In The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning, literary and film critic James Chandler examines the contemporary assault on American higher education through a long lineage of hostility to intellectual life in the United States. Connecting the nativist Know-Nothing movement of the 1850s, which persecuted Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany, to the current political challenge to universities, Chandler considers how the ironies of this history, including the Irish immigrant ancestry of Trump's anti-intellectual crusader Steve Bannon, call for satire as well as critique.

The conversation also takes up “kayfabe,” the mix of illusion and reality that Trump imported from professional wrestling to turn political life into a “spectacle without thought.” Drawing on critics from Jonathan Swift and Alexis de Tocqueville to Roland Barthes, Chandler offers an account of the MAGA campaign against higher learning and its transformative effects on criticism and democracy itself.

Speaker bio

James Chandler is William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. His publications include England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema, and Doing Criticism: Across Literary and Screen Arts. He is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Irish Academy.

Respondent bios

Manan Ahmed (Moderator) is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. His areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia; critical philosophy of history, colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers.

Matthew Engelke is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. From 2018 to 2024, he also served as Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Trained as an anthropologist, Professor Engelke’s main research interests are on Christianity, secular humanism, media theory, materiality, and semiotics. He has conducted fieldwork in Zimbabwe and in Britain. He is currently conducting research on the production and reception of James George Frazer’s classic, "The Golden Bough." Engelke also co-founded Prickly Paradigm Press in 2001, and served as editor until 2025.

Hilary A. Hallett is Professor of History at Columbia University and an historian of modern American culture and politics whose first two books—Go West, Young Woman! & Inventing the ‘It Girl’—explored the impact of popular culture on gender roles and sex. As a Heyman Center fellow, she will work on her first collection of essays, "Haunted by Phyllis Schlafly." Mixing cultural analysis and memoir, the essays explore the origins of the country’s polarization death spiral in the various culture wars over “Family Values” that Schlafly launched from the heartland.

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