Is Obama changing anti-intellectualism in America?

I thought I’d noticed a difference lately: that one could use a French phrase without meeting rolled eyes, mention a philosopher without killing a conversation, have a dinner-table chat that focused on something other than American Idol. Is Obama’s ascendancy, I began to wonder, changing anti-intellectualism in America?
It seemed unlikely. Anti-intellectualism has prevailed for most of my lifetime, at least since the Reagan Revolution established the simpleton with a big stick as the archetype of American leadership.
Yet I was noticing these little changes in America. So I began eavesdropping more carefully at the university where I teach. Professors are particularly sensitive barometers of anti-intellectualism. They can hardly meet a civilian without hearing, “Oh, you’re a professor, I’d better watch my grammar.” They get roped off from the normal crowd, and a great many respond by trying to say, in so many ways, “I’m just like you!”
I was astonished, when I first went to graduate school, to hear professors minimize their own profession, as if to do so was–can I get away with saying this now?–de rigueur. False humility or a response to anti-intellectualism? Even when we want professors to talk about Kierkegaard and Hegel, they’ll toss in sitcoms and pop songs, as if to say, “Oh sure, I work as a professor, but I’m no egghead.” One professor told me that for every 100 books he accumulates, he buys another television, “just to keep things in balance.”
That’s a lot of televisions.
I don’t have new stats yet on professorial television ownership, but I can report campus pride in an intellectual president and a government that puts science before politics. So sure, I decided, something is changing, and I jotted it down as an idea for further research: “Is Obama changing anti-intellectualism in America?” No sooner had I stuck the Post-It note to my monitor than Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, wrote the story for New Scientist:
With the coming of Barack Obama to the presidency, the phrase “sea change” is not too strong. Here is a former academic who is deeply familiar with the world of thought. In his inaugural address, Obama pledged to restore science to its “rightful place” in our government; heck, he even extolled the virtue of “curiosity.” And for the first time in history, he has appointed a Nobel laureate to the presidential cabinet. The worm has turned in American life – but for how long?
Anti-intellectualism is a central thread of America’s culture and spirit. In his Pulitzer prize-winning 1964 work Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter showed how the anti-intellectual impulse arose from a complex set of historical factors which included religious evangelism, a bustling business culture and a deeply rooted emphasis on egalitarianism: “the American dream”. In short – and this is what is so insidious about it – distrust of the pointy-headed thinker springs, at least in part, from Americans’ better nature. The value placed on hard work and fairness plays as big a role as ignorance in the lamentable resilience of anti-intellectual sentiment, in Hofstadter’s view.
Hofstadter also pointed out that anti-intellectualism waxes and wanes in American life…. History suggests that it won’t last, and we’ll soon be fighting the same old battles. Unless, of course, Obama can break the cycle.
To break the cycle, Mooney contends, Obama has to succeed as an intellectual president, and alternative energy could be his Apollo Program. Obama also has to convince Americans to value intelligence again. The biggest obstacle, Mooney says, is our stupid media.
Like, for example, the crew at Fox News who jumped all over the president recently for putting Dijon mustard on an American hamburger, never quite grasping that Grey Poupon is made by Kraft in Northfield, Illinois, and Hamburg is a town in Germany.