“Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous and subversive,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his 1963 book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” summing up the conventional wisdom of his era. And not just his era: As Hofstadter pointed out more than six decades ago, the United States has a long record of resenting its professors, experts, intellectuals and scientists — and of questioning whether higher education is actually good for the national soul.
Decades before the American Revolution, critics were already warning that Harvard and Yale — then the only two colleges in New England — had become sources of “darkness, darkness that may be felt.” By the early 20th century, the critique had expanded to include attacks on academics “as the prophets of false and needless reforms, as architects of the administrative state,” even as nefarious “ur-Bolsheviks.” Fast-forward to 2025, and the critiques look much the same. According to the Trump administration and its allies, America’s top universities are at once too exclusive and too inclusive, overly influential but utterly useless, unconscionably wealthy but too dependent on taxpayer dollars.
Hofstadter had little patience for attacks on universities as hotbeds of un-Americanism. But he warned that intellectuals did themselves no favors by simply proclaiming their own virtues and denouncing their critics as rubes. “It is rare for an American intellectual to confront candidly the unresolvable conflict between the elite character of his own class and his democratic aspirations,” he wrote. For that sentence alone, his book is worth rereading.
In retrospect, Hofstadter didn’t know how good he had it. The middle of the 20th century was a boom time for higher education in America, with entire universities springing up seemingly overnight and faculty jobs for the taking. Even so, universities found themselves on the defensive, accused of fomenting dissent, brainwashing students and wasting everyone’s time on frivolous subjects. Leading the charge was the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who disliked university professors almost as much as Communist Party members.
“It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out,” McCarthy declared in 1950, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer — the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give.” In his anti-communist absolutism, he prefigured Donald Trump’s critique of today’s universities as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
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