'Are We Creating Critical Thinkers?' Historians Say Smithsonian Review Reflects Today's Anti-Intellectualism

“We're in a very dangerous moment when everybody's considered an expert, where your training doesn't matter."

(Photo by Frank Schulenburg via Wikimedia Commons)

Ask any historian what they felt when President Donald Trump announced in August that his team would conduct a “comprehensive internal review” of select Smithsonian Institute museums and exhibits, and they all have similar answers: Fear, despair and confusion. But what’s even more prominent and disconcerting is their lack of surprise.

That’s partly because Trump has been consistent in his efforts to “culturally realign” various institutions these last seven months of his second term, expressing particular disdain for everything about them that he considers “woke” and therefore “divisive.” Those efforts have included naming himself chairman of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and restricting federal funds from inclusive arts organizations.

“The Trump administration on several different levels have been amping up their attacks on museums and universities,” Alexis Boylan, an art history professor at the University of Connecticut, said.

“Really, any libraries, intellectual spaces wherein American citizens have historically been able to often freely access information, facts, histories, art,” she continued.

But while the letter from the White House suggested a review of several different Smithsonian institutions, including the National Museum of American History, Trump’s supplementary Truth Social post seemed to specifically target the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Even more emphatically, the space slavery takes up in its narrative.

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL,” Trump posted. "Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

Here’s where some of the aforementioned confusion comes in. Sharita Thompson, a history professor at Prince George’s Community College who also gives tours at the NMAAHC, says slavery only takes up about two-thirds of the first floor of the six-level museum.

“What is their definition of too much when we're talking about 1619 to 1865, and two-thirds of one floor is dedicated to that story?” she said. Thompson added that NMAAHC had already been careful about telling a “balanced” story due to the fact that two-thirds of its funding comes from the federal government, and that some even felt it “did the uplifting a little bit too much.”

To hear the White House tell it, though, even that was not enough.

“To me, it's not that they want to minimize the story of slavery,” Thompson said. “They want to erase the story of slavery from that museum.”

That would be a categorically dishonest measure, but not out of the realm of what the Trump administration has been attempting to do this year.

Jennifer Morgan, a history professor at New York University, put it plainly, describing the initiative, like others the White House has recently enacted, as explicitly anti-Black.

She points to examples like the many banned books by Black authors as well as the “assault” on K-12 and university curriculum that include conversations about race and other aspects of identity, and history books.

“MAGA and the Trump administration have always understood the power of Black history,” she said. “That's the irony as they work systematically to erase it from our classrooms, from our public life. He knows how important Black history is, [so] he wants to do away with it.”

And so far, he’s been pretty successful—concerningly so. Peruse social media and you’ll see many lamenting the hesitance or outright failure of institutions and government officials to counteract the president’s most questionable objectives.

They’re not the only ones. Every person I interviewed expressed their disappointment, including Allen J. Wiener, an author and historian.

“Everybody seems to be just giving in to him,” he said. “That's what's concerning me more than anything else is how quietly this is being done with very little opposition.”

In fact, just weeks before the White House letter was even sent to the Smithsonian Institute, artist Amy Sherald pulled her celebrated “American Sublime” exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery, citing “social concerns” that the museum raised about some of her work. Among them is a piece depicting a Black transgender Statue of Liberty.

While the Smithsonian claimed that it wasn’t proposing its removal from the exhibit, as Sherald believed, a statement from Lindsey Halligan, a special assistant to the president, said otherwise:

“The ‘Trans Forming Liberty’ painting, which sought to reinterpret one of our nation’s most sacred symbols through a divisive and ideological lens, fundamentally strayed from the mission and spirit of our national museums.

“The Statue of Liberty,” the statement continued, “is not an abstract canvas for political expression — it is a revered and solemn symbol of freedom, inspiration, and national unity that defines the American spirit.”

It’s not lost on Wiener and other historians that the White House’s idea of “unity” and efforts to align the Smithsonian in a “unifying” way are also about trying to “spruce up” the institution in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. And they recognize that that has nothing to do with reflecting an account that is “historically accurate,” as the administration’s letter states.

“It's a sanitation,” Wiener said. “They're calling it a review, which struck me as a very odd term because they're reviewing it in a way to make sure that it measures up to what they want it to say, not the way historians review history. That's what historians do every day."

While Smithsonian historians worked hard to examine and teach the nuances of the past, the president has been working to flatten it in ways that have alarmed the industry.

In the case of the NMAAHC, these include historians of slavery, Reconstruction and many other specific and intricate topics examined in the museum. They’re experts with decades of experience in these areas, as Thompson asserted, who have worked to come up with theories and understandings about each time period.

“And now you're telling me people who have no background in any of this can come and wipe away the work that these people have done to try to tell a truly American story in that museum,” Thompson said. “It's very concerning.”

It also impairs the very goal of intellectual spaces like those at the Smithsonian.

“I think we are going to be very ignorant about this country's history if we keep going down this path,” Thompson said. “One thing we always talk about in academia is: Are we creating critical thinkers? And I think at this moment, we can say we have not.”

The lack of urgency around the deterioration of critical thinking and nuance also points to the erosion of the work humanities leaders do, which is reflected by the “devastating,” as Boylan described it, fact that they’ve been defunded and undermined in the age of social media.

“I think that those of us who work in the humanities have understood that there is a devaluation of our work that has been going on for more than a decade,” Morgan said. “Humanities programs are under-enrolled, are being cut, are being restructured.”

She called it “anti-intellectualism.”

“Because there's an idea that what we do in the humanities is somehow not grounded,” Morgan said. “It's, like, icing on the cake.”

That has helped create a destabilized state today, particularly in the social media era that is fueled by unverified historical details confidently discussed by people with millions of followers who are quick to bolster and amplify them. It’s a scary time, Thompson said, when many of those followers sit down in the classroom with “at the very least, a very warped sense of history.”

“We spend more time trying to undo that than actually doing what we plan to do in a day,” she said. “We're in a very dangerous moment when everybody's considered an expert, where your training doesn't matter.”

There is also more information at our fingertips than ever, yet many are only interested in learning some of it. Trump’s not the only one who has an emotional response to histories that don’t cater to their sensibilities or ideologies. Wiener often comes across people like him who are eager to challenge his work, which includes books on 19th-century politician Davy Crockett.

“I had one guy come up to me and say, ‘Well, if that's not the way it happened, it's certainly the way it should have happened,” Wiener recalled. “And he stormed out. And I said, ‘What do you say to that?’ So, the adult population as well sort of internalizes these versions of things.”

And there is the president at the center of it all, who seems eager to exploit those tensions and decreased confidence in the humanities leaders by designating himself a cultural authority who is also unwilling to tolerate any textured histories of a complicated nation.

That implies, Boylan said, an “unbelievable fragileness and sensitivity and lack of complexity that he intellectually suggests, that we can't look at the whole or at the ‘bad’ because that somehow besmirches or undermines what might be then called ‘good.’”

That binary approach, Boylan added, is entirely “unproductive.”

“I don't think you can actually find anything remotely heroic about the United States,” she said, “if you don't think about all of the deeply problematic decisions and moments and violences that also build it.”

Not unless your aim is to create an authoritative state, as Morgan suggested. She likens it to how Adolf Hitler attempted to concoct a narrative of German beauty and triumph.

“Part of what an authoritarian state has to do is craft an image of strength and aspiration and God-given successes,” Morgan said. “And part of what the Smithsonian does is it tells a range of stories.”

Those include stories of “people who don't triumph or who triumph in ways that are complicated or who are critical of the status quo,” she continued. “That's what American folk art is.”

It means including context that might be knotty and discomforting—and unquestionably significant to understanding the full scope of American humanity and history and what being an American has entailed for many people.

“What is at stake right now is an erasure of struggle, of opposition, of critique,” Morgan added, “and replacing that with a notion that this is a white majority country, which it has never been.”

She paused briefly before adding, “By erasing the lives of Black and brown people and of women in the Smithsonian, you are narrowing the category of what an American is.”