“Today’s backlash against intellectual life cannot simply be written off as a popular celebration of mindlessness,” wrote Adam Waters and E.J. Dionne Jr. in Dissent. It was true of America in 2019. It is painfully true of India now.
Books written in other countries, in other decades, often feel eerily suited to our present moment. Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963, is one such text. Its arguments, meant for Cold War America, read today as commentary on contemporary India.
In that book, Hofstadter described a distinctly American malady: a cultural allergy to thought itself. Certain minds, he wrote, “elevate hatred to a kind of creed,” substituting group resentment for any genuine political or moral project. The targets of this hostility were those who dared to think differently: abolitionists, Masons, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, immigrants, Black Americans, international bankers, and, again and again, intellectuals.
As Ed Luo puts it in Medium, “…. the final diagnosis is sobering: anti-intellectualism breeds political illiteracy and social apathy.” Those, in turn, produce societies led by the incompetent and the dangerous. The spread of outright lies and the denial of facts, phenomena now woven into our national discourse, do not begin in WhatsApp forwards; they begin in political culture, at the very top.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines anti-intellectualism as “opposition or hostility to intellectuals, intellectual pursuits, or intellectual reasoning.” At its core, it is a suspicion of the abstract, a distrust of nuance, a belief that thinking too deeply constitutes elitism, and that the complex must always bow to the “practical.”
On university campuses, anti-intellectualism takes quieter, more corrosive forms: a mistrust of complex ideas; a casual disdain for “useless” subjects like the arts and humanities; and an impatience with anything that cannot be packaged as a marketable skill. Students bristle at “elitist” academics; corporatization pushes them toward employability; faculty retreat into their own “ivory tower” routines. The result is, of course, skipped classes, avoided readings, and critical thinking replaced by easily digestible “real-world” shortcuts. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the very purpose of higher education begins to erode.
John Dewey, in Democracy and Education (1916), drew a distinction that feels painfully relevant. Education, he argued, has intrinsic aims to develop the capacity for continual learning, while teachers often inherit extrinsic aims, such as finishing a prescribed syllabus or helping students crack exams. Liberal learning, Dewey insisted, cultivates independence of mind. Yet today, vocational training, especially under the new NEP, has crowded out those humanities-based aims.
Across Indian campuses, and certainly within Lucknow University, intellectual life is being traded for its cheaper cousin: conformity. In the twenty-first century, intellect often feels less like a gift than a liability. LU, in too many ways, caters to the lowest common denominator of IQ and EQ, not because students lack talent, but because the system expects little of them. In a system where the state demands uniform outcomes, teachers teach to achieve those outcomes, not to challenge or expand their students’ abilities. The lowest bar becomes the standard. And surveillance, both digital and administrative, discourages risk-taking in the classroom. The result is a culture of pedagogical caution. Professors teach to the test, fearfully, their intellectual autonomy slowly eroded by bureaucratic demands. When teachers cannot think freely, students quickly learn not to.
Hofstadter defined the intellectual temperament through qualities such as disinterested intelligence, generalizing power, creative novelty, and radical criticism. Anti-intellectualism, by contrast, is a disposition that resents the life of the mind altogether. Within that framework, the modern assessment movement, ostensibly geared toward “learning outcomes,” often narrows intellectual inquiry by coercing professors into meaningless bureaucratic tasks. Even learning-oriented assessment becomes a way to measure compliance rather than curiosity.
Once upon a time, universities were laboratories of dissent. They birthed manifestos, sharpened political vocabularies, and taught generations to argue with both ferocity and grace. Lucknow University, home to the Progressive Writers’ Movement, once gave India a literature that dared to disturb. Today, that same campus prefers to play it safe. The conversations that once filled seminar halls have been replaced by the hum of bureaucratic survival. “Finish the syllabus” has become the pedagogical equivalent of “mind your business.”
There are, of course, extraordinary teachers, those who change lives, who awaken possibility. But for every such teacher, there is another who reads out notes verbatim in class “lectures,” demands obedience over comprehension, and polices attendance more vigorously than ideas. Students learn the lesson quickly: questions become threats; disagreements become acts of defiance; student-led literary organizations become suspiciously close to subversion. In such a climate, memorization becomes safer than wonder. The cost of curiosity becomes unaffordable.
At the same time, funding structures reveal a strange imbalance. While significant resources go toward accommodating students with special needs, an essential investment, almost nothing is allotted to students who might be intellectually advanced. The top 5 to 10 percent are left to fend for themselves, seeking intellectual engagement outside the classroom at their own cost, all while navigating attendance rules that stifle exploration. India, for its part, often “democratizes” knowledge by dumbing it down, making it palatable to the masses in the name of equality.
Meanwhile, universities tighten their grip on student initiatives. At LU, students trying to form a literary society are asked to submit their books and films for approval, a practice better suited to censors than educators. One campus authority even announced, with pride, “I am against all isms; all isms are bad, including feminism,” as though intellectual frameworks themselves were subversive. One wonders, then, whether the same principle applies to nationalism or Hinduism. And as for institutional support, to find a hall in LU is harder than finding Wonka’s Golden Ticket. I probably have a better chance at the Golden Ticket.
Anti-intellectualism is not abstract. It is intimate. In my first year, after days spent perfecting an assignment, the feedback I received was about my outfit, “inappropriate for girls,” followed by a sermon on convent education and English-medium arrogance. The irony was almost theatrical: a university that teaches in English could not tolerate the presence of English as identity. Classes conducted exclusively in Hindi made comprehension difficult. When I voiced that difficulty, it was treated not as academic concern but personal insolence.
In another class, the professor shifted the argument onto my supposed upper-class privilege, singling out my iPhone as evidence. Critique morphed into caste-based insinuation. The opposite of reservation, it turns out, is not equality; it is hostility toward “privilege,” real or imagined.
Across India, and within our classrooms, there is a quiet erosion of curiosity. Not mere ignorance, but anti-intellectualism: suspicion that thinking too much, reading too deeply, or questioning too loudly is pretentious, impractical, or dangerous.
The trend is national. A country that once produced The Argumentative Indian now treats argument itself as an act of audacity. The public sphere rewards noise over nuance; the classroom imitates the same. Professors are told to “align with policy.” Students are told to “focus on placements.” Inquiry becomes rebellion; rebellion becomes misconduct.
This is not merely a bureaucratic inconvenience. It is pedagogy as propaganda. The goal is not to produce thinkers but believers. Anti-intellectualism is marketed as comfort. It tells citizens that complexity is elitist, reflection suspect, and curiosity expendable.
The irony is historical. Nehru wrote The Discovery of India from prison; Tagore refused a knighthood over Jallianwala Bagh; Ambedkar drafted the Constitution as critique and invention in equal measure. These acts assumed that intellectual labour was inseparable from citizenship. Today, the logic is reversed. Obedience is patriotism, and thought is suspect. Universities are asked to affirm rather than analyze, to discipline rather than debate, to celebrate the past and ignore its complications.
The university, in that lineage, was a republic of ideas. The new nationalism demands obedience over inquiry. It fetishizes pride but fears analysis. It celebrates the Vedas but distrusts historians. What remains is hollow performance: loud, sentimental, incurious.
The cost is both cultural and democratic. When students stop debating, they start conforming. When citizens stop reading critically, they start voting emotionally. And when the university ceases to teach independence of mind, the state begins to teach dependence on narrative. It is not just the bureaucracy; it is also the students slowly getting comfortable with this and living an ignorant life, insisting that “my ignorance is just as good, if not better, than your expertise and knowledge.”
The present government’s relationship with universities reflects a long-term project: to domesticate the intellectual class. Professors are framed as “elitist parasites,” students as “lazy revolutionaries,” and courses as “Western imports.” Beneath the populist theatre lies a systematic restructuring of knowledge itself. Pedagogy becomes propaganda; education is reimagined as cultural alignment. Universities exist not to question the state but to affirm it. Fear becomes ambient. Students self-censor. Faculty retreat. Seminar halls are monitored; WhatsApp messages and Instagram reels can cost degrees at worst and lives at best. The new enemies are not militants but thinkers.
The era of this government has driven us into an era of anti-enlightenment. For if the common citizen is well prepared and well informed, then the task of political deceivers becomes extremely difficult. Alas, the common person is neither prepared for the onslaught of manipulative propaganda nor informed of truth and facts. Ed Luo’s words, by the way, not mine.
The parallels between 1950s America and today’s India are striking. Narendra Modi’s rise in 2014 emboldened the Hindutva core to launch an assault on independent-minded scholars and writers. Their rhetoric is more vulgar than the Republicans of Hofstadter’s time, but the impulse is identical. Where earlier critics used words like “pretentious” or “effeminate,” today’s warriors of purity deploy “libtard,” “sickular,” “Aaptard,” or “toadie of the Italian waitress.” And the consequences in India are far graver. American universities, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, guard their autonomy fiercely. In India, institutions of every quality level remain vulnerable to political capture. Instead of learning physics or history or international relations, students at JNU are instructed to salute the national flag and worship an army tank to prove their patriotic credentials.
Anti-intellectualism is a slow poison: tasteless, invisible, deadly. It does not silence you overnight; it makes you stop wanting to speak. It does not burn books; it makes you stop reading them. And in a country built on dialogue, that silence is the loudest alarm.
Yet all is not lost. Even here, rebellion persists in small ways: student collectives, literary societies, and underground debates that treat literature, politics, and art as living, breathing things. These pockets of resistance remind us that study itself is a form of dissent. To read seriously is to resist. To argue responsibly is to remember that freedom begins in thought.
Lucknow University, like every other university across India, has a choice. It can drift toward mediocrity, producing graduates who are skilled but uncurious. Or it can reclaim its heritage as a space where disagreement is not disrespect, where syllabi are starting points rather than cages, where professors and students alike dare to engage with the world’s complexity.
If Lucknow University wishes to honor its past, it must treat education not as compliance but as courage. To reclaim intellectual life is to reclaim democracy itself. If universities like LU fall to mediocrity, India loses one of its last sanctuaries for independent thought. The project of democracy depends on thinkers unafraid to speak truth to power. And, perhaps, the next generation of writers, debaters, and dreamers will make this campus, and this country, think again.
Ultimately, in this moment of lies and anti-intellectualism, what must be defended is the life of the mind, not any particular class that might be labeled “intellectual.” What must be preserved is the right to dissent, not any subset of dissenters who happen to have advanced degrees. What must be nurtured is a public debate rooted in respect for racial and religious minorities, women, LGBTQ people, low-income and working-class people, and Indians of all backgrounds deprived of opportunity and power. What must be fostered is the exchange of ideas, whether inside the academy or outside its walls.