1. Course Description Form – Honors College
The Honors Course Proposal must include the following information:
Proposed Course Title –
Anti-Intellectualism in American Culture and Politics
50-word Course Description –
Hostility to science, experts, and “book learning” is a common impulse that shapes
contemporary American culture and politics. In this course, we will explore how antiintellectualism promotes notions about media bias, encourages belief in implausible
conspiracies, and spurs hyperpolarized politics, among other topics. We will take the runup to the 2016 elections as a real-time case study.
Course Justification Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as, “Resentment and suspicion of the life of the
mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to
minimize the value of that life.”1 Anti-intellectualism is currently a powerful tendency in
American culture, and we will be charting its effects especially in terms of the national
electoral campaigns that will be in high swing in fall 2015.
There are some laudable democratic, anti-elitist impulses to much populist antiintellectualism. It is nonetheless an approach that most academics (who do, in fairness,
have a dog in the fight) believe causes more harm than good. Know-nothingism, hostility
to unwelcome facts, and commitments to opinions not supported by data all lead to
trouble over the long haul. Anti-intellectualism is especially troublesome in electoral
politics. The current highly polarized environment, in which elected officials rarely cross
party lines to vote, and in which “red staters” and “blue staters” stake out unbending
positions on hot button issues, is made tenable by a culture of anti-intellectualism that
condones dismissing expert opinion and settled science. This state of affairs is bad for
democratic political culture.
Students who take honors courses are among our very strongest and include the next
generation’s intellectuals, in the best sense of the term. I hope that a course of this type
will be especially useful to honors students, both for helping them to situate their own
worldviews vis-à-vis those in the larger society, and for helping them to make sense of
the politics of the moment.
Course Goals and Objectives –
I am particularly interested in structuring the course and its assignments in a way that will
challenge students, regardless of their own political biases, to consider their own habits of
thinking about the “other side.” Nobody has a monopoly on bone headedness. The data
1
Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage
books, page 7.
show that partisans of all stripes often think about politics and the culture at large in
simplistic, emotionally satisfying ways. Partisans of all stripes routinely minimize careful
research and deliberation. (For example, those on the political left are sympathetic to one
set of conspiracy theories that do not withstand careful scrutiny, while those on the right
are sympathetic to another set of such conspiracy theories.)
As a political sociologist by training, I draw extensively on the literature from sociology,
political science, and, for this topic, psychology. So the course will be interdisciplinary.
Moreover, the assignments and obligations of this course will require students to read
carefully, and to articulate their own positions (and others) fairly and with precision. The
assignments will require a mindful, creative approach to making sense of antiintellectualism, and to the conditions that promote or discourage it.
Brief Description of Instructional Methodologies –
I will lecture for about one-fourth of the time most days. Most of the balance of class
time will go to structured classroom discussions of ideas from lectures and especially to
analysis of the assigned readings. We will also spend some class time considering current
events that are relevant to class. For example, we will analyze current campaign ads and
score them for anti-intellectualism. Campaigning for the U.S. Presidential and
Congressional elections of 2016 will be in high gear during the fall 2015 semester.
Indeed, the list of presidential hopefuls will probably not yet have been winnowed, and
we are likely to see lively Republican and Democratic single-party televised debates in
the fall of 2015 as both parties work toward naming their nominees at their respective
national conventions in the summer of 2016. We will take full advantage and use the
campaign season as a kind of case study, watching for moments of greater or lesser antiintellectualism in candidates’ campaign messages, media coverage of the season, partisan
attacks that persist or die quickly in interesting ways, and so forth.
Assessment of Student Learning –
Participation: 20%
Five page paper analyzing one implausible conspiracy (September): 20%
Five page book analysis (October): 20%
Two student-produced 30-second political advertisements, one an example of antiintellectualism, the other an example of a more reasoned approach (November): 20%
Final exam: 20%
Course Outline–
Week 1: history of anti-intellectualism in America, its sources, its periodic rise and fall
Week 2: cultural consequences of The Enlightenment, its relationship to antiintellectualism
Weeks 3 & 4: implausible conspiracies, why they are common, their political
implications
Weeks 5 & 6: the attack on science from the political left, radical environmentalists,
vaccine avoiders, etc.
Weeks 7 & 8: the attack on science from the political right, creationists, climate skeptics,
etc.
Weeks 9 & 10: models of media bias, liberal v. conservative bias, the hostile media effect
Weeks 11 – 13: models of cultural polarization, the state of the “culture wars” today
Week 14: student presentations
Suggested Textbooks and Other Learning Resources –
Students will read parts or all of the following:
Jacoby, Susan. 2009. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Vintage Books.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1963. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage
books.
Lim, Elvin. T. 2008. The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential
Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Carr, Nicholas. 2011. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Students will also read current academic articles posted on our class website (linked from
Alkek at no charge to students) of the type indicated in the bibliography below. I will also
be assigning relevant items from news media outlets as they become available.
Bibliography –
Benton, Thomas H. 2008. "On Stupidity." The Chronicle of Higher Education August 1.
Bradley Hagerty, Barbara. 2012. "The Most Influential Evangelist You've Never Heard
of." National Public Radio: August 8.
Butler, Ella. 2010. "God is in the Data: Epistemologies of Knowledge at the Creation
Museum." Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 75(3):229-51.
Domhoff, G. William. 2010. Who Rules America? Challenges to Corporate and Class
Dominance, Sixth Edition. Boston: McGraw Hill.
Engelstad, Fredrik. 2009. "Democratic Elitism: Conflict and Consensus." Comparative
Sociology 8(3):383-401.
Feldman, Lauren. 2011. "Partisan Differences in Opinionated News Perceptions: A Test
of the Hostile Media Effect." Political Behavior 33(3):407-32.
Foltz, Franz and Frederick Foltz. 2012. "Words, Words, Words: Ellul and the
Mediocritization of Language." Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
32(3):222-30.
Gauchat, Gordon William. 2008. "A Test of Three Theories of Anti-Science Attitudes."
Sociological Focus 41(4):337-57.
Gelfert, Axel. 2010. "Kant and the Enlightenment's Contribution to Social
Epistemology." Episteme 7(1):79-99.
Groseclose, Tim and Jeffrey Milyo. 2005. "A Measure of Media Bias." The Quarterly
Journal of Economics 120(4):1191-1237.
Hall, Stuart. 2005. "Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse." Chapter Seven in
Discourse Theory and Practice, A Reader, Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie
Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates, eds. Sage.
Haque, Omar Sultan. 2011. "Moral Creationism: The Science of Morality and the
Mutiny of Romantic Realism." Journal of Cognition and Culture 11:151-187.
Harris, Lee. 2010. "The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals." Policy Review 161:3-14.
Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books.
Hobbs, Mitchell. 2009. "Neo-Conned: The Murdoch Press and the Iraq War."
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 6(2):187-207.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern." Critical Inquiry 30(2)25-48.
Lee, Tien-Tsung. 2010. "Why They Don't Trust the Media: An Examination of Factors
Predicting Trust." American Behavioral Scientist 54(1):8-21.
McCright, Aaron M. and Riley E. Dunlap. 2011. "The Politicization of Climate Change
and Polarization in the American Public's Views of Global Warming, 20012010. The Sociological Quarterly 52:155-94.
Morris, Jonathan S. and Peter L. Francia. 2010. "Cable News, Public Opinion, and the
2004 Party Conventions." Political Research Quarterly 63(4):834-49.
Nall, Jeff. 2010. "Exhuming the History of Feminist Masculinity: Condorcet, 18th
Century Radical Male Feminist." Culture, Society & Masculinities 2(1):42-61.
National Public Radio. 2012. "Wikipedia Policies Limit Editing Haymarket Bombing."
October 3.
Otto, Shawn Lawrence. 2012. "America's Science Problem." Scientific American
November:62-71.
Pieper, Andrew L. 2011. "Flouting Faith? Religious Hostility and the American Left,
1977-2000." American Politics Research 39(4):754-78.
Rouse, Joseph. 2001. "Power/Knowledge." Chapter Four in The Cambridge Companion
to Foucault, Gary Gutting, ed. Cambridge University Press.
Shermer, Michael. 2013. "Logic-Tight Compartments: How Our Modular Brains Lead
Us to Deny and Distort Evidence." Scientific American January:77.
Shortell, Timothy. 2011. "The Conflict over Origins: A Discourse Analysis of the
Creationism Controversy in American Newspapers." Mass Communication and
Society 14(4):431-53.
Simmons, Joseph P., Leif D. Nelson, Jeff Galak, and Shane Frederick. 2011. "Intuitive
Biases in Choice versus Estimation: Implications for the Wisdom of Crowds."
Journal of Consumer Research 38(1):1-15.
Sokal, Alan D. 1996. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." Social Text 46/47:217-52.
Stivers, Richard. 2012. "The Media Creates Us in Its Image." Bulletin of Science,
Technology & Society 32(3):203-12.
Sutter, Daniel. 2012. "Mechanisms of Liberal Bias in the New Media versus the
Academy. Independent Review 16(3):399-415.
Tan, Yue and David Weaver. 2010."Media Bias, Public Opinion, and Policy Liberalism
from 1956 to 2004: A Second-Level Agenda-Setting Study." Mass
Communication & Society 13(4):412-34.
Teten, Ryan Lee. 2011. "Mouthpiece of the Liberal Left?" Public Integrity 14(1):67-84.
Vandenburg, Willem H. 2012. "The Desymbolization of Human Life in Contemporary
Mass Societies." Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 32(3):213-21.
Wenick, Robert. 1997. "Declaring an Open Season on the Wisdom of the Ages."
Smithsonian 28(2):72-80.
Course Resources –
All I will need is a classroom with the usual media cabinet and projector.