Education: Parnassus, Coast to Coast

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This group—"the establishment"—runs the Commonwealth, and the people seem perfectly willing that it should do so. But not in the U.S. Says Co-Editor Irving Kristol of Encounter: "The Americans don't respect the intellectual the way he is respected in Britain. But then, they don't respect anyone, not even Charlie Wilson. The English, on the other hand, are a deferential society, as Bagehot said. They'll defer to dukes or earls or anyone with the right tie round his neck. So they defer to the intellectual because he has generally got the right tie round his neck."

I Ain't One. Without the proper tie, the American intellectual is hard to identify. He does not gravitate to any one city, nor does he bear the stamp of any particular university or have his roots in any particular country. He may be a maverick genius like Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or a state Supreme Court chief justice who, like New Jersey's Arthur T. Vanderbilt, especially has devoted his talents to improving the courts. He may be doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief—or a physicist like George Gamow, who will explode: "Intellectual? Intellectualism? I don't know what you're talking about!" Indeed, one of the difficulties in tagging the U.S. intellectual is his own resistance to the tag. It is quite characteristic of America that Nobel Prizewinning Novelist William Faulkner should declare, with a hint of pride: "I ain't no intellectual."