Other factors are at play, of course. For instance, some have suggested that the right’s rejection of higher education is instead a response to the public perception that while tuition costs rise, the economic return on degrees has depreciated. There is no doubt some truth to this suggestion. But it does not account for the rise in sharply hostile ways of talking about the universities among conservatives in the last fifty years.

Anti-intellectualism in America has deep and complex historical roots, as shown by historians such as Richard Hofstadter and, more recently, Susan Jacoby. For instance, Americans have long prized what they see as practical business activity over the intellectual reflection associated with the liberal arts—as is evident in the fact that by far the most popular undergraduate degree in the country continues to be business.

Yet the trope of portraying American universities as a threat to society emerged with particular intensity in the 1970s and ‘80s. Neoconservatives including the journalist Irving Kristol and the philosopher Allan Bloom developed a discourse around what they saw as the moral laxity and corrosiveness of the 1960s counterculture. As one neoconservative intellectual put it, thinkers like Kristol and Bloom saw themselves as being born out of a “reaction against the Left’s nihilistic revolt against conventional morality and religion.” Kristol is an early figure in the development of this discourse, and his 1972 lecture “Capitalism, Socialism, and Nihilism” is a seminal text. In the lecture, Kristol argued that economic libertarians such as Milton Friedman were unable to philosophically rebut the counterculture’s political agenda. This is because libertarians reduced political life to economics. But where the old, Marxist left had been chiefly concerned with economics, the new, “hippie” left did not “think economically.”

Instead, the new left’s goal, according to Kristol, was a radical cultural revolution that would demolish the religious traditions and virtues that sustained a democratic form of free-market capitalism. Although the counterculture generation often presented itself as a moral movement (antiwar, ecology, women’s liberation, etc.), Kristol characterized it instead as a species of nihilism—or the effort to repudiate an objective moral order in favor of a relativistic hedonism. For Kristol, the counterculture’s definitive feature was its rejection of sexual mores and traditional religion: “The enemy of liberal capitalism today,” he wrote in his 1972 lecture, “is not so much socialism as nihilism.”

If Kristol’s contribution to conservative discourse was to reduce the hippies—one of the most moralizing generations in American history—to the category of relativists and nihilists, Bloom’s achievement was to target America’s university system with the same critique. Indeed, Bloom’s notion of America’s universities as hotbeds of nihilists was so influential that within a matter of a few years it had entered the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, William Bennett.