To become a class enemy is a misfortune, but to cultivate such status is a blunder. Right-wing populists chose American academics and intellectuals generations ago as their class enemies. More than 50 years ago, Vice President Spiro Agnew labeled social-science professors and their students an “effete corps of impudent snobs.” Former Alabama Governor George Wallace derided academics as “pointy-headed intellectuals who can’t park their bicycles straight.” President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger, only recently departed from the Harvard faculty, “Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
Rather than decline the assigned role, American academics and intellectuals have played it with relish. In 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine all but endorsed Joe Biden, the first time in the publication’s 200-plus-year history it had intervened in presidential politics. Scientific American was even more blunt, openly endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 and Kamala Harris in 2024, the only times it had done so in its 180-year history. The new president of the American Association of University Professors declared that Vice President-elect JD Vance is a “fascist.” Inside Higher Ed, an online news publication directed toward academics, recently posted an opinion piece urging professors to “go to the barricades” to defeat the Republicans’ higher-education agenda.
“A new generation of right-wing populists comes wielding far more than words.”
But today’s academics are not facing their fathers’ Republican Party. After offering little more than rhetoric for decades, a new generation of right-wing populists comes wielding far more than words. DEI programs at state universities are already on the chopping block throughout the south and midwest. In a strategy pioneered by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Donald Trump has promised to overturn the accreditation system for the country’s colleges and universities in order to gain greater control over them. Trump has also proposed a higher-education public option, the online “American Academy,” which would compete directly with established schools to award a bachelor’s degree equivalent at no financial cost to students. JD Vance has suggested raising the federal tax on the wealthiest college endowments from the current 1.4 percent to a crushing 35 percent. House and Senate Republicans are all ears.