@shawbridge The USA has always had an uneasy relationship with smart people. Look haw many bad guys have been “evil geniuses” who were, somehow, beaten by brave but not that smart heroes, think about how smart people are almost always portrayed as evil, arrogant, ineffectual, weak, or useless. Look at how damaging having a graduate degree can be to the political chances of somebody.
While there have been short period during which being smart has been considered a good thing - the 1930s, the past 20 years or so, the attitude that smart people cannot be trusted is fairly deeply ingrained in the US culture. It is sometimes easy to forget that here on CC, where being good at school is considered a virtue, but that is still not all that widespread.
How many heroes in literature and popular culture have been truly smart, until recently? For every MacGyver, there are 30 A-Teams. It is Harry Potter who is always the hero, and Hermione Grainger is a supporting character.
In the past few years, it’s sometimes been hidden by claiming that the people who are very intelligent are not “really” smart. No, there is something called “street smarts” which is not related to the type of intelligence that allows somebody to be inventive of otherwise creative. So a person with “true intelligence” is somebody who can make a lot of money, or manipulate the system, etc.
That is why everybody thinks of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as “geniuses”, since they were able to monetize the inventions of other people. The people who are actually inventing the technology which these people are selling are ignored, and considered as being, somehow, of “lesser” intelligence.
Universities epitomize the type of intelligence which is scariest. These are not only people who are smart in the ways that make so many Americans uneasy, but they also disprove the tropes that are so dear to the American heart. They are creative, they are powerful, and some are rich, and, worst of all, they control the education of the youth of America.
America’s greatest achievement in higher education - importing brains on a scale never seen before, also plays into it, because it there is something that Americans fear more than intelligence, it is foreigners.
Baby boomers grew up on all the tropes related to academics, and internalized them more than any generation before or after. There are the conservative tropes that academics are “un-American”. There are the left-wing tropes that academics as cold and clinical and not only do not have compassion and humanity, but do not “understand nature”. The lefty also has the trope of creativity only existing in the arts, not in any academic field. There are apolitical tropes that academics are not actually working but living well on great salaries and simply spend their time engaging in wasteful pastimes of studying stuff which doesn’t matter. Then there is the trope of scientists “studying things that were never meant to be studied”. These tropes dominate books and movies from 1950s to the early 2000s, and still exist today, especially in popular media.
PS. Because I spoke about tropes: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/should