The Irony: Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.

In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story about a woman whose physician-husband confines her to a room and prescribes a “rest-cure” for her nervous condition. He removes her writing, her work, her agency—everything that constitutes her professional and intellectual life—on the grounds that she cannot be trusted to manage herself. The cure produces the breakdown it was meant to prevent. More than a century later, critics of higher education across the political spectrum are prescribing the same cure to a different patient.

Anti-intellectual movements in the U.S. were most famously chronicled by Richard Hofstadter in his 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. In the preface he wrote, “It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.”

Anti-intellectualism began with evangelical American Protestants in the Colonial period who distrusted educated elites and formal education and saw them as a barrier to personal, intuitive and spiritual relationships with God. In the 19th century, populists like President Andrew Jackson portrayed themselves as “self-made men” as a counterpoint to the educated, whom they labeled corrupt elites uninterested in the plight of the working class.

In the early- and mid-20th century, during the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Scopes Trial or Scopes Monkey Trial 1925), scientific consensus about evolution came under fire by creationists. Scopes, a high school teacher, was accused of violating the Tennessee’s Butler Act of 1925 (HB 185), which, in part, stated, “That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” The Act and trial portend the current actions of legislators working with the religious right to limit academic freedom and subvert knowledge produced by scholars (particularly with teaching topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion such as women’s, gender and black history) with a punitive parent-child structure.

Focused on fears during the Cold War in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) targeted libraries, authors, intellectuals and academics among others. As chronicled by the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy, “Senator McCarthy also launched an inquiry into U.S. Information Service Libraries around the world, causing what he called ‘Red books’ written by communists or communist sympathizers to be removed from shelves and, in some locations, even burned. The books had been donated to the troops during World War II, and given to the libraries afterwards which kept them to show the wide range of political opinions allowed in a democracy. Rather than call the curators of the collections to testify, Senator McCarthy called the authors of the ‘Red books,’ such as Langston Hughes and Dashiell Hammett, and interrogated them about their values and beliefs.

“In other hearings, Senator McCarthy targeted professors, including those at prestigious universities such as Harvard and Columbia. In those hearings, he challenged principles of academic and intellectual freedom. As a consequence of his accusations, a number of professors lost their jobs—even though he’d provided no evidence of their communist affiliation.” These actions had a chilling effect on freedom of speech and academic freedom by acting as if the public needed to be protected from an imagined ideological threat, providing unsolicited input, denying agency and imposing punishment.

Today, the nation is having a déjà vu moment. Books are being banned and many institutions are being attacked (quelle surprise: The list once again includes Harvard and Columbia). “Since 2021, PEN America has documented nearly 23,000 book bans in public schools, a number never before seen in the life of any living American. These book bans now affect nearly every state and disproportionately target books about race and racism, titles by or about people of color, and books featuring LGBTQ+ characters and themes, as well as works for older readers that include sexual references or discussions of sexual violence.” The Trump administration specifically targeted elite institutions when he “threatened to withhold funding for universities over transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and has arrested and sought to deport pro-Palestinian foreign students.”

Anti-intellectualism in American life has deep roots—from Colonial-era suspicion of educated elites to Jacksonian populism, from the Scopes Trial to McCarthyism. What is distinctive about the current moment is the specific form the rhetoric takes. Where earlier waves of anti-intellectualism branded scholars as godless, subversive or out of touch with ordinary people, today’s critics go further: They treat higher education’s boards, administrators and faculty as not merely wrong, but fundamentally incompetent—as children who cannot be trusted to make their own professional decisions. This essay names that rhetorical move as infantilization, traces its history and documents its consequences.

The pattern is neither accidental nor partisan: The infantilization of higher education’s leadership comes from conservative think tanks and state legislatures, from congressional hearings and presidential executive orders, and—in a finding that complicates any simple left–right narrative—from the editorial board of The New York Times and the pages of Harper’s. The rhetoric is the same regardless of who deploys it. And understanding why requires looking at what has happened to American higher education over the past century—because the critics now calling for more control are, paradoxically, the same forces that spent a century creating the institution they now declare unfit to govern itself.

Debates about academic autonomy, external political control and state interference began in the early 19th century. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward of 1819, the state legislature attempted to alter the College’s charter to change the institution from a private to a public institution and assert control via state-appointed trustees. The Supreme Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice John Marshall, found the attempt to be unconstitutional based on the Contract Clause (Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1). The ruling established that college charters were contracts protected from state interference, like those of private businesses. Thus, the ruling gave private not-for-profit institutions a legal bulwark against external political control, as distinct corporate entities rather than arms of the state. This case echoes debates over academic autonomy, governmental oversight and asset control.

The Morrill Land-Grant College Acts of 1862 and 1890 provided the first major injection of an instrumental, economically productive rationale into American higher education. Land-grant institutions were explicitly chartered to advance agriculture, the mechanic arts (engineering), and practical sciences in service of national economic development. For the first time, the primary justification for public investment in higher education was not the formation of civic virtue or religious learning, but economic productivity. The university was reconceived as a utility, a plant for producing technically trained workers and agricultural science. The seed of the corporate model was planted in public institutions, even if their governance structures were not yet corporate in character. Many formidable state universities such as those in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Texas grew from this model, and their public-service mission functioned as both a genuine democratizing force and the beginning of the accountability-to-taxpayers argument that critics use today.

The first major critical diagnosis of corporate capture came from American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), in his 1918 book, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen. The book remains the foundational text to understand the corporate university. Veblen coined the satirical term “captains of erudition” (a mockery of the phrase “captains of industry”) to describe university presidents who had adopted the posture and methods of industrial CEOs. He insisted universities should be dedicated solely to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, and that the intrusion of business logic, with its concentration on efficiency, marketability and measurable output, was structurally incompatible with genuine intellectual inquiry.

Veblen argued that treating faculty as employees subordinate to business-minded administrators was a form of professional disrespect threatening the university’s core function. Specifically, Veblen targeted boards composed of businessmen with no scholarly qualifications, presidents functioning as CEOs rather than scholars, the subordination of research to vocational and commercial ends, and the replacement of collegial governance with hierarchical administrations.

Ties between business and higher education increased throughout the 20th century. As explained in Inside Higher Ed’s May 6, 2026 article, “Part 2: Is Higher Education Having a Psychotic Breakdown?,” “One significant academic-industry model was developed by Frederick Terman (1900–1982), engineering dean and, later, provost at Stanford University. In the 1940s and 1950s, he encouraged faculty and recent graduates to create local companies by establishing the Stanford Industrial Park (later known as Silicon Valley) and leasing University land to technology firms. One of the early firms was Hewlett-Packard, founded by William Hewlett (Class of 1934) and David Packard (Class of 1937). Terman championed the value of practical application and the commercialization of ideas.”

The government played additional roles in strengthening the ties between business and education in several significant ways. During the post-WWII era, massive federal research funding from the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the Atomic Energy Commission, among others, along with the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (G.I. Bill) of 1944 added to the corporatization of higher education. “[The G.I. Bill] provided public higher education, unemployment insurance and housing to veterans after World War II.” Although there were racial exclusions in the Act, it is widely credited with creating America’s middle class by addressing manpower needs in the economy and simultaneously helping the U.S. remain a world leader in technology during the Cold War. Universities became central to national security and economic competitiveness.

In 1963, Clark Kerr, then-president of the University of California system, delivered the Godkin Lectures at Harvard University, later published as The Uses of the University. He coined the term “multiversity” to describe the state of American research universities. Kerr argued that the university no longer had a single purpose but had fragmented into several communities. As a modern institution, it was to be managed as a panoply of corporate enterprises. He described higher education as “a prime instrument of national purpose,” language that treated universities explicitly as instruments of the state and economy rather than communities of scholars pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

Less than a year after Kerr’s lectures, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement erupted, protesting, in part, the depersonalization his model embodies. At the famous December 2, 1964 University of California, Berkeley, Sprout Hall speech “Bodies Upon the Gears,” student activist Mario Savio directly challenged Kerr, urging fellow students, “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” These are prescient words; arguably the multiversity Kerr envisioned has ceased working.

Kerr’s model normalized several features that critics today invoke when infantilizing university leadership, such as the president as manager rather than scholar-leader, the university as a service-delivery organization accountable to multiple external “clienteles” (government, industry, students, the public), administrative growth as a rational response to institutional complexity and research productivity as measured by external funding and patents, not scholarly impact alone.

This is part one of a series chronicling the damaging rhetoric of anti-intellectualism in the U.S.