Anti-intellectualism, marked by opposition to or distrust of education and intellectual pursuits, has grown in the last decade. This movement is damaging Americans’ trust in science and medicine.
Matt Motta, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, published his book, “Anti-Scientific Americans: The Prevalence, Correlates, & Political Consequences of Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.” in September 2024.He explains that there has been a significant rise in anti-intellectual rhetoric since the 2016 presidential campaign, and that the pandemic increased its prevalence.
A 2023 Pew Research Center poll showing that 27% of Americans had little to no trust in scientists.
Many people do not value education for the sake of learning anymore and are only interested in the job opportunities a degree can lead to. Understandably, the high cost of education doesn’t help.
The message that college and education in general is a scam continues to spread. From popular news outlets calling college a scam, to the current administration aiming to dismantle the Department of Education, many American institutions are perpetuating this myth with their exclusivity.
Sources such as Fox News have run several articles calling college a scam or featuring people who do so, such as the March 2023 article titled, “These top colleges scam you and your kids as woke insanity soars.”
Academia is part of the problem. Scientific papers are full of jargon and extremely specialized terminology while also being locked behind paywalls, making academic literature more inaccessible.
On top of this, basic high school classes do not teach scientific literacy and, depending on their major, college students may not learn it either. This results in many adults having low scientific literacy.
Michigan State University professor John Miller found in his research that 70% of Americans cannot understand the science section of The New York Times.
In conjunction with this, social media is helping grifters peddle medical conspiracy theories, pseudoscience remedies and general misinformation. The fast pace of content like this means anyone in the world is subjected to questionable and unproven information presented as fact.
While educational institutions teach the methods necessary to identify misinformation, anti-intellectualism aims to cut down on teaching critical reading, writing and thinking.
The sinister part of this is something we’ve seen before: Authoritarian regimes attack education and the spread of information because an uneducated, fearful populace serves their goals. If people are not able to identify misinformation and mistrust scientists as a result, then they are much less likely to question the world around them.
President Donald Trump himself even said on the 2016 campaign trail in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated.”
The effect of this attitude on college students should not be understated. If the administration succeeds in eliminating the Department of Education, it will drastically change student loans and federal student aid, making it even more prohibitive for people to get an education.
As anti-intellectualism proliferates through state and federal governments, public funding for colleges decreases, which will consequently raise tuition costs.
Chris Sprague can be reached at arg-opinion@uidaho.edu.