Universities, Trump, and the anti-intellectual tradition

Today's attacks on higher education look a lot like the ones in the 1950s

Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for higher education. Obviously much of his ire has been directed at Columbia University, but he’s also gutted the federal research agencies that many universities depend on, he’s threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, he’s targeted dozens of schools for defunding unless they change their hiring and teaching practices, and more. This has caught many observers off guard, but the motivation behind these attacks is far from new.

The conservative populist tradition, of which Trump is very much a part, is inherently anti-intellectual. That doesn’t mean it’s opposed to intelligence or research or learning. Rather, universities and professors are seen as elitist and out of touch, while the common sense of working people is seen as a far better source of information and decision-making.

This perception has been common in the Republican Party for many years. In 2008, for example, Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public policy scholar Linda Bilmes produced a report estimating that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then five years old, would end up costing the U.S. roughly $3 trillion. The Bush administration immediately attacked Stiglitz — not by questioning his numbers, but by calling him a cowardly egghead. As then-White House spokesperson Tony Fratto said:

People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11. It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. Three trillion dollars? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?

But the anti-intellectual tradition goes back considerably further, arguably even prior to the Constitution. Possibly the best analogue to what is going on today can be found in the 1950s. This was a topic well addressed by historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1962 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. As he notes, the 1952 presidential election, in which the eloquent and brilliant Adlai Stevenson, beloved by intellectuals, lost to a very plainspoken war hero who belittled intellectuals, really set the tone for the decade. A few of the examples Hofstadter brings up:

• Conservatives attacking intellectuals seen as influential in U.S. politics, going after

  those who are “burdened with Phi Beta Kappa keys and academic honors” but not “equally loaded with honesty and common sense”; “the pompous diplomat in striped pants with phony British accent”; those who try to fight Communism “with kid gloves in perfumed drawing rooms”; Easterners who “insult the people of the great Midwest and West, the heart of America”; those who can “trace their ancestry back to the eighteenth century—or even further” but whose loyalty is still not above suspicion

• Conservative writers defending Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). As one wrote in the Freeman:

  He possesses, it seems, a sort of animal negative-pole magnetism which repels alumni of Harvard, Princeton and Yale. And we think we know what it is: This young man is constitutionally incapable of deference to social status.

• Conservative writers accusing universities of warping students’ minds:

  Our universities are the training grounds for the barbarians of the future, those who, in the guise of learning, shall come forth loaded with pitchforks of ignorance and cynicism, and stab and destroy the remnants of human civilization.… If you send your son to the colleges of today, you will create the Executioner of tomorrow. The rebirth of idealism must come from the scattered monasteries of non-collegiate thought.

• Questioning whether economists really understand the nation’s economy, suggesting that common folk understand it better:

  [A]ll of us are economists by necessity, since all of us are engaged in making a living, which is what economics is all about. Any literate housewife, endowed with a modicum of common sense, should be able to evaluate the specifics in the prescription, provided these are extracted from the verbiage in which they are clothed.

• Religious leaders like Franklin Graham saying that intellectuals have turned people away from God and morality:

  [In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship, the working power of government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these “intellectuals” have publicly stated that morality is relative—that there is no norm or absolute standard.…

This kind of rhetoric supported the Red Scare against colleges and universities in the 1950s, leading to demands of loyalty oaths from faculty, restrictions on research funding, FBI investigations of professors, and more, all in the name of stopping communism. And notably, you can hear a lot of these arguments in modern conservative attacks on higher education.

Interestingly, as Hofstadter notes, anti-intellectualism is not constant, nor is it steadily growing. Rather, it has ebbed and flowed throughout U.S. history. And one of the things that worked against it back then was the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957. With the fear that American science was falling behind and that this could pose a mortal threat to the U.S., suddenly professors and universities and federal research dollars were back in vogue.

It seems reasonable to think that there will be better days for higher education at some point in the future. But what could scare Americans and their leaders into valuing education, and how much damage will be done in the current climate, remains to be seen.