As a newspaper serving a higher-education institution and community, and indeed by virtue of being a newspaper to begin with, we have a vested interest in a public (i.e., our readership) prizing intellectual capability.

When “intellectual” is a dirty word, we have a problem. We, as citizens of a community supported by the University of Iowa, as journalists, and as members of this country, all have a problem.

It is with no small sense of irony that leading members of the Tea Party criticize “elitist intellectuals” in one breath and praise our Founding Fathers in the other. What were the Founding Fathers if not the elitist intellectuals of their day? But, then, it’s not accurate to just pin this on conservatives. In 2008, when Hillary Rodham Clinton came out in support of a gas-tax holiday, she dismissed criticism of her support as “elite thinking.” This is coming from a woman who graduated from the Yale Law School.

And gosh darnit, Rodham Clinton wasn’t the only one getting in touch with her folksy rootsies during that little campaign either, you betcha.

At its core, anti-intellectualism, a dangerous phenomenon in a safe world, let alone ours, is rooted in distrust of the “educated class.” The fact is that over the last year and a half, the ideas espoused by the educated class have lost popularity. According to a Pew Research Poll, global-warming skepticism, isolationism, and support for gun rights are all on the rise. It’s no coincidence that anti-intellectual rhetoric is on the rise as well.

There’s nothing inherently liberal or conservative about any of those three ideas, yet anti-intellectualism is increasingly being codified into the lifeblood of the GOP as the abrasively anti-intellectual Tea Party becomes the new conservative norm. Even Newt Gingrich, who, personal failings aside, is a damn smart man, has embraced this surge of hysteria.

And while derogatory labeling of “out of touch,” “academic,” and the inevitable “intellectual” are nothing new, this rhetoric seems to be reaching dangerous levels, at a particularly volatile time. So hunky-dory was the world in 2000 that the U.S. presidential campaign really more or less came down to whom people would rather have a beer with.

That metric, in and of itself, is telling.

But the world has since changed. Our Army is overextended, our economic recovery has slumped back downward, greenhouse-gas emissions continue to pose environmental and economic threats, U.S. national debt is approaching record levels, and rogue states possess nuclear weapons. Oh, and to top that all off, they’re forecasting more rain next week. Keep your eyes on the river.

The most disturbing part of this whole mess is that that distrust of the elite is not unfounded.

Intellectuals were the ones who caused this financial crisis (or at bare minimum didn’t see it coming). Intellectuals are the ones who, largely, have kept their jobs. Intellectuals are often (but not always) really snobby and arrogant and talk about the rest like they’re idiots. (We’re confident that we’d be labeled part of the “lamestream media,” but we like to think we aren’t.)

However, we can’t just throw our pilot out the window. Think of the world like an airplane. A really, really complicated airplane. And that airplane is in a nosedive. It’s now clear that our pilot didn’t actually go to flight school. What do we do?

We sure don’t go get Joe the Passenger and put him in charge. We need to first re-establish trust in pilots. Not necessarily the pilot who go us into this mess, but the notion of pilots in general. They, in turn, need to make themselves trustworthy.

This is no easy task. Particularly in a community such as Iowa City, where we pride ourselves on our intellectual capacities. While we certainly aren’t responsible for the free-falling plane, we’ve all fed into an arrogant intellectual culture. It’s time for us to come down from the Ivory Tower, realize a little humility and man the controls. There’s a world to save.