an expert jackass

When it comes to the concept of expertise, there are two types of academics: those who would never claim to be experts in anything that lies outside of the papers they're currently writing
and those who think that being an expert in one thing (e.g. histone deacetylace inhibitors) makes you an expert at everything else (e.g. parenting). You can probably tell which group lies within my crosshairs this evening, but the reality is that I don't think either attitude is healthy.

The first type of "expert" is one I can sympathize with. As an academic, your research becomes more and more focused with time. Eventually it becomes a stretch to say that you're studying an overall concept -- say, malaria, for instance -- when you actually spend your day analyzing the mechanics of flight of satiated female mosquitoes. Because science is constantly evolving, your knowledge of every other aspect of malaria quickly becomes dated, and you wouldn't dare to call yourself an expert on malaria.

To some degree, I fell into this category when I was a grad student and a postdoc. My field owed its existence to current problems facing society, and we used those problems as a justification for funding, yet I wasn't comfortable really discussing that current societal problem because I didn't consider myself qualified.

This is kind of a sad way to be, as it implies either that you don't have a sense of how your work really fits into the real world or that you don't have the confidence to discuss topics that you're not intimately familiar with. Either way, society loses out because you're not sharing your knowledge.

But the academic that's more dangerous is the one who thinks that being an expert in one thing makes him an expert in, well, everything. I started thinking about these toxic experts after I had a email spat with one of these self-aggrandizing windbags last week. Here was the situation:

Our university recently adopted a system of templates for university web pages. They're really nice, and were even vetted by a web designer friend of mine. The goal is to make all of the university's web pages look and feel consistent so that we're sending coherent signals to our visitors. Makes sense. The templates also make building a new website really straightforward. Since I, having basically never built a website, was charged with building one for our new multi-disciplinary initiative, I was relieved to have these templates at my disposal.

Last week, I emailed a few people who need to provide content for the website. And the first comment I get about my weeks of hard work was from Windbag, who didn't like the template. I begged off, explained the university's policy about website styles, etc., thinking I was in the clear. He spat back that no one had consulted him when these templates were being developed, so he doesn't think we should use them.

Uh, right. So we should let the professors decide on how the university presents itself to the world? Better yet, we should just let Windbag decide. He seems to know a lot about nanotechnology, so we should definitely have him make that final decision on what color the navigation bars should be.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even crazy Windbag professors. But these "experts" don't seem to recognize the difference between opinion and expertise. In thinking that he was an expert of web design, Windbag was essentially saying that his opinion should be given the same weight as the opinions of the graphic designers and web developers who came up with the templates. Academics like Windbag have a lack of respect for different types of work, for different avenues of research, and for different opinions. On a deeper level, they fail to recognize that the experts in any field have worked hard to become so.

This is a bit of an extreme example -- my jaw literally dropped when I got these emails from Windbag. But the Ivory Tower is crawling with Windbags, some more subtle and some less. These are the creatures who go to talks on topics unrelated to their own research and then harangue and belittle the speaker without having any basis for doing so. Their voices drip equally with impatient condescension whether they're talking about the papers recently published in their field or the relative merits of the Bahamas versus the Florida Keys for sailing.

They're also the creatures who decide to leave academia and are then shocked when people out in the real world aren't clamoring for their knowledge (guilty).