Discussion | Expertise in the Age of Trump

For Climate Week, the Institute for Public Knowledge is organizing a special event, “Expertise in the Age of Trumpism,” featuring Columbia University sociologist Gil Eyal, Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, and Sonali McDermid, Chair of Environmental Studies at NYU, moderated by IPK Director Eric Klinenberg.

In recent years, there has been a significant change in the valence of the word “experts,” from a superlative to a near pejorative, often accompanied by a recitation of experts’ many failures and misdeeds. In topics as varied as climate change, COVID, and vaccinations, there is a palpable mistrust of experts and a growing tendency to dismiss their advice. Today, with leaders of the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency intent on discrediting the scientific research and policy guidelines that have long defined their offices, the status of expert knowledge in the U.S. is ever more imperiled. What has led to this transformation and what are its likely consequences? How is the retreat from expertise playing in the media, among political officials, in public culture and civic life? What are scholars, scientists, and citizens doing to challenge this turn?

Gil Eyal is Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Trust Collaboratory at Columbia University. He is the Author of The Crisis of Expertise (Polity 2019) and The Autism Matrix (Polity 2010), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics (OUP 2023).

Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His most recent book is 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, and his other books include Heat Wave, Fighting for Air, Going Solo, and Palaces for the People.

Sonali Shukla McDermid is a climate scientist, Associate Professor, and Chair of the NYU Dept. of Environmental Studies. Her research investigates both climate change impacts on agriculture and food security, and the impacts of land management on the environment. She is a climate co-lead for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, evaluating regional climate change impacts on food security across South Asia and Africa. She is also a research affiliate at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where she contributes to land and Earth system model development by incorporating and improving land management processes. McDermid is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Fulbright-Kalam Fellow awardee, which supports her work on climate mitigation and adaptation in agriculture. She holds a B.A. in Physics from NYU, and masters and Ph.D. from the Dept. of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. Prior to NYU, she was a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at NASA GISS in NYC.

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University where he directs the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment. Oppenheimer has been an author of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, since its First Assessment Report (1990). Oppenheimer is coeditor-in-chief of the journal Climatic Change. He is a science advisor to the Environmental Defense Fund and member of several boards of directors including the Board of the Trust for Governors Island (NYC), the future site of a major climate science research and education center focused on solutions to the climate problem, and Climate Central, an NGO focused on research and communications. He is a Heinz Award winner and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Oppenheimer’s current research focuses on impacts of, and adaptation to, sea level rise, coastal flooding, and other extreme outcomes of climate change.