…Despite the title of his book [Anti-intellectualism in American life] Richard 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."
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