a look, like, ‘When did the help get so uppity?’
And I found that what was really happening was, as long as seats were filled, students were being asked about being happy. This is what I call the therapeutic model of education. We were spending a lot of time saying, ‘Are you happy? Do you feel included? Is this meaningful to you?’ I think we’re asking them things that, first of all, are either irrelevant or that they can’t answer right now. Ask them 10 years from now about whether their education was meaningful to them.
I think you’re seeing, particularly in this middle tranche of very expensive boutique schools, that it’s, ‘Well, come here. We know it’s fantastically expensive, and we have a cool rock-climbing wall.’ This is not healthy. There are so many college degrees now that the days when someone could say, ‘Look, what I know about this is more authoritative than you because I went to college’—well, [now] we all went to college. But that doesn’t mean that everyone got an education. And that, I think, is driving some of this death of expertise: ‘Sure, you went to Penn and studied Russian history. And I went to a local community college, and I read a book in a world history course about Russia. We both have college degrees. Why should I listen to you?’
This is a very tender subject, because, immediately, you’re being elitist. There are real differences among universities, there are real differences among programs, there are real differences among students—and we have chosen, in the name of egalitarianism and peace and happiness for our students, to say that those things don’t really exist.
This is not a jihad against the liberal arts. I don’t want to live in a world without art history. That is not what this is about. But I think a lot of kids who have gone off to college—at a time when in my little state of Rhode Island, we are hurting for electricians and builders—would have been happier [doing that]. Because a lot of these kids end up going into trades afterwards, and college was just, as one graduate described his college experience in my book, ‘those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.’ That is a real crime. We shouldn’t be dragging people in the door and saying, ‘Fine, just go to college, and we hope you enjoy the experience. And if you graduate and you don’t know a whole lot—you’re not really prepared to do anything, and you’re not really an educated citizen—you’re still gonna owe us $50,000.’”
