Thank heavens we have an intellectual president again

Yet he also faces a challenge that other “intellectual” presidents have not, or not to the same extent. It’s a factor highlighted by Susan Jacoby in her recent attempt to update Hofstadter, The Age of American Unreason: the vacuous, dollar-driven mass media. If Obama’s message about the importance of science makes its way through even this medium, he will have changed America more than we can possibly calculate.

The goal must be nothing less than to break the cycle – to make intellectualism a permanent value of American culture. A two-term presidency would help. So would maintaining those early pledges of support to science. And most of all, there is leading by example, continuing to extol thinking, and not being afraid to come to its aid now and again.