Anti-Intellectualism on the American Right

"The conservative portrait of higher education, if true, is devastating. However, it has a number of serious flaws. The first is that it is empirically inaccurate. America’s universities are not monolithically left-wing. Rather, a battery of recent evidence on higher education show that although the professoriate tends to lean left, conservative students and faculty continue to flourish in significant numbers. Moreover, as the philosopher Charles Taylor argued at length in his 1992 book The Ethics of Authenticity, 'nihilism' has never been an accurate or fair account of the American counterculture. Rather, Bloom mistook a disagreement over morals as a rejection of them."

Jason Blakely at The Atlantic discusses "the rise in sharply hostile ways of talking about the universities among conservatives in the last fifty years."