Academia Must Come to Terms With the GOP

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.”