Intellectuals always have responsibilities, and historians are surely part of what most people mean when they speak of that class. What is our role at the present time?

I begin with a confession: I’ve never been comfortable with the mantle of intellectual. It joins one to some but mostly sets one apart. Besides, for more than two decades I have taught at public universities. My classroom is for everyone; my expertise is a public good, paid for, in admittedly ever-decreasing part, by taxpayer dollars. As a caretaker of knowledge, in my case about our common national history, I’m in the truth business, but funded by and for the collective. Dwelling on my difference—a special sense of responsibility that accrues to my role as an intellectual, modified by other identities and loyalties—strikes me as self-indulgent.

Yet in a regime that targets intellectuals as fellow travelers with all the wrong people, one no longer needs to theorize the student, the teacher, the academic, the writer, as a marginalized person or exile-at-home, as sociologists and movement makers were doing when Noam Chomsky wrote his classic essay in 1967. In retrospect, perhaps the most striking thing about his conception of his subject is his certainty about who he is talking about. Permit me, then, to trace some history.

There was a discourse then about The Intellectual, that airy figure conceived as heir both to the Enlightenment and to modernism, as well as a parallel, more specific discourse about the responsibility of the Black intellectual to his—as the assumption at the time invariably went—“community.” The postwar U.S. state was caught in the contradiction of having expanded the university to accommodate the GIs, the baby boomers, and the Cold War only to find that it had wound up funding and creating spaces for opposition along the way. The campus, as a demographically skewed little city, became a site of real political agitation and controversy and hand-wringing as well as generational conflict. It also began training a larger, more diverse class of intellectuals with higher degrees—a class that, as it mushroomed, came to seem more secure and bourgeois (as opposed to shabby-aristocratic) than an earlier professoriate and not necessarily all that intellectual, if by that we mean, as Chomsky did, critical and interested in politics and culture beyond one’s academic specialty. For several decades, Chomsky’s choice between speaking truth to power and justifying the status quo came to seem less stark or necessary than it did in 1967. Most writers and professors existed comfortably in an expanding middle or grey zone where tough choices, or agitations, seemed either unnecessary or someone else’s job.

Ever since, intellectuals have drawn agonized circles around the results. The transformation seemed, and felt, both natural and weird. Surely academe wasn’t the real world, its denizens, whether temporary or tenured, not “the people.” Yet that world continued to grow, continued to matter and to attract money too, even as it mocked itself in a subgenre of campus novels and suffered the arrival of “late capitalism” in the form of funding crises at state universities. The right grumbled about “tenured radicals”; radicals muttered “As if!” or replied with ironic manifestos. The rise of the so-called “knowledge economy” in the 1990s muddied distinctions further. As president, Barack Obama made higher education sound like a middle-class right while trying to turn the narrative toward workforce development, away from his own origins as a Columbia student turned community organizer turned law professor turned legislator.

By then, higher ed looked polarized as a public policy matter, the Democratic Party identified with both its public and private forms and the GOP increasingly arrayed against it. The academy too felt increasingly politicized, intellectual life itself more performative, riskier, and certainly more alienated than in its heady years of expansion, especially in light of the at first creeping, then overwhelming adjunctification of the faculty. Canon and “culture” wars flared, punctuated by the small wars that seemed designed to elect presidents and frustrate comparisons to Vietnam and the 1960s. Some might have remembered their wartime predecessors, like Charles Beard in 1917 and W. E. B. Du Bois in 1944 and Staughton Lynd in 1969, who had been effectively forced out of the academy for their politics even while their intellectual work anticipated emerging trends.  

All that seems a pale shadow, a mere foreshadow, of what we face now. Today the Trump administration is putting its heavy thumb over the academy and everything it is supposed to be good for: making citizens, doing research, exploring new ideas. In the name of restoring a mythically glorious (read: white) past, congressional inquisitors are undermining the very autonomy of the life of the mind from the meddling influence of the state, the freedoms of teaching and research, that have always represented the best of what the American university has had to offer. The very fact that people all over the world wish to come here to further their education (and even help pay the bills) makes the university epitomize for the nativist right everything that has gone wrong with the country and its thinking classes. The professor is now not merely a potential homegrown dissident: they are figured in this reactionary fantasy as an urban migrant displacing the heartland stock from its rightful place in the cultural elite and poisoning the homeland with their “DEI” or “terrorist” words. The siege has all the contradictions of every Herrenvolk campaign. Invoking scarcity of the right’s own creation—competition for limited funds and limited spaces—the imagined solution, as usual, is not to expand and include, still less to make a brief for anything free, universal, and public, but to oust and expel and extort.

There are precedents within U.S. history, during wartime and at the state level. Whether we call it fascism or note the parallels with contemporary Hungary, India, or Hong Kong, suppression is both first move and endgame, whether operating through funding freezes, police actions on campus, or a Department of Justice that has flipped the meaning of discrimination on its head.

In this situation I see it as the particular responsibility of the intellectual in the United States to testify from experience, as well as knowledge, that this moment of rank repression and corruption is at once recurrent—continuous with a pattern running through U.S. history—and unprecedented in scope and form as the immediate result of a presidential election. The Democrats, as a party, still refuse to admit the glaring violence behind their loss: another Middle East war, which Bidenites enabled. This was Gulf War and 9/11 redux—the third time as genocide. As the late Amy Kaplan made so clear in Our American Israel (2018), the current conjuncture of domestic politics and international alliances reflects a heightening of trends going back more than half a century, issuing from generations of fantasy about American and Israeli innocence. Among its perverse effects has been to provide cover for a presidential administration populated by officials with links to antisemitic white nationalism to carry out a siege on the academy under the rubric of anti-antisemitism, all while drawing support from the likes of the Anti-Defamation League.

Nothing confirms Chomsky’s distinction between responsible intellectuals and functionaries of the state like the current trend of college administrators rushing to strike deals with the federal government to placate The Leader. The headline on the July 14 cover story of the Philadelphia Inquirer put it directly: “The art of the deal between Penn and Trump.” The kowtowing, at Penn and Brown and Columbia and beyond, will be familiar to anyone who watches university administrators; DEI programs have been toppling everywhere under much less pressure. But it is unconscionably short-term thinking and action, taken with apparently no historical or political awareness of what happens, in business or politics or everyday life, when one agrees to what is in essence bullying and extortion, or accepts rules of war that can be changed at any time. What will they demand, and take, tomorrow? And who next will pay the price?

The immediate material stakes are high, but this battle is also as symbolic as they come. The dispatching of fighting forces on the streets and the relishing in sheer violence go hand in hand with the assault on intellectual life, which is hardly an afterthought or mere collateral damage. Rather, it is a culmination of what Richard Slotkin names “The Age of Culture War.” In privileging their budgets and abandoning guardrails around free speech, the richest institutions in the country demonstrate that they are not interested in the responsibility of intellectuals felt keenly by their own systematically disempowered, if privileged, faculty. They fail to ask why the regime, spurred by its would-be inheritors like J. D. Vance and Stephen Miller and Christopher Rufo, is making such a priority of cracking down on higher education as well as immigrants, and what that already has meant for those downstream of the repression of both protest on campus and academic self-governance, especially in states with compliant red legislatures.

In other words, the university is now center stage in not just antiwar protest, as in the 1960s, or the culture wars, as it was during the early 1990s, but in politics itself. And these developments, accelerated by an essentially televisual president who seeks to rule through meme-threats, are a reaction in part to knowledges articulated by both “intellectuals” and “activists.” Even where the latter can be credited more than the former for having anticipated and made change, the lines are blurry; what appears in retrospect as haziness was two-way influence, and it mattered. Generations later, as Robin D. G. Kelley shows in his account of figures who were derided in the pre-Chomsky era as “premature antifascists,” the dissenters have been revealed as truthtellers, even prophets of what was to come.

That is one reason why erasing history at the Smithsonian and the National Parks has become a bureaucratic priority. The lesson I take is that we will all have to be historians now, to remember that things were not always this way and to see through the growing morass of lies our government is propagating in public. There is no choice but to enter the breach, and we have to do it together. The biggest myth that intellectuals face, leading them to underestimate both their power and their responsibility, is the self-fulfilling sense that we work alone and for ourselves. We do not.

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