Americans don’t seem to think so, but they should.
(Credit: Buckley Institute)
Corinne Cowan
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
Americans have always had a strange relationship with the concept of “the elite.” We are both obsessed with and disgusted by the elite. We admire and revere the Founding Fathers, yet we are sometimes uncomfortable with their educated and bourgeois backgrounds. At Yale, we desire both to partake in the traditions and aesthetics of the WASP upper class and also to tear down any sign of the old aristocracy.
This summer, I stumbled upon an interesting poll in the center-left magazine The Argument. The poll suggested that Americans are comfortable designating three groups as the “elites:” billionaires, celebrities, and business leaders. Other groups in American society, such as politicians, college professors, and journalists, were less likely to be considered part of the “elite.” In particular, only about 12% of respondents to the survey believed that college professors are elites, though the percentage is higher among Trump voters than Harris supporters (17% vs 6%).
When I saw this poll, I was shocked at how few Americans view college professors as elites. Clearly, the respondents consider the American elite to merely be those who are materially wealthy. But being elite is more than just one’s financial status. Typically, Americans are skeptical of the business elite because they can exercise undue influence in politics. Wealth can buy one influence, cementing billionaires, CEOs, and movie stars in the elite. But there are other, less lucrative ways to exercise outsized influence in our country.
Despite their apparent low profile, there is a strong case to be made that university professors are one of the most subversive elite groups in America, by virtue of their influence. For example, the intellectual groundwork for many policy stances in the public consciousness today, especially on the progressive left, was laid in the university. Defund the police, American imperialism, “stolen land” — these are all propagated in the classroom. Even prominent concepts in modern culture, such as “speak your truth,” would never have proliferated if not for postmodernist academia of the 1960s, where professors like Michel Foucault first introduced the notion that objective truth does not exist.
University professors exercise power even in non-humanities disciplines. In fields that claim more objectivity, such as the hard or social sciences, professors still dictate the direction of their research enterprises. This is part of the reason why ideological imbalance is so harmful: The climate scientist simply doesn’t have to investigate hypotheses that contradict his preconceived political beliefs if he doesn’t want to. The sociologist doesn’t have to examine certain uncomfortable crime statistics when building the statistical case for policy decisions. And yet both of these individuals’ papers will go on to influence public policy and infiltrate the public consciousness. University faculty shape the American public’s notions of truth merely by choosing the direction of their scientific inquiry, then by touting their findings as settled fact.
So when I hear that faculty are not elite in some way, I’m skeptical. Their elite status comes not merely from their influence upon American life, but also by virtue of the fact that they exist outside the consequences of their actions. Their position actually makes them arguably more elite than billionaires and businessmen.
There is a certain degree to which professors exist in isolation from the rest of American society. Both the businessman and the billionaire have to live and work within the consequences of their actions. If the businessman constructs an inaccurate financial model, it’s immediately reflected in his company’s stock price. If a billionaire posts a politically incorrect tweet, firms and customers can choose to take their business elsewhere.
But for the professor? There is perhaps no other sector in America whose employees are so isolated from the consequences of their actions. In the name of academic freedom, professors are given significant amounts of leeway to pursue research and advance knowledge. Despite the indubitable influence that university faculty have on shaping the future of America, they are distanced from the particular problematic manifestations of their ideas.
The professor who advocates for reduced police presence doesn’t have to face the consequences of rampant crime in America. He is locked away in his ivory tower, lost in the world of abstract thought. He is protected by the campus police force, anyways. The professor who argues that marriage is an institution of the patriarchy doesn’t have to witness what happens when children grow up without father figures. These kids rarely make it into her classroom. And her own marriage is more likely to be stable and successful.
Does the life of contemplation require that one lives in the world? Maybe not completely. But the elite status of university faculty has allowed for some of the silliest and most dangerous ideas to run amok in modern academia.
American politics has, to some degree, always been concerned with rejecting the elite. It is an inevitable part of our spirit of democracy. Yet if we want to truly understand our modern political moment, we should be more conscious of who exactly exercises power in society.