Andrew Delbanco: A New Day for Intellectuals
[Andrew Delbanco is a professor of humanities and director of American studies at Columbia University and a member of the board of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. His book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be will be published by Princeton University Press in 2010.]
Soon after election day, the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in The New York Times that the "second most remarkable thing" about the election was that "American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual."
What goes on here? Was the historian Richard Hofstadter wrong in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to detect an irresistible current in our society of "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it"? Has that current weakened or been sufficiently dammed up to explain the election of a president who is reflective about history and ideas as well as about policy and practice?
Those questions were in the air last month in Seattle at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The association is devoted to promoting liberal education — which it defines as one that develops in students "a strong sense of value, ethics, and civil engagement" — at all levels, from community colleges to research universities. Without discounting the importance of marketable skills, such an education should include the study of literary and historical texts, philosophical questions and scientific concepts, as well as engagement with foreign cultures.
Many people who attended the meeting felt that the spirit of anti-intellectualism emanating from Washington in recent years has hampered, or even stymied, the pursuit of those aims. The inquisitorial tone of former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, with its focus on benchmarks and standardized testing, was frequently cited. But now beleaguered deans and presidents were hoping for better days ahead. What are the chances they are right?
Hofstadter's book is a good place to start in considering both strategies and prospects. Although not published until 1963, it was conceived in the 1950s, when, even more than today, the term "egghead" was an image of dysfunction and disloyalty. Hofstadter regarded anti-intellectualism as a kind of antibody in the national bloodstream — sometimes dormant, sometimes active — that reacts to "high" culture with an inflammatory response. He traced this attitude to multiple sources: including, in particular, the religious evangelicalism that flares up periodically throughout American history in reaction to the perceived decline of piety and morals and, more generally, public resentment toward those who, claiming expertise and "excellence," seem to condescend toward unlettered or uncredentialed people as somehow inferior or unworthy of respect.
Lurking in Hofstadter's book was a cyclical theory of history that attempted to account for why those attitudes wax and wane. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, he wrote, "the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected," until that respect was swept away by a wave of philistinism. The titular chief of the reactionaries was Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the real ringleaders were "the unpalatable Nixon" and, of course, that avatar of "the vigilante mind," Joe McCarthy. By the time Hofstadter finished his work, he sensed that the pendulum was swinging back (or forth) again. John F. Kennedy was playing host to Nobel laureates at the White House, and Washington had once more "become hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes scholars." Today there is reason to think we are living through another turn in the cycle. The philistines are out; the Harvard professors (Elena Kagan, Lawrence H. Summers, Cass R. Sunstein, et al.) are back in.
Yet is it really true that intellectuals go in and out of favor entirely for reasons of public irrationality? In fact, Eisenhower had his own brain trust — led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had studied with the French philosopher Henri Bergson and was a fluent reader of Ancient Greek. George W. Bush, too, turned to advisers with strong academic credentials. Paul D. Wolfowitz, his deputy defense secretary, was eminent enough in his University of Chicago days to earn a bit part in one of Saul Bellow's novels. Leon R. Kass, also of Chicago, advised Bush on issues of ethics and science, and Bush's second secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, once held the position of provost at Stanford University.
The deeper implication of Hofstadter's book is not so much that Americans oscillate between periods of antiand pro-intellectualism, but that they tend to harbor simultaneously an "ingrained distrust of eggheads" and "a genuine yearning for enlightenment and culture."...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
Soon after election day, the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in The New York Times that the "second most remarkable thing" about the election was that "American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual."
What goes on here? Was the historian Richard Hofstadter wrong in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to detect an irresistible current in our society of "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it"? Has that current weakened or been sufficiently dammed up to explain the election of a president who is reflective about history and ideas as well as about policy and practice?
Those questions were in the air last month in Seattle at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The association is devoted to promoting liberal education — which it defines as one that develops in students "a strong sense of value, ethics, and civil engagement" — at all levels, from community colleges to research universities. Without discounting the importance of marketable skills, such an education should include the study of literary and historical texts, philosophical questions and scientific concepts, as well as engagement with foreign cultures.
Many people who attended the meeting felt that the spirit of anti-intellectualism emanating from Washington in recent years has hampered, or even stymied, the pursuit of those aims. The inquisitorial tone of former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, with its focus on benchmarks and standardized testing, was frequently cited. But now beleaguered deans and presidents were hoping for better days ahead. What are the chances they are right?
Hofstadter's book is a good place to start in considering both strategies and prospects. Although not published until 1963, it was conceived in the 1950s, when, even more than today, the term "egghead" was an image of dysfunction and disloyalty. Hofstadter regarded anti-intellectualism as a kind of antibody in the national bloodstream — sometimes dormant, sometimes active — that reacts to "high" culture with an inflammatory response. He traced this attitude to multiple sources: including, in particular, the religious evangelicalism that flares up periodically throughout American history in reaction to the perceived decline of piety and morals and, more generally, public resentment toward those who, claiming expertise and "excellence," seem to condescend toward unlettered or uncredentialed people as somehow inferior or unworthy of respect.
Lurking in Hofstadter's book was a cyclical theory of history that attempted to account for why those attitudes wax and wane. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt, he wrote, "the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected," until that respect was swept away by a wave of philistinism. The titular chief of the reactionaries was Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the real ringleaders were "the unpalatable Nixon" and, of course, that avatar of "the vigilante mind," Joe McCarthy. By the time Hofstadter finished his work, he sensed that the pendulum was swinging back (or forth) again. John F. Kennedy was playing host to Nobel laureates at the White House, and Washington had once more "become hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes scholars." Today there is reason to think we are living through another turn in the cycle. The philistines are out; the Harvard professors (Elena Kagan, Lawrence H. Summers, Cass R. Sunstein, et al.) are back in.
Yet is it really true that intellectuals go in and out of favor entirely for reasons of public irrationality? In fact, Eisenhower had his own brain trust — led by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who had studied with the French philosopher Henri Bergson and was a fluent reader of Ancient Greek. George W. Bush, too, turned to advisers with strong academic credentials. Paul D. Wolfowitz, his deputy defense secretary, was eminent enough in his University of Chicago days to earn a bit part in one of Saul Bellow's novels. Leon R. Kass, also of Chicago, advised Bush on issues of ethics and science, and Bush's second secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, once held the position of provost at Stanford University.
The deeper implication of Hofstadter's book is not so much that Americans oscillate between periods of antiand pro-intellectualism, but that they tend to harbor simultaneously an "ingrained distrust of eggheads" and "a genuine yearning for enlightenment and culture."...