“He’s just trolling America at this point.” That’s what Alyssa Farah Griffin — a former aide to Donald Trump — tweeted last week, after Trump nominated Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the departments of Justice, Defense, and Health and Human Services, respectively. But mostly, Trump was trolling American experts: people who think they know more than others about certain subjects, and that this knowledge should earn them a kind of deference in our society. In short, people like me. Gaetz, Hegseth, and Kennedy all lack the expertise to direct a huge federal agency. But who needs experts, anyway? We have done a poor job of making the case for what we do. And that’s because we speak almost entirely to each other, and not to the wider public. That’s not a perspective you’ll often hear from my fellow professors, who reflexively blame Trump for the dissolution of expert authority in the United States. More and more Americans think their own opinion is as good as anyone else’s, whether it’s grounded in reality or not. And surely You Know Who bears a lot of responsibility for that. Tariffs? Trump thinks they’re great, but economists warn they will send us into a tailspin. Undocumented immigrants? The data says they break the law less often than native-born Americans, yet Trump keeps calling them criminals. COVID-19? It’s nothing that a little hydroxychloroquine — or even some bleach — won’t cure. I share my colleagues’ outrage about Trump and his buffoonish lies, of course. But we also need to ask why so many people believe him, instead of believing us. The answer starts with our own professional systems of preparation and reward. Put simply, most experts are not taught how to communicate with non-expert audiences. The way you move up in the academic ladder is by impressing other academics. We call that “peer review.” You write an article or a book, and it’s sent to readers in your field. If they like it, it goes to print. And you get another publication on your C.V., which is the best route to tenure and promotion. That’s a good way to incentivize the discovery of new knowledge. But you don’t get many points for disseminating it. Indeed, that can count against you. When I was a newly minted professor, several senior scholars advised me to stop writing op-ed columns for newspapers. That diverts you from your research, I was told, and it also makes you look superficial. If a layperson can understand your ideas, how serious can they be? Never mind that most of us are required to engage lay audiences in our own classrooms, where we teach people with little background in our subjects. You generally don’t get a lot of professional reward for that, either. True, most institutions provide annual prizes for good teaching. But when I won that honor at my previous job, at New York University, my dean introduced me at the awards ceremony by listing the books I had written! That spoke volumes about what the institution really valued. So is it any wonder that so few of us write for the general public, or that laypeople — including the millions of people we teach — have so little understanding of what we do? If we wanted to change that, we would start by requiring future professors to take courses on how to teach. At the University of Pennsylvania, where I now work, new teaching assistants receive a three-day training before they enter the classroom. It takes five or 10 years of Ph.D. training to learn how to become a researcher. But if you want to teach, a few days of preparation will do. We would also need to reward — not penalize — scholars who successfully engage public audiences. Ashley Moses, a Ph.D. student in neurosciences at Stanford, has proposed that every member of her discipline be trained in “Science Communication” — that is, how to translate their research into everyday language. And every candidate for a faculty position should have to demonstrate their ability to do that. “By not communicating in a way that folks can understand, we are allowing misinformation to spread and distrust to continue,” wrote Moses, who has started a nonprofit that publishes short research summaries at a 10th-grade reading level. “It is time we come down from our ivory tower.” That’s exactly right. It’s too easy to blame Trump for the cynical rejection of expertise in America. It’s a lot harder to look in the mirror, and to ask how we experts have contributed to the problem. Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.