The Causes Of 'Lisa And American Anti-Intellectualism'

It is made clear that college students are quick to form an opinion which doesn’t expand knowledge and can show unintelligence. Many people, more specifically protesters, believe one side and won’t open up and listen to the other side. Frank Bruni, an Op-Ed Columnist for the New York Times and the author of 3 New York Times best sellers in 2015, 2009, and 2002, tells us that the college protesters are wrong. His argument states that the college students need to be educated more on the whole subject because lacking education can essentially lead to being biased or sticking with the one side you believe in. The students were protesting a guest speaker, Charles Murray, who is identified as anti-gay, racist, and sexist. Although the guest speaker’s beliefs are terrible, the students should hear what he has to say. Frank Bruni’s “The Dangerous Saftey of College” presents an effective logical appeal; however, it lacks clear and concise evidence along with not presenting an emotional appeal to connect with the audience.

Graff states that, “In the dark, all intellectual disagreements are gray”(7). This displays that what people say and what people hear is vastly different. When there is a disagreement between two intellectuals in the same field, they “share a public language of ideas and arguments that transcends their ideological differences and separates them from many students and other Americans” (7). Therefore, when students hear these, they clearly experience a misunderstanding that can, and will not be understood unless these students experience the same intellectual thinking that these intellectuals

In the world of academia, from Graff’s perspective, street smarts are associated with anti-intellectualism. Graff states “we associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty an academic.” He argues that educators should broaden their aspect of material they once preserved as inefficient. Graff implies that a person who is studious enough can find substance in any content. He reasons that intellect can be uncovered and observed in various forms, hence the name “hidden intellectualism.” He suggests that the Education system overlooks the interest of the students because they consider their interest irrelevant.

Society’s view on intelligence is becoming watered down from the truth. In Rose’s article, “Blue Collar Brilliance” Rose discusses societies outlook on intelligence. Rose explains how society thinks blue collared jobs don’t involve any intelligence, and anyone can do a blue collared job. He explains how society thinks that since you don’t have to have a high education to perform well in blue collared jobs, it takes little to no intelligence. Rose says, “We reinforce this notion by defining intelligence solely on grades in school and numbers on IQ test” (Rose 279). Rose explains that even though most blue collared jobs don’t require a college degree, they still demand many forms of intelligence. Rose also explains how his brother dropped out of school in the ninth grade but eventually became a successful employee of the company General Motors. In Graff’s article, “Hidden Intellectualism” he explains how there are many students in today’s world who have an outstanding amount of “street smarts” but are failing school. He explains

After reviewing the film Expelled no intelligence allowed I was taken back by the whole idea of people being terminated from their jobs for mentioning intelligent design. When Ben Stein would question people about the subject of intelligent design they would say they are no such thing and reply with if people want to educate their children they will not mention this again. They would reply it is nothing but a waste of time and energy. It was like they were pushing God away from the subject as well as the schools. This to me is so very wrong. I do not agree with it nor understand why people are acting this way toward the subject in a public settings when there is supposed to be free speech and free will, but this film has proved otherwise. It not only proved it, but it showed how people who do speak their minds are being treated after they do, and it is not fair nor is it right.

In the article “Hidden Intellectualism” written by Gerald Graff, Graff target college students to inform them about a hidden intellectualism that can be found in our everyday society. In the article Graff draws attention to the many types and ways different people can identify with intellectualism. He argues that people are intelligent in several ways and just need to learn how to plug the intellectualism they enjoy into a school-like setting during classes. He exemplifies this by using his own intellect within sports and such as an adolescent. While being very analytical of sports team movies, and the toughness he and his friends engaged in, he was unknowingly before now trained to be intellect in a class room and other school subjects.

The essay “God, Science, and Imagination” by Wendell Berry discusses fundamentalists, specifically ones of science and religion, and their need to humiliate their opponents through evangelism and conversion. He also criticizes Professor Steven Weinberg’s essay and his opinion on God and religion. Weinberg is in fact a fundamentalist of science who questions the existence of God. But, Berry argues that “If in fact the fundamentalist scientists were as smart as they think they are, and if the religious fundamentalists were as secure in their belief as they claim to be, then they would leave one another in peace… these camps keep pestering each other because they need each other” (25).The same could be said for the contestants in James Fallows’

“A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” (Lukianoff and Haidt 44). Colleges are sheltering their students from words and ideas that students do not like or are found to be offensive. Affecting their education and cognitive skills, scientists are warning colleges to refrain from coddling the students and allowing other viewpoints to be spoken. People are speaking their minds, saying their own views; however, some people are over sensitive and take these viewpoints offensively. In the article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt successfully argues using rhetorical questions, specific examples, and affective visuals that protecting college students from words and ideas deteriorates their education and mental health.

Graff opens “Hidden Intellectualism” by presenting one of the piece’s three major points of focus. He states, “What doesn’t occur to us, though, is that schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and channel them into good academic work” (Graff 264). By introducing his argument as something that is commonly dismissed by a large group of people, he utilizes the writing template in They Say I Say for introducing what “they say” as a tool to keep the big

In his article, Penrod first starts out talking about how a football team won an Arizona state championship the previous year. Penrod then goes on to talk about how no one paid any attention to the Science bowl team since everyone was focused on the athletes. Furthermore, Penrod points out how there is “disdain for the educated harbored in much of society,” and also speaks about stereotypes associated with intelligent kids and how uneducated celebrities are not setting a good example for future kids to get an education.

Critical Analysis: “The Coddling of the American Mind” As an argumentative essay with an intention to persuade a reading audience, “The Coddling of the American Mind” leaves a lot to be desired. The supporting evidence the authors use to back their arguments is flimsy, insufficient, and largely anecdotal. The authors’ offer no scholarly, peer-reviewed evidence to support their main point they make in the article, which is “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense… and ”campus culture devoted to policing speech and punish speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive

“You are Not So Smart” is a book about the fallacies, false judgments, and the ideas that we believe to be true about ourselves but are in-fact fictitious beliefs we have. It was written by journalist David McRaney who won two William Randolph Hearst awards. McRaney’s book was originally a blog that he created then later converted into a book. He uses different imagery, vocabulary, and studies to bring his ideas across in this book, and is showing various amounts of evidence from examples and his own experience of these concepts first hand.

In Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008), Ben Stein travels the world to expose the incarceration in the realm of science. Stein’s goal is to rile up the audience to stir up desire and motivation of the voice of the people to bring down the unjust wall in scientific academia. Ben Stein fails to persuade his active viewing audience that universities have used unfair practices to exclude research and believers in intelligent design from the scientific community, but succeeds in persuading the unpretentious and idle audience. Ben Stein losses his credibility and ultimately his persuasive power through the use of misrepresentation of messages and facts, fallacies of ethos, pathos, and logos, and the digression from the main point of the

Jaded from seeing humanities uprisings first hand, he knows that they are nothing more than symptoms of an underlying disease. Because of his experience, he is able to see more deeply into the truth of American ideology, but he is unable to do much about it. As he says, “Once you figure out what a joke everything is, being the Comedian's the only thing that makes sense” (Moore and Gibson, Part 2, Pg. 13).

What is Anti-Intellectualism? According to Dictionary.com, Anti-Intellectualism is defined as being hostile toward intellectuals and the modern academic, artistic, social, religious worlds as well as other theories that are associated with them. Although Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize, it is now almost fifty-fives out of date. Not to mention the ideas within the book are seen as suggesting a type of self-defensive justification rather than an actual deep investigation. Hoftstader used the aftermath of McCarthyism and how there were wide range witch hunts among the academics and progressives and how that is influenced by the reform, socialists and communist movements between the World Wars. Applying McCarthyism, Hoftstader looks at the tension from four different perspectives: religion, politics, business, self-help culture, and education. Taking into consideration the year the book was written, each angle is explored from the colonial period up until the 1950s. Throughout the introduction, Hofstadter makes it clear that the purpose of the book is to shed a little light on our cultural problems. Focusing on the social and political phenomenon of “anti-intellectualism” Hofstadter applies broad abstractions to social issues. He explains how applications of the abstracts presented by intellectuals can ultimately pose a threat to the social and political ambitions of certain and specific individuals. Because of this,