A New Day for Intellectuals

By ANDREW DELBANCO

The election has opened the door to education and expertise, but academics will have to earn respect

Soon after election day, the columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wrote in The New York Times that the "second most remarkable thing" about the election was that "American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual."

What goes on here? Was the historian Richard Hofstadter wrong in his classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to