How Broken Is Academia?
Pleased to appear in Persuasion…
Speaking as a seasoned veteran of public broadcasting and Ivy League PR—having spent a formative few years under the wing of PBS icon Bill Moyers and then working for a decade plus as a reporter and flack across Columbia University—there’s one overarching truth about marketing higher education. No matter what the discipline, the very most rigorous scholarly research tends to be pretty damn boring and incremental and hard to promote.
Almost all actual progress gets inched out excruciatingly deep in the footnotes; the real world remains a frustrating, contradictory, endlessly complicated mess awfully hard to reconcile with the news cycle and whatever various donors, journalists, and grantmaking entities like to hear. Even the most masochistic of academics can scarcely bear to read much academic literature, so most of it goes essentially unread and unchallenged.
But in casting and canonizing superstar public intellectuals from throughout the academy, mass media and upper middlebrow audiences tend to prefer clear-cut triumphant breakthroughs, the stuff of headlines and biopics, right on mark and schedule—sheer sparkling salesmanship for popular consumption even as less heralded stalwarts of higher ed stolidly pursue the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny screws.
In STEM, the crowd-pleasing goods are typically delivered via excessive exaggeration of the revolutionary landmark significance of each and every latest research paper in a valiant attempt to help capture the imagination of a lay public raised to expect electrifying science fiction. In the social sciences, the ever-metastasizing replicability crisis is always hiding behind the seductive talking points and press releases, while in the humanities the discourse is often so jargon-laden and deep in the weeds that even specialists’ eyes glaze over. If nobody’s actually bothering to double check the details, why wouldn’t ambitious students, faculty, and administrators quietly cut corners and fudge as necessary to snatch up the bigger money and most coveted opportunities for professional advancement, delivering what wider audiences want to hear?
So I haven’t been the least bit surprised that Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Harvard President Claudine Gay, and now Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Ann Charleston have turned out to have past records of plagiarism and/or academic misconduct. What’s surprising is that the hollow credentialism and politicized infotainment that define so much of today’s academic establishment are at last coming to light.
It’s been a long time coming: I’ve spent much of my career feeling queasy about a lot of the content I’ve had to package and sweeten for the market as it is, regardless of when I’ve strongly suspected it to be empirically shaky at best. In terms of the struggle to land jobs and funding and tenure from a stagnant or shrinking pie, even honest scholars with the best of intentions face constant temptation to simply deliver the goods.
From what I’ve seen in public broadcasting and at Columbia Journalism School, that dynamic often incentivized artful incorporation of consistently slanted narratives on hot-button political issues. At Columbia Law, it seemed to be a top priority to help codify talking points into statute—particularly when it came to expansive definitions of “equity.” In nearly a decade of reporting for Columbia Engineering, I watched the school move from sleepy backwater to enthusiastic cheerleader and enabler for whatever the sexier fields desired. And at the School of Public Health, in my final job for Columbia, I helped celebrate striving technocrats testing the outer limits of their authority since, during Covid, almost any social problem could be framed as an “epidemic.”
In drafting and editing for various eminent institutions, the usual distortions tended to come in a handful of predictable forms. I certainly witnessed a distinct lack of academic rigorousness throughout the process—whether that meant consistently caricaturing the opposition as unreasonable extremists or playing it fast and loose with numbers.
Occasionally I had to step in for some fundamental fact checking. In one memorable instance, when I came across computational errors, the research team seemed more annoyed that I was being a stickler than alarmed that they’d been on the verge of publishing a profoundly flawed paper. The numbers didn’t matter, only the narrative.
More often, though, my role in the process was more subtle. In fields like journalism and law, incentives pointed to bending narratives to what donors and influencers liked to hear. In STEM, returns were far more based on actual actionable results, if still inextricably tied to marketing and major capital campaigns promising a seamlessly rosy future.
Not so surprisingly, the academic establishment’s first instinct amongst recent controversies has been to circle the wagons and resort directly to attack mode. In an op-ed for The New York Times shortly after her resignation from Harvard’s presidency, Dr. Claudine Gay wrote of the charges against her, “This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.” Yet, as experts acknowledge, it’s currently hard to say just how deep issues of plagiarism, non-replicability, and broader intellectual sloppiness really go.
“The bracing fact is that no one seems to know how extensive—or serious—the problem may actually be,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “But we found one point of general agreement: the heavy pressure academics are under to keep publishing fuels the problem, however widespread it may be.”
Artificial intelligence geared at detecting plagiarism and other red flags reportedly played a substantial role in exposing Gay’s record and seems poised to subject the entire universe of academic publishing to severe scrutiny. It may be telling that the controversy around Gay has prompted palpable anxiety and efforts to minimize the gravity of her infractions. “God knows, I think if we submitted every scholar in the United States to that kind of scrutiny, what would happen?” said Earl Lewis, professor of history at the University of Michigan, to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Based on everything I’ve seen, my view is: Yes, let’s by all means authenticate everyone’s publications with the finest of fine-tooth combs. If that task is too terribly tedious for human beings to tackle, it’s getting easier and easier for AI. Integrity still matters, as does figuring out who’s still trying to maintain it. Let ‘er rip, and let the chips fall where they may!
The mid-term future of academic discourse may well be the story of a clash of algorithms: AI ever more precisely determining exactly what messaging influential “stakeholders” like in their clickbait versus watchdog AI becoming ever better at ferreting out academic misconduct. Perhaps technology might finally force academia to become as rigorous as it would like to think it is.
Until the AI cavalry arrives, or an army of muckrakers, the best prospect for near-term progress is for the public to start exercising a lot more day to day skepticism. Did that shiny new study in the Times miraculously affirm all of your priors? Did that silky-smooth professor on the PBS Newshour wrap everything up with a neat little bow? Reality is messy, and what seems too good to be true is probably not true. Let the buyer beware!
Next: Keeping the Blue Blood Pumping
Oh my gosh. Spot on, every word. Except I think you cut STEM too much slack. I was quite often the only person in the way of some bullshit STEM claim just because no one else could or would challenge it. Magic crystals, cold fusion, cloak devices - I saw it all
Spot on. Thanks for this.