Removing Agency: Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.

This essay concludes my series of essays on anti-intellectualism. To recap:

Part 1: The Irony: Anti-intellectualism in the U.S. traces the long history of anti-intellectualism in American life.

Part 2: Follow the Money: Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S. points to the financial and commercial machinery that remade the university into a market enterprise and to the political actors who now invoke that very transformation as a pretext to seize control.

Part 3: The Web of Legislative Control: Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S. follows infantilization into the machinery of government.

This last installment shows how the rhetoric bleeds into the media and outlines what anti-intellectualism has built over time. Infantilizing higher education and removing the agency of those who serve the sector makes for a less intelligent society, not a smarter one.

Mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, Politico, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and others tend to use words such as “accountability” and “leadership failure” to launder infantilization and anti-intellectualism through more neutral vocabulary. For example, writing in Harper’s, Madeleine Baker stated flatly that “college administrators have made it clear that education is no longer their top priority,” pointing to the proliferation of underpaid contingent faculty as evidence that administrators had effectively abandoned the core professional mission.

Baker also noted that the Harvard Corporation, described as composed “largely of ultra-wealthy philanthropists,” overruled the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to bar student activists from graduating, illustrating how governing bodies can act paternalistically against the professional judgment of the faculty beneath them. Baker also cited a striking data point: In a Gallup poll, only 47 percent of college graduates themselves could muster more than “some” confidence in the institutions that gave them their degrees.

Baker issued a verdict that administrators have forfeited their professional mission so thoroughly that even their own graduates no longer trust them. Crucially, Baker also documents a form of internal infantilization: A governing board of wealthy nonacademics overriding the considered judgment of tenured faculty, the subject-matter experts whose professional autonomy is supposed to be the point of the institution.

About the conflicts in the Middle East and protests on college and university campuses, the New York Times editorial board declared that “during the current demonstrations, a lack of accountability has helped produce a crisis,” and specifically indicted university leadership by stating, “It’s in that enforcement that the leadership of too many universities has fallen short.” The piece argued administrators had failed to enforce their own codes of conduct—their most basic managerial duty—allowing both Jewish students to feel “systematically harassed” and cynical politicians to exploit the resulting chaos.

The nation’s most prominent editorial board essentially told university presidents they needed a reminder of elementary administrative responsibility (enforcing their own published rules), as though they could not be trusted to do so without external instruction. This is the “dismissive behavior” form of infantilization. The editorial board undercuts the professional judgment of experienced institutional leaders by treating their failures as the failures of people who did not know better and needed to be told.

Here is what the critics of higher education have actually built over the past century: a Morrill Act that redefined universities as economic utilities, a Cold War research apparatus that made them servants of national security, a Bayh-Dole Act that turned them into patent-holding commercial enterprises and a Reagan-era funding shift that repositioned students as consumers and institutions as market competitors. Having spent a century demanding that universities adopt the logic of corporate enterprise, these same forces now declare the resulting institution dysfunctional and move to replace the last remaining check on that logic—professional faculty governance—with direct political control.

This is not accountability. This is the logical endpoint of infantilization: Strip away autonomy, produce dysfunction, then use that dysfunction to justify stripping away more autonomy. Veblen warned in 1918 that turning universities over to “captains of erudition”—presidents who functioned as businessmen in academic dress—would corrupt their core function. His warning was largely ignored. A century later, those same captains are being told by their political overseers that they are not even competent enough to be good captains. The child who was never trusted to develop judgment is blamed for lacking it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman named this dynamic before any of us were born. In her 1862 essay “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator’s husband prescribes rest and confinement for her nervous condition—he removes her agency, her work, her voice—and the cure produces the breakdown it was meant to prevent. The wallpaper she is forbidden to engage with becomes what consumes her. When you confine a professional to a purely advisory role, strip her of curriculum authority, make her job contingent on a single administrator’s unchecked discretion and subject her scholarship to legislative approval—and then declare that her institution is failing—you are not diagnosing a problem. You are describing one you made.

What is at stake in this rhetoric is whether American society retains any institutional space where expertise carries authority independent of political patronage. Every learned profession rests on the principle that peer judgment is the appropriate standard for evaluating professional conduct. The argument that faculty cannot determine what is taught in their disciplines, that administrators need congressional supervision to reach correct moral conclusions, that tenure review must include nonfaculty political appointees—these are not checks on incompetence. They systematically demolish the conditions under which serious intellectual work is possible.

Infantilizing higher education does not make it more accountable. It makes it less capable of doing the work democracy requires of it—and more useful to those who never wanted it to do that work in the first place.