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Inside Higher Education
Why Academics
Were Ignored
By David Matthews for Times
Higher Education
July 7, 2016
Just over a week before Britain's referendum on European Union
membership, Paul Whiteley, a professor in the University of Essex’s
department of government, was scheduled to take part in a BBC Norwich
debate alongside three other academics to fact-check statements made by
politicians from both campaigns, to remain in the union and to leave.
But one of the politicians set to appear, Douglas Carswell, the U.K.
Independence Party representative for Clacton, refused to appear
alongside them. “He was no longer prepared to share a platform with any
experts,” according to Whiteley (Carswell did not respond to a request
for comment from Times Higher Education).
“Considering the importance of the wider issues, this is a relatively
trivial incident, but it does show how academic experts are no longer
seen as authoritative,” he said.
Carswell was one of the many leave campaigners who rubbished the
opinions of experts whose economic modeling predicted that Brexit would
make the U.K. worse off.
“All we’ve heard from the remain side -- apart from outlandish
scaremongering -- is appeals to authority. Instead of presenting the
issues, they expect us to trust the experts to get it right,” the
member of Parliament wrote on his blog earlier in June.
Michael Gove, the prominent leave campaigner, has achieved infamy in
some quarters for his remark during the campaign that “people in this
country have had enough of experts.” He later compared economists
warning about Brexit to scientists wheeled out by the Nazis to
discredit Einstein. One anonymous remain campaign chief quoted in The
Sunday Times said that Gove had “launched an all-out assault on the
Enlightenment in the name of atavistic nationalism.”
Leave voters were just as dismissive of academic experts as leave
politicians. According to a YouGov poll before the referendum, more
than half said that they did not trust academics, and nearly six in 10
distrusted economists, on whether or not to leave the E.U.
Remain voters were far more trusting, and academics were the only group
with a net positive trust rating overall.
But scholars are still worried by the apparent alienation of such a
large segment of the population and the victory of a campaign with such
a strong anti-intellectual streak. What has gone wrong?
The most immediate issue is how the economic arguments were deployed.
“Expert opinions, particularly in relation to the economy, were misused
during the campaign,” said Whiteley.
“The models that the Treasury used to justify the claim that each
householder would be worse off by £4,300 [if Britain left the E.U.]
were state-of-the-art [economic] models, but they are incapable of
making a definitive forecast like that since they are subject to very
wide confidence intervals when projected many years into the future,”
he said. “This was not made clear and so the leave side effectively
trashed them.”
“There’s no doubt that for some people, all experts are suspect,” said
Charles Pattie, a professor of electoral geography at the University of
Sheffield. “Economists' collective failure (for the most part) to
predict the 2008 crash no doubt feeds that,” while it has also entered
“collective memory” that there was “expert consensus” that Britain
needed to join the exchange rate mechanism in the 1990s, which ended
disastrously on Black Wednesday in 1992.
Academic opinion has also struggled to keep up with the lightning-quick
dissemination of opinion made possible by social media, says Mike Finn,
a teaching fellow at the University of Warwick who focuses on
contemporary British politics.
“We’re a long way from Radio 4,” he said. “We’re now in the world of
social media. It means facts become facts in a different way.”
When something goes viral, “academic expertise lacks power in the face
of that tidal wave” and ideas travel rapidly and are difficult to
refute, he said. “It’s like watching popular mythmaking in real time …
myths that are very hard to challenge because they are endorsed by
however many shares.”
However, one academic, Michael Dougan, a professor of European law at
the University of Liverpool, did have his expertise go viral: a video
of him analyzing the figures circulated by both sides attracted nearly
500,000 views. “A lot of expertise was not disseminated in that way,”
said Finn. “Academics are too slow to pick this up.”
Also blamed for the broader erosion in trust is the impact agenda --
the government-backed push for research to have a visible use in
society. It creates “perverse incentives to dumb down and
oversimplify,” said Whiteley.
“Make academic communication compulsory so everyone is clamoring to be
heard and you will devalue its impact and some of it will be simply
misrepresented and ultimately not believed,” he said.
Then there is the wider sense that universities and academics are on
one side of a cultural split in British society -- and leave voters eye
them suspiciously from the other side.
“Academics are part of that establishment class, but perhaps don’t see
themselves in that way,” Finn said. The academy needs to attract more
scholars from poorer backgrounds who understand other parts of society,
he thinks.
Fifty years ago, things were very different, Finn said. As former Prime
Minister Harold Wilson declared that he would embrace the “white heat
of technology,” several Oxford dons sat in his cabinet. “That was seen
as a selling point,” as they were “grammar school boys done good,” he
said.
Now, it is Oxford graduates, not Oxford academics, that dominate the
cabinet, and they are seen as “elitist and out of touch.” This shows
how universities are seen as “bastions of entrenched elitism,” said
Finn.
Meanwhile, rising inequality provides a background to collapsing trust
in many sources of authority, not just academic expertise, says
Whiteley. “If many people think that the system is not delivering for
them, they are unlikely to think very much of the people in charge,” he
said.
What place is there now for academics and universities in public
debate, after the leave victory? Jamie Martin, a former special adviser
to Gove who campaigned for leave, particularly on science issues,
acknowledges that the campaign did indeed encourage voters to look at
politicians and economists and say: “We don’t trust you.”
But Martin makes a distinction between expertise in “hard science,"
which he says Gove holds in high esteem, and politics and economics,
which are “necessarily subjective” areas where “I have my view and you
have yours.”
Arguments about immigration are based around unquantifiable cultural
preferences, and academics find it difficult to contribute to this kind
of debate, Martin added.
“If you enjoy that mix of cultures, that’s a value judgment against
someone who opposes free movement,” he said. “You can’t have expertise
on a value judgment. A lot of this was about cultural values.”
Still, for all the soul-searching in academia about declining trust,
scientists remain one of the most trusted professions in the U.K.,
according to an Ipsos Mori poll released this year. Seventy-nine
percent of the public trusted them to “generally tell the truth.”
Professors scored similarly highly before they were dropped from the
survey in 2013. But whether future surveys will tell a similar story is
unclear.
Read this and other articles at Inside Higher Education
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