Anti-Intellectualism in American Media: Magazines and Higher Education

Academe, Sep/Oct 2004 by Park, David W

Anti-Intellectualism in American Media: Magazines and Higher Education

Dane S. Claussen. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, 2004

What do we expect of our colleges and universities? And why do we have those expectations? Dane Clausscn's Anti-Intellectualism in American Media: Magazines and Higher Education asserts that our ideas concerning higher education in the United States are shaped by the attention that the news media focus on the academy. He presents a thorough analysis of portrayals of college and university life that appeared in the U.S. news media between 1944 and 1998. Given the title of the book, it comes as no surprise that Claussen finds antiintellectualism to be one of the defining themes of these portrayals. He concludes that the American media portray college as an active site for anything but intellectual pursuits. College is described as a place where students have parties, make connections for jobs after graduation, find spouses, and engage in all kinds of social activities, not as a place where they engage in critical thought, do research, or deepen their understandings of the world.

Claussen takes great care to explain anti-intellectualism fully, and to show its relevance to the news media's depiction of higher education. The most important touchstone in his discussion is Richard Hofstadter's seminal Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Though there are important differences between the two books, Clausscn's empirical discussion treats types of anti-intellectualism that can be traced directly to Hofstadter's work: religious antirationalism, populist antielitism, and unreflective instrumentalism, or the tendency to value thought only for its practical or material yield. Claussen's work advances beyond Hofstadter's by telling us why we should care what the media have to say about intellectualism and higher education. Whereas debates concerning intellectuals and education have too often considered their topics in a cultural vacuum, Claussen shows that the news media have the power to establish the terms on which higher education is judged.

The research takes the form of a textual analysis of stories about intellectuals, anti-intcllcctualisni, and higher education that appeared in Reader's Digest, Ladies Home Journal, Time, LJJe, and Nation's Business. Claussen carefully justifies this research design and includes a helpful appendix that describes the research process. His approach has its limits, and as a result Claussen is sometimes left without sufficient support for his points. To reduce such a broad cultural pattern as antiintellectualism to examples found in five magazines is to turn away from many other examples that might be presumed to offer a more prointellectual point of view.

Despite these limitations, Claussen establishes that mainstream media coverage of higher education lines up quite closely with the classic typology of U.S. anti-intellectualism. He finds antirationalism in the tendency of the media to play up the seeming "dangers"-such as loneliness, isolation, and depression-that await those students who engage in too much intellectual activity while at college. When this is paired with the media's even more common emphasis on rituals of college life-and in particular, rituals relating to the Greek system-we wind up with a picture of the college campus as a site for fun and games, from which the reader would be "hard pressed to have any idea what, if anything, college students do in a classroom, library, or laboratory."

Another major theme in media coverage of higher education is populist antielitism, which Claussen traces from the 194Os through today, a period in which colleges and universities experienced dramatic increases in the enrollment of nonelite students who were less prepared fur college than their elite peers. It is significant tu note that the magazines discuss this expansion of higher education in terms of "democratizatiun," a term that casts it in a pusitivc gluw. Though Claussen does not find much left- or right-wing populism, he does find a consistent rhetoric of advocacy for the interests of "common people," often in the form of stones on how "approachable" a college education is. liut this is matched by very little discussion of the decline of intellectual rigor that makes college success possible for poorly prepared students. Claussen, a defender of philosopher and author Allan Bloom's vision of college as a site where "pure" research and learning can be carried out, is disappointed by this populist approach to higher education.

Finally, (Haussen discusses the tendency of the news media to consider higher education as little more than preparation for the job market. Such unreflective instrumentalism informs magazine stories that describe colleges only in terms of the job prospects of their graduates, those that rank colleges in terms of alumni salary, and those that focus on how entrepreneurship has been incorporated into college curricula. This section shows Claussen at his best; he supports each point well, and the links to his theoretical perspective on anti-intellectualism are particularly clear.