The Infantilization of the Academy: A Century-Long War on Higher Education

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 masterpiece, The Yellow Wallpaper, a woman is confined to a room by her physician-husband, who prescribes a “rest-cure” for her perceived nervous condition. By systematically stripping away her writing, her professional work, and her personal agency, the husband—acting under the guise of paternalistic care—ultimately precipitates the very psychological breakdown he claimed to be preventing.

More than a century later, a strikingly similar dynamic is playing out on a national scale. Critics of higher education, spanning the ideological spectrum, have begun prescribing the same stifling “rest-cure” to the American university. By framing faculty, administrators, and governing boards as fundamentally incompetent—as children who cannot be trusted to manage their own affairs—these critics are systematically dismantling the intellectual agency of the institution. This rhetorical shift toward "infantilization" is not a modern aberration; it is the culmination of a century of tension between the American democratic project and the autonomy of the mind.

A Chronology of Anti-Intellectualism

The American tradition of anti-intellectualism is as old as the republic itself. As Richard Hofstadter famously observed in his 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, there is a profound irony in a nation founded by Enlightenment intellectuals that has, throughout its political history, treated the intellectual as either an outsider, a servant, or a convenient scapegoat.

The Colonial and Jacksonian Roots

Anti-intellectualism first took root among Colonial-era evangelical Protestants. For these groups, formal education and the “educated elite” were viewed as barriers to a direct, intuitive, and spiritual relationship with the Divine. This suspicion of the expert evolved in the 19th century into a core tenet of Jacksonian populism. President Andrew Jackson championed the “self-made man” as the authentic American hero, positioning the educated class as a corrupt, effete elite inherently disconnected from the struggles of the common laborer.

The Scopes Trial and the Policing of Thought

The early 20th century marked a transition from populist suspicion to state-sanctioned censorship. The 1925 State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes—the infamous “Monkey Trial”—was the first major modern collision between scientific consensus and political power. By outlawing the teaching of human evolution in public schools, the state of Tennessee established a precedent for punitive, parent-child governance in education. Today’s legislative efforts to restrict topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender history reflect this same impulse: a desire to shield the public from uncomfortable knowledge by legislating the content of the classroom.

The McCarthy Era: The Chilling Effect

In the 1950s, the anti-intellectual project found its most virulent form in Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism did not merely disagree with intellectuals; it sought to criminalize them. By targeting university professors at institutions like Harvard and Columbia, and by purging libraries of “Red books,” McCarthyism imposed a climate of fear that equated academic freedom with ideological subversion. As the Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy has noted, McCarthy’s interrogations of authors like Langston Hughes and Dashiell Hammett were designed to demand ideological conformity, effectively treating the American public as a population in need of protection from “dangerous” ideas.

The Shift to Infantilization: A New Rhetorical Strategy

While earlier eras branded scholars as “godless” or “subversive,” the current rhetorical landscape has shifted. The modern critic no longer just calls the academic wrong; they call them incapable.

This "infantilization" strategy treats boards and faculty as children who require adult supervision. This is evident in the wave of book bans documented by PEN America, which has tracked nearly 23,000 instances of removal in public schools since 2021. The pattern is distinct: by framing the university as an entity that cannot govern its own curriculum or discourse, state legislatures and think tanks justify the imposition of external, often political, control.

The irony is that this movement is not strictly partisan. While the right-wing focus on transgender rights and DEI programs is well-documented, mainstream outlets like The New York Times and Harper’s have occasionally echoed the sentiment that higher education is in a state of self-inflicted “psychotic breakdown.” Whether the catalyst is a desire for political purity or a demand for market-driven accountability, the result is the same: the stripping of professional autonomy.

The Corporate Capture: How We Built the Machine

To understand why higher education is currently under siege, one must look at how the university was transformed over the last hundred years. The very forces now calling for more control are the same forces that spent a century forcing the university into a corporate mold.

The Legal Bulwark: Dartmouth v. Woodward (1819)

Early on, the courts protected the university’s independence. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the Supreme Court ruled that a college charter was a contract protected from state interference. This established the university as a distinct corporate entity, shielded from the whims of transient political majorities.

The Morrill Act and the Utility Model

The 1862 and 1890 Morrill Land-Grant Acts marked a pivot. Higher education began to be viewed through the lens of economic productivity. The university was no longer just a site for civic virtue; it became a “plant” for producing engineers, agriculturists, and technically trained workers. This birthed the “accountability-to-taxpayers” argument that modern critics now wield as a weapon.

The Veblen Critique and the "Captain of Erudition"

In 1918, economist Thorstein Veblen provided the definitive critique of this trend in The Higher Learning in America. Veblen mocked university presidents who acted as industrial CEOs rather than scholarly leaders, calling them “captains of erudition.” He warned that the subordination of research to commercial ends and the replacement of collegial governance with top-down hierarchy would eventually destroy the university’s soul.

The Multiversity and the Berkeley Reaction

In 1963, Clark Kerr solidified this corporate shift by coining the term “multiversity.” He argued that the modern university was no longer a unified community of scholars, but a corporate enterprise serving the needs of the state and the economy. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, led by Mario Savio, was a direct reaction to this depersonalization. Savio’s call to put “bodies upon the gears” of the machine was an attempt to stop the very corporate apparatus that today’s critics claim is running out of control.

Implications for the Future

The irony of our current moment is profound. The neoliberal, corporate-driven model of the university—characterized by administrative bloat, a focus on external funding, and the commodification of the student experience—has produced the very institutional instability that critics now use as a pretext to strip away academic freedom.

When legislatures threaten to withhold funding over cultural grievances, they are not protecting the university; they are finalizing its transition into a state-run, subservient utility. By treating faculty as employees who have lost the right to self-govern, the state is effectively completing the “rest-cure” Gilman described.

The consequences are clear: if the university is forced to operate under the constant threat of external oversight and punitive intervention, the disinterested pursuit of knowledge will wither. A society that views its most prestigious institutions as “children” in need of disciplining will soon find that it has no scholars left—only servants of the state. As the academic world faces this existential pressure, the central question remains: can an institution built to serve the “machine” of the economy ever regain the agency required to serve the truth?