The Covid pandemic made one truth feel unavoidable: In moments of crisis, people really should listen to experts. Yet the longer I worked as a health professional — specifically one trained without a single course in nutrition, which we can agree is foundational to human health — the more I understood why so many people doubt expertise in the first place. Because very often, expertise is questionable.
My own education showed me how easily a system can produce professionals who know intricate molecular pathways of chemicals and can recite the mechanisms of biological agents, yet know almost nothing about food and drinks — the substances people consume far more often than pills or vaccines. It was absurd, and it made me sympathetic to the skeptics.
Now I study history, and at a recent conference I met a journalist who told me, almost casually, “But you don’t need to be trained as a historian to be a historian.” She was speaking about herself — she had studied something entirely different, yet was researching the Holocaust — and I could imagine that her background sometimes leads people to question her competence. Still, the moment she said it, I felt a wave of anger rise in me.
I wanted to tell her that she was wrong — that historians receive rigorous training, that the university has shaped me in ways no amount of self‑directed reading could replace. I wanted to explain that her education, however valuable, cannot simply stand in for the formation of a real historian: someone trained to think historically, to analyze sources, to understand context, to work with archives, to navigate historiography, to recognize methodological pitfalls. But even as these arguments formed in my mind, I also knew I could not say to what extent they hold true for the discipline as a whole. There are motivated teachers, rigorous classes, and students who learn to interrogate sources with genuine sophistication; at the same time, there are countless examples that complicate any sweeping claim.
So in that moment, I realized that — however wrong the journalist may be in her assessment of what it takes to be a historian — she also did have a point. History education, as it currently stands, is simply not as good as it could and, in my opinion, should be. Many people graduate without any real understanding of the empirical side of the field. We know, to an extent, where to find sources and how to present and cite them, but we often know almost nothing about how to analyze them. We can quote a document, but not interrogate its silences; we can summarize a source, but not examine its conditions of production, its intended audience, its rhetorical strategies, or the power structures that shaped what was recorded and what was omitted. In other words, my impression is that we lack the intellectual discipline required to transform evidence into knowledge.
And the issues go deeper. Too many students finish their degrees without grasping that our work is oriented toward objectivity: the slow, disciplined effort to separate what can be known from what we might wish were true. History is not a stage for personal desires, nor a venue for performing what feels morally satisfying. It is certainly not activism. It is a discipline built on method, evidence, and interpretive restraint — the willingness to let sources unsettle our assumptions rather than bend them to our preferences. When those foundations are weak, the boundary between trained historians and enthusiastic amateurs becomes blurry.
The fairest way to illustrate this problem is to use my own example. Although I’m enthusiastic about history in general, my personal motivation lies in researching the Holocaust. Certain powerful experiences from my childhood taught me to care deeply about Jewish history and about what happened — and continues to happen — to Jews. And precisely because of that emotional connection, I have to remind myself constantly that Holocaust victims were human beings, not symbols. Their lives were not raw material for moral lessons, political arguments, or personal identification; they were individuals embedded in specific social worlds, shaped by contingencies, choices, constraints, and contradictions. To study them responsibly requires resisting the temptation to treat the past as a reservoir of meaning for the present. It demands the discipline to let evidence speak in its own register, even when it challenges the narratives I find comforting.
This is where proper training matters. Without it, emotional investment easily becomes moral storytelling; with it, emotional investment becomes a source of sensitivity. Holocaust victims were individuals with the full spectrum of human complexity, and that is how they must be researched. Some were loving parents; some were difficult spouses; some were politically progressive; some were deeply conservative; some were wealthy industrialists who exploited their workers; some were impoverished laborers. Their social positions, their flaws, their virtues, their conflicts — all of this is part of their history just as much as their persecution, their suffering, and their resistance. To study them honestly is to acknowledge their humanity in its entirety, not to flatten them into desired archetypes. And this — this ability to resist simplification, to hold complexity, to treat sources with discipline rather than sentiment — is exactly what universities should be teaching. When they don’t, the line between trained historians and well‑intentioned amateurs becomes dangerously thin, as both groups operate without the methodological rigor that keeps history from collapsing into narrative comfort.
Overall, I have a deep appreciation for expertise. Universities are my favorite places, and I want to defend both pharmacists and historians with equal vigor. I believe in training, in method, in the slow accumulation of knowledge. And I should say clearly that parts of my own education have been excellent — rigorous, demanding, and formative in ways I still rely on every day. Those experiences are precisely why I know how transformative good education can be, and why I wish there had been more of it.
That is also why certain encounters unsettle me. When health‑care professionals confidently tell me that red wine is “healthy,” or when journalists insist that Holocaust research can be done by amateurs, I’m reminded that expertise is only as strong as the education that produces it. And when that education is uneven, incomplete, or careless, people begin to doubt experts not out of ignorance, but because the experts themselves reveal the cracks.
Perhaps the clearest example comes from my former neighbor in my hometown — herself a doctor of law — who didn’t trust me when I told her which people were, beyond any doubt, not reliable sources for Covid information. It wasn’t a matter of opinion; it was a matter of training. She could recognize a weak legal argument instantly, yet she couldn’t recognize a weak physiological one — and she didn’t trust me when I did. That moment crystallized something for me: Expertise is not universal, and competence does not migrate automatically from one domain to another. A person may be highly trained in one field and entirely untrained in another, yet still assume that intellectual skill is transferable by default. But expertise is not a general trait; it is a highly specific form of literacy, built on the slow accumulation of methods, concepts, and habits of mind that do not generalize simply because someone is intelligent or educated.
I understand where people’s doubts come from. After all, I’ve seen the cracks from the inside — in health care, in historical training, in the way institutions sometimes fail to teach what truly matters. My neighbor’s confidence outside her field wasn’t an anomaly; it was a symptom of a broader problem in how we think about expertise itself. And yet, despite these cracks, I still don’t know what the solution is. How do we create a balance in which people trust experts in their own domains, yet remain aware that expertise is not a universal passport? How do we cultivate respect without naïveté, skepticism without cynicism, and a public understanding that experts are, like all humans, only as strong as the systems that produced them?
At the moment, I don’t have an answer. I only know that expertise is both essential and imperfect, and that living with this tension — without collapsing into blind trust or blanket doubt — might be the most honest position we can take. After watching people assume their competence travels with them into fields where it absolutely does not, I’ve come to think that the real challenge is learning to inhabit this middle space. It is a space where we acknowledge the limits of experts without dismissing their value, where we respect the disciplines we rely on without pretending they are infallible, and where we accept that trust must be earned not by credentials alone, but by the rigor of the systems that shape them.
