WHAT WOULD WE EVER DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?

Possibly better, suggests Inside Higher Ed's John Warner.  Sometimes, you just have to talk like a senior non-com.  "This shit does not work."  He even offers a version of several Cold Spring Shops points.

Obviously great things happen at higher education institutions every day, but in my view, these great things often happen despite existing structures rather than because of them.

In hindsight, this belief has roots as far back as my freshman year at the University of Illinois, where I discovered that you could get a B in your large lecture classes without attending any of the lectures themselves provided you read the textbook -- which the professor had written -- and purchased (and skimmed) the overhead transparency lecture notes from the campus copy shop.

As an indifferent student more interested in things other than class, this was an agreeable bargain at the time, but in hindsight … not great. What meaningful experience did those classes deliver? What lasting learning resulted?

To be fair, I did have a couple of instructors who would change the trajectory of my life, but they were exceptions to the structure they were working within, going beyond the bounds of the kind of work that was incentivized for faculty to provide these transformative moments. Only by defying structural incentives could they deliver experiences that embodied the high ideals of what it means to receive an education.

As a graduate student, I knew pairing up my developmental English students, who were absolutely the students most in need of expert instruction, with the likes of me -- the least experienced instructor -- was not good news for them. This was a structure not designed to help students succeed, but instead to weed them out, having captured at least a semester or two of their tuition revenue.

By way of review, that's the "nonaggression pact" argument and the "senior noncom" argument, both in one essay in the house organ for business as usual on the Woke Campus.

He then pivots to a baffling paean to wonks.

I believe the vast majority of wonks work in good faith. A good wonk operates carefully within the boundaries of the system they seek to explain and influence, grounding their work in evidence, with policy recommendations flowing from this careful work. A good wonk is several million times more desirable than a pundit, who tends to start from a sweeping major premise and then go looking for evidence and extensions of that premise.

Yes, if there are good generalists around, as well as wonks arguing from different sub-systems. When that isn't the case, you get the ongoing disaster that is Fauciism.

I'm not persuaded by much of the specific cases Mr Warner gets down to, although his concluding remark is on point.  "[W]e also can’t allow [wonks] to tell us what is and isn’t possible as though their word is holy writ."