Hanswursthochschätzung

In his book Shottenfreude, Ben Schott created a dictionary of made up German compound words that he devised to describe concepts for which English (and German) lack words. Thus “dreikäsehochregression” describes “returning to your old school and finding everything feels so small.” “Flughafenbegrüfungsfruede” is “childish delight at being greeted at the airport.”

Hanswursthochschätzung  (which he pieced together from the words for a dunderhead and esteem) means “the respect conferred on those who are conventionally wrong rather than unconventionally right.” He created the term to express an idea that Paul Krugman called “Serious Person Syndrome.”

From Krugman’s NYT blog:

Thus, you’re not considered serious on national security unless you bought the case for invading Iraq, even though the skeptics were completely right; you’re not considered a serious political commentator unless you dismissed all the things those reflexive anti-Bushists were saying, even though they all turn out to have been true; and you’re not considered serious about economic policy unless you dismissed warnings about a housing bubble and waved off worries about future crises.

I have often wondered why academic administrators continue to embrace assessment even though there is no evidence that it improves student learning or anything else. Serious Person Syndrome goes a long toward explaining this phenomenon. As long as a critical mass of people in suits keep telling each other how important assessment is, academia will persist in this folly. After all there is no wisdom quite as comforting as the conventional wisdom.