Follow the Money: Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.

Last week, I presented “The Irony: Anti-intellectualism in the U.S.,” part one of a series tracing the long history of anti-intellectualism in American life from colonial evangelical Protestants’ suspicion of educated elites and Jacksonian populism through the Scopes trial and McCarthyism to current book bans and political assaults on higher education. What distinguishes the present moment is a rhetoric of infantilization. Critics across the political spectrum now treat higher education’s boards, administrators and faculty not merely as godless, subversive or out of touch with ordinary people but as children incapable of governing themselves. And it surfaced a central irony—that the same century of forces that gradually corporatized the university, from the Morrill Land-Grant Acts and Veblen’s “captains of erudition” to Clark Kerr’s “multiversity,” produced the very institution its critics now declare unfit for self-rule.

This essay (part two) follows the money. It picks up where that logic leads: to the financial and commercial machinery (patents, tech-transfer offices, tuition debt and administrative growth) 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.

Perhaps the single most consequential legislative turning point in the corporate history of American higher education was the Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, also known as the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, sponsored by Senators Birch Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, and Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, signed by President Jimmy Carter on Dec. 12, 1980. The Bayh-Dole Act granted universities the right to patent inventions arising from federally funded research and to license those patents for profit. Before 1980, such inventions belonged to the federal government. After 1980, universities became intellectual property owners and commercial actors.

While the act was originally touted, its effects progressively corporatized higher education and removed scholarly agency. In Janet Rae-Dupree’s Sept. 6, 2008, New York Times article, “When Academic Puts Profit Ahead of Wonder,” she opines, “Today’s universities function more like corporate research laboratories,” and argues, “In trying to power the innovation economy, we have turned America’s universities into cutthroat business competitors, zealously guarding the very innovations we so desperately want behind a tangled web of patents and royalty licenses.” She criticizes, “The kind of basic experimentation that leads to a greater understanding of how the world works has largely been set aside in favor of projects considered to have more immediate market potential.”

Operationally, universities established technology-transfer offices to manage revenue generation. Industry-sponsored research grew, with corporations directly funding university research. The boundary between basic research (discovery for its own sake) and applied research (discovery for commercial application) blurred significantly. Research focused on the needs of industry rather than society. Faculty began to hold equity stakes in spin-off companies based on their research, creating novel conflicts of interest. Research universities began to resemble hybrid public-private enterprises rather than purely public institutions.

Beginning in the Reagan era and accelerating through the Clinton and Bush years, a set of intersecting policy shifts fundamentally transformed higher education from a primarily public institution to a market-operating enterprise. Backed by Ronald Reagan and leaders of both parties who followed, tax cuts and market-based ideology contributed to decreasing federal and state subsidies, rising tuition levels, a shift in federal education support from grants to loans, and the transfer of costs to the individual consumer (students), which defined higher education as a private benefit rather than a public good.

Universities adopted corporate governance models and hired large administrative staff to manage compliance, marketing, student services, fundraising and the growing complexity of their commercial operations. In addition, state and federal unfunded mandates such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security and Campus Crime Statistics Act (1990), the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act (1989), the Drug-Free Workplace Act (1988), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (1996), and others also required hiring personnel to manage compliance and training.

According to AAUP reports, between 1976 and 2018 the number of full-time administrators at U.S. colleges and universities grew by 369 percent, outpacing faculty growth, creating the “administrative bloat” that critics across the political spectrum now cite. The shift from grants to loans repositioned students as consumers making investment decisions and universities as service-delivery organizations competing for market share. The language of higher education shifted accordingly: “enrollment management,” “branding,” “customer experience” and “return on investment.”

University presidential compensation packages began resembling corporate executive compensation, with total packages at major research universities regularly exceeding $1 million and sometimes $5 million. Presidents were increasingly recruited from business and government rather than from academic ranks and were evaluated on financial performance metrics: endowment growth, enrollment targets, research revenue and facilities expansion. Veblen’s “captains of erudition,” the business-minded presidents he mocked in 1918, have now been told by their political overseers that they are not even competent enough to be good captains. The infantilization is not just rhetorical. It is the logical endpoint of a century-long project to subordinate the university to external authority, now reaching the point where the external authority declares the resulting institution still insufficiently compliant.

Conservative think tanks and politicians often speak the language of infantilization openly. The Manhattan Institute’s Model Legislation to Reform Faculty Accountability in Higher Education (2026) argues that “under the guise of ‘shared governance’ and ‘faculty autonomy,’ our public universities have become insular and sclerotic” and that “it is a problem that can be solved only from outside.” The institute’s proposed legislation would limit faculty governance bodies to an advisory role and require governing boards to publicly approve all tenure-eligible faculty job postings. The framing is explicit—faculty and administrators have forfeited the right to make their own professional decisions and now require legislative supervision of hiring, curriculum and personnel. This is the external control arm of infantilization: the assumption that the child (higher education) cannot be trusted without a parent (the government) watching every move.

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, also known as Project 2025, published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023, is arguably the most explicit expression of institutional infantilization in the entire corpus of higher education criticism. Project 2025 flatly asserts that higher education’s leaders are ideologically compromised, professionally captured and need to be replaced or overridden by political actors. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes in the foreword that the next administration “should promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics.”

Roberts’s foreword proposes dismissively stripping credentialed faculty of their professional identity entirely and replacing it with a caricature that implies they are not competent adults exercising professional judgment but ideological actors who cannot be trusted with public resources.

In the document’s education chapter, by Lindsey Burke, colleges and universities are described as “an establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel,” and the Department of Education is separately characterized as “a convenient one-stop shop for the woke education cartel.” The word “captured” is the tell. It implies that university administrators and faculty are mentally incapacitated and not autonomous professionals making informed decisions, but people who have been taken over by outside forces and are no longer capable of governing themselves. The infantilization logic is explicit: Because they are “captured,” external political intervention is not an overreach; it is a rescue, like dementia patients who have lost their faculties.

Project 2025 declares that accrediting agencies “have presided over a precipitous decline” in academic freedom and campus free speech and that “despite maintaining criteria that demand such policies, accreditors have done nothing to dampen the illiberal chill that has swept across American campuses over the past decade.” The peer-review accreditation system, the professional mechanism higher education uses to hold itself accountable, is characterized as having failed so completely that it must be dismantled or politically overridden. This is the “unsolicited help” form of infantilization at institutional scale: the assumption that professionals cannot be trusted even to police themselves, so outsiders must step in and do it for them.

Project 2025 takes a jaundiced view toward standard degree programs precisely because faculty continue to exercise influence over what must be studied. Its policy remedies—mandating curriculum content, requiring public syllabi submission, defunding area studies programs in women’s, ethnic and gender identity studies—operationalize the conviction that faculty cannot be trusted to make those professional determinations themselves. As one analyst summarizes, the document’s thrust is that “faculty should not determine what is taught in college.” The entire professional basis of faculty expertise that scholars in a discipline are best positioned to determine what students in that discipline should learn is rejected in favor of political oversight. It is the equivalent of telling a surgeon what operations to perform or a judge what verdicts to reach.