John Adams Warned Us About the Professors

For the first time in its history, the American Association of University Professors has endorsed a political candidate, and—you guessed it—he’s a democratic socialist. On July 30, the organization formally endorsed democratic socialist Dr. Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate in Michigan’s Democratic primary, positioning him as a “fierce champion for debt-free and tuition-free higher education” and an ally in its fight against “the Trump administration’s ideological assault on the sector.”

This decision is, of course, deeply dangerous. 

For one, it signals to an entire generation of young people that to be college educated in America is, well, to be a democratic socialist. As is the case with these sorts of things, many conservatives have therefore characterized the AAUP’s endorsement of a Marxist politician as a clear, revolutionary break from our liberal traditions of institutional neutrality, academic freedom, and open inquiry. Other, more thoughtful conservatives lament how one of the nation’s historic academic institutions, prided for its evenhandedness and academic stature, has “transformed into little more than another advocacy organization.”

But what if precisely the opposite were true? What if these professors, in endorsing El-Sayed, were not throwing off or altering the tradition of American higher education, but fulfilling its end? Allow me to explain.

Today, when Americans discuss solutions to social ills, we almost instinctively do so through the lens of education. If one community struggles with crime, poverty, or another oft-discussed system, we attribute it to unequal access to education. If another enjoys greater wealth and influence, we look for educational advantages—elite schools, legacy admissions, expensive college counselors, or other forms of privilege. Our politics are utterly saturated with this language of opportunity and access.

This faith in education rests upon a particular understanding of human nature. Liberal political thought tended to conceive of the individual as fundamentally prior to, and distinct from, the institutions and customs into which he was born. If human capacities are sufficiently independent of inherited social circumstances, then expanding access to education can liberate those capacities from the accidents of birth. Remove artificial barriers, provide equal opportunity, and individuals will be able to realize whatever talents they possess. Education consequently becomes an institution for unlocking raw human potential.

It is the success of this assumption about human nature that has led us to the AAUP’s endorsement of El-Sayed. The AAUP supports him not so much because he is a democratic socialist but because he promotes programs like “debt-free and tuition-free higher education” that further their mission of expanding access to education. More education means more opportunity; more opportunity means a more just society.

This rather Rousseauian-sounding idea is well-founded in the American tradition, particularly in the thought of Thomas Jefferson.

Our third president famously distinguished, in an October 1813 letter to Adams, between a “natural aristocracy” founded on “virtue and talents” and an artificial aristocracy founded on birth and wealth. In this correspondence, Jefferson was clear that intellect and virtue were natural to these individuals: “it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.”

Jefferson thus saw education as a problem of selection. The task of the new American polity, having recently thrust off the distractions of the noblesse, was to sweep through society, discover those rare individuals of extraordinary ability and virtue who might otherwise remain hidden, and elevate them into leadership. As he put it in his Notes on the State of Virginia, education would “rake from the rubbish” the elites, the natural aristoi.

The ever-conservative John Adams saw the folly of this idea. 

Like Jefferson, Adams had long rejected the fiction that all men possessed equal abilities at birth. 

Unlike his longtime sparring partner, however, Adams was far less optimistic about Jefferson’s natural aristoi. He questioned whether Jefferson’s distinction between natural and artificial aristocracy adequately accounted for the many sources of human influence. As he replied to Jefferson in November of that same year, “Education, Wealth, Strength, Beauty, Stature, Birth, Marriage, graceful Attitudes and motions, Gait, Air, Complexion, Physiognomy are Talents, as well as Genius and Science and Learning.” Jefferson’s “Talents,” Adams opined, could take many forms, but none of them had any obvious connection to virtue. Each of these traits could elevate a man above his peers in some quantifiable sense without making him morally superior. A man might possess extraordinary natural intellect and yet be depraved—see Michel Foucault.

Adams thus insisted that an education must do more than catalyze the natural genius of Jefferson’s aristoi—it should morally form them into upstanding people and citizens. Adams said as much in a 1781 letter to John Quincy, “You will ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.” In other words, natural intellectual excellence, however great, was no use unless it was chastened by virtue and ordered toward its proper end.

Adams went further in his inaugural address before both chambers of Congress. There, he expounded how a true education is one that instructs in “knowledge, virtue, and religion…not only for their benign influence on the happiness of life” but as the “only means of preserving our constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, profligacy, and corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence.” 

More than moral formation, however, Adams saw the natural aristocracy as something to be regulated, balanced, and checked. As he quite vividly expounded to Benjamin Rush, “I can never too often repeat that aristocracy is the monster to be chained…shut him up in a cage from which, however, he may be let out to do good but never to do mischief.” For Adams, the existence of superior talent did not itself entitle a man to a high station in life. Precisely because the aristoi were capable of doing great good—or great harm—their influence had to be checked by the institutions of the republic and the restraints of virtue. As Uncle Ben said (quoting Christ, of course), “With great power, comes great responsibility.”

Adams maintained that even an aristocracy founded on men of genuine intellect could not escape the stain of human conceit and fallibility. Those distinguished strictly by their “genius and talents,” with no respect for virtue or the fickle nature of those societally-defined talents, will gradually begin to drink their own Kool-Aid. Without an education in the art of humility and self-restraint, the aristoi will cease to understand themselves as servants of the republic. Instead, they will become Huxley’s “World Controllers” and Lewis’ “Conditioners.”

It was this danger—the belief that an enlightened man could perfect mankind through their own judgment—that Adams warned, in his November 1813 reply, will ultimately lead our best minds to “Set up Caesar.” As Adams explained, artificial aristocracy, monarchy, and even “civil, military, political and hierarchical Despotism” had “all grown out of the natural Aristocracy of ‘Virtues and Talents.’”

Our modern higher education system has entirely neglected that warning. American universities have become extraordinarily sophisticated mechanisms for identifying an especially utilitarian kind of ability. Standardized tests are the clearest example of this—effective at identifying “useful Citizens” and intellectual aptitude but indifferent to the formation of “good Men.” 

In other words, what this Jeffersonian meritocracy cannot measure are the moral habits upon which republican self-government ultimately depends.

That is why the AAUP’s endorsement should not surprise us.

The professors who selected Abdul El-Sayed are themselves the products—and, indeed, the victors—of Jeffersonian meritocracy.  They scored the highest on admissions tests, attended the finest universities, secured prestigious fellowships, and accumulated the credentials necessary to become members of the American professoriate. They excelled at every corner of the educational circuit, even if soft factors like race and gender greased the wheels along the way.

This educational system, in judging the people who would go on to form the ranks of the AAUP almost exclusively by intellectual performance, fell into the trap Adams foresaw. He warned that even a natural aristocracy of “Virtues and Talents” could become dangerous when its Talents were mistaken for Virtues, and that an elite convinced of its own intellectual superiority could come to believe its reason alone was sufficient to reorder society.

The AAUP’s endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed represents precisely that danger: an empowered class of extraordinary intellect, but one increasingly untethered from the character and prudence necessary to govern wisely. In this sense, America’s professoriate has fulfilled Adams’ warning of an aristocracy that mistakes the possession of superior talents for a corresponding superiority in natural judgment and, believing itself capable of perfecting mankind, seeks to “Set up Caesar.”

Sherman Criner is a Duke University alumnus interested in public policy, history, and political science. He is a Ph.D. student in history at Stanford University.