Illich and the Experts: Whose fake news do you want?

With so much concern about truth and falsehoods in social media, and the role of Universities in defending knowledge or fighting fake news (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-41902914), the defence of the "experts" by Universities should be seen for what it is: a defence of existing hierarchy.

Ivan Illich was on to this in the 1970s - particularly in his book "Disabling Professions":

The Age of Professions will be remembered as the time when politics withered, when voters guided by professors entrusted to technocrats the power to legislate needs, the authority to decide who needed what, and a monopoly over the means by which those needs should be met. It will be remembered as the Age of Schooling, when people for one third of their lives were trained to accumulate needs on prescription and for the other two-thirds were clients of prestigious pushers who managed their habits. It will be remembered as the age when recreational travel meant a packaged gawk at strangers, and intimacy meant training by Masters and Johnson; when formed opinion was replay of last night's talk-show, and voting, an endorsement to the salesman for more of the same.

Illich's recipe is to overturn the hierarchy. We need to think about what that means for "experts", and particularly the difference between the "declared experts" by institutions (who are often merely the product of institutional management - "professor" has become a synonym for "manager"), and "intellectual authority", which is something different: the community elder who has read more, thought more, and often is more uncertain and open in their thinking than anyone else.