Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education
Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness
Abstract
Ideally, universities are centers of learning, in which great researchers dispassionately search for truth, no matter how unpopular those truths must be. The marketplace of ideas assures that truth wins out against bias and prejudice. Yet many people worry that there's rot in the heart of the higher education business. This book reveals the problems are even worse than anyone suspects. Marshalling an array of data, the authors systematically show how contemporary American universities fall short of these ideals and how bad incentives make faculty, administrators, and students act unethically. ... More
Ideally, universities are centers of learning, in which great researchers dispassionately search for truth, no matter how unpopular those truths must be. The marketplace of ideas assures that truth wins out against bias and prejudice. Yet many people worry that there's rot in the heart of the higher education business. This book reveals the problems are even worse than anyone suspects. Marshalling an array of data, the authors systematically show how contemporary American universities fall short of these ideals and how bad incentives make faculty, administrators, and students act unethically. While universities may at times excel at identifying and calling out injustice outside their gates, the text contends that individuals within them are primarily guided by self-interest at every level. It finds that the problems are deep and pervasive: Most academic marketing and advertising are semi-fraudulent; colleges and individual departments regularly make promises they do not and cannot keep; and most students cheat a little, while many cheat a lot. Trenchant and wide-ranging, the text elucidates the many ways in which faculty and students alike have every incentive to make teaching and learning secondary.
Keywords:
universities,
research,
ideas,
students,
injustice,
administrators,
faculty
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190846282 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: April 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190846282.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Jason Brennan, author
Professor of Strategy, Ethics, and Public Policy, Georgetown
Phillip Magness, author
Senior Research Fellow, American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, Massachusetts
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