What Richard Hofstadter Tells Us About the American University in Crisis.

“Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous and subversive,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his 1963 book “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” summing up the conventional wisdom of his era. And not just his era: As Hofstadter pointed out more than six decades ago, the United States has a long record of resenting its professors, experts, intellectuals and scientists — and of questioning whether higher education is actually good for the national soul.

Decades before the American Revolution, critics were already warning that Harvard and Yale — then the only two colleges in New England — had become sources of “darkness, darkness that may be felt.” By the early 20th century, the critique had expanded to include attacks on academics “as the prophets of false and needless reforms, as architects of the administrative state,” even as nefarious “ur-Bolsheviks.” Fast-forward to 2025, and the critiques look much the same. According to the Trump administration and its allies, America’s top universities are at once too exclusive and too inclusive, overly influential but utterly useless, unconscionably wealthy but too dependent on taxpayer dollars.

Hofstadter had little patience for attacks on universities as hotbeds of un-Americanism. But he warned that intellectuals did themselves no favors by simply proclaiming their own virtues and denouncing their critics as rubes. “It is rare for an American intellectual to confront candidly the unresolvable conflict between the elite character of his own class and his democratic aspirations,” he wrote. For that sentence alone, his book is worth rereading.

In retrospect, Hofstadter didn’t know how good he had it. The middle of the 20th century was a boom time for higher education in America, with entire universities springing up seemingly overnight and faculty jobs for the taking. Even so, universities found themselves on the defensive, accused of fomenting dissent, brainwashing students and wasting everyone’s time on frivolous subjects. Leading the charge was the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, who disliked university professors almost as much as Communist Party members.

“It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out,” McCarthy declared in 1950, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer — the finest homes, the finest college education and the finest jobs in government we can give.” In his anti-communist absolutism, he prefigured Donald Trump’s critique of today’s universities as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”

Hofstadter conceded that many intellectuals lean toward “the left side of center” — not because they want to sell out the country, but because coming up with radical ideas and challenging conventional wisdom is part of the job description. “Intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma or interest,” he explained. As a graduate student at Columbia University during the Depression, Hofstadter briefly joined the Communist Party before concluding that its totalitarian mind-set made it unlikely to spawn great ideas. By 1946, when he returned to Columbia as a faculty member, he had pivoted toward liberalism but still took pride in adopting the wry, skeptical stance of the outsider.

Then as now, Columbia was in the thick of national political debate. In 1948, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the hero of D-Day, became president of the university. Four years later, he became the Republican candidate for president of the United States — at which point members of the Columbia faculty composed a manifesto denouncing him as a McCarthyite sheep and intellectual lightweight. They preferred the Democratic candidate, the Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, a Princeton graduate and darling of the highbrow liberal set. Though today’s historians would not necessarily identify the Eisenhower-Stevenson contest as a major turning point, Hofstadter saw it as a high-stakes showdown between “philistinism” and “intellect.” Philistinism won.

That judgment was unduly harsh toward Eisenhower, who turned out to be quite a friend to higher education once the Soviets launched Sputnik and terrified his administration into funding scientific research. As Hofstadter noted, the humanities and social sciences have always occupied a somewhat different place in the nation’s priorities. “The advice of experts in the physical sciences, however suspect many of these experts may be, is accepted as indispensable,” he wrote. “Expertise in the social sciences, on the other hand, may be rejected as gratuitous and foolish, if not ominous.”

Today’s polls bear out that distinction. Even as the Trump administration tries to bend universities to its will by defunding medical and scientific research, public opinion surveys suggest that these are precisely the aspects of university life that Americans most admire and appreciate.

Even in the 1950s, Hofstadter could see that the fuss about campus Marxists was often about something else: dismantling the New Deal, stirring up Republican votes, undermining the liberal consensus. The same might be said of today’s efforts to rid college campuses of antisemitism and allegedly discriminatory D.E.I. policies: Are these the true goals, or are they handy ways to undermine powerful bulwarks of American liberalism?

It’s at such moments of crisis, Hofstadter argued, that academics and intellectuals often run into difficulty mounting campaigns in their own defense. Some of the most biting passages in his book take aim at the contradictions and self-regard of midcentury campus life, in which the “prophets of alienation,” keen to denounce the modern world, also seemed happy enough to embrace its material advantages.

Hofstadter worried that his fellow academics did not understand how to exercise political power, or how to come to terms with the hard choices it often entailed. He expressed special frustration with left-wing intellectuals who insisted that they spoke for the masses but, in his view, spent most of their time “maintaining their sense of their own purity.” He recommended that they devote some energy to “making their ideas effective” instead.

By 1963, the anti-intellectual surge of the McCarthy era was coming to an end. A Harvard man, John F. Kennedy, occupied the White House, and he seemed determined, in Hofstadter’s acerbic formulation, to make national politics once again “hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes scholars.” That, too, conformed to an established pattern in American history, according to Hofstadter, in which surges of anti-intellectualism were usually followed by periods of accord and rebuilding.

If he was right, the current crackdown on America’s universities will not last forever, though what happens in the meantime may permanently alter the structure of higher education. But today’s debates — over free speech and intellectual diversity, access and curriculum, money and power — are unlikely to be resolved for good, now or ever. Despite the title of his book, Hofstadter concluded that Americans skeptical of academic life are in the end neither pro-intellectual nor anti-intellectual, but “ambivalent” about what they want from their colleges, professors, experts and scientists. Hence all the back and forth about the state of our universities.

Hofstadter himself was not so sure that his fellow intellectuals always deserved special deference, given their tendency to resist self-critique. The best he could come up with, by way of defense, was to suggest that having a vibrant, free and democratic sphere of intellectual inquiry was a whole lot better than not having one. “I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon,” he wrote. But “one does not need to assert this, or to assert that intellectuals should get sweeping indulgence or exercise great power, in order to insist that respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and the health of any society.”