On my last trip to Serbia, I brought back the book The Intellectual and a Crisis (Intelektualac i kriza) by Croatian sociologist Slaven Letica. The book was published in 1989, the watershed year between a period of severe economic crisis in Yugoslavia and the political crisis that would lead to the bloody unraveling of the country in the following decade. To some in the region now referred to as the Western Balkans, Letica’s book is a souvenir from a different time, almost an archaeological find; to others, it is a reminder that crises come in waves and that they can last for decades. 

It is hard to miss the similarity between the title of Letica’s book and the theme of this year’s Stanford Humanities Center Fellows’ Colloquy. During Donald Trump’s first term in office, a group of émigré intellectuals from the region of the former Yugoslavia living and working abroad organized an illuminating, and sometimes bitter-funny, series of online talks entitled “Yugosplaining the World,” in which they took the examples from this country’s brief and turbulent history to throw light on some of the major crises in our contemporary moment. Since then, the idea of Yugosplaining seems to have gained in currency, especially in the US: from the transformation of economic to political crisis (in the case of the US, the crash of 2008 was too quickly and conveniently forgotten); to the erosion of institutions; to the stoking of nationalist and racist rage; to anti-bureaucratic revolution, that tired strategy endlessly exploited by demagogues, which in the US took the form of a chainsaw-wielding billionaire in the DOGE office, and many others. One of the things that ICE and anti-immigration militants don’t understand is that for many people who sought refuge in the US, all of that is just a nightmarish déjà vu.

I will take one instance from Letica’s book that could shed some light on an overlooked aspect of the intellectuals’ relationship with the crisis. It is what he calls “the silence of intellectuals.” It is striking how little response there has been to the onslaught of MAGA anti-intellectualism. In the 1990s, the de-funding of agencies such as the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) provoked resistance so vigorous that the media named it the “culture wars.” This time, an even more vicious onslaught on the humanities and arts has been met by a deafening silence. Now even science, that engine of innovation that has been driving US capitalism for more than a century, is under attack. Crickets, largely. How has this come about? 

Letica recognizes three kinds of intellectuals’ silence. The first variety he calls “intellectually conceived, rational silence.” He writes that in times of “intellectual lawlessness […] silence is sometimes more eloquent and efficacious than words, sounds, forms, and thoughts.” I am not so sure that there is any profound message in the mute response to the crippling of federal agencies and universities across the US. The second kind is the 

... silence out of helplessness and desperation, desperation born of emptiness within and without oneself. In a society experiencing a deterioration of knowledge, where there is a sharp decline of learning, reading, and research, and a steep rise of writing, speech, and empty talk, the words become empty and spent. 

These lines, written long before the rise of the internet, social media, and AI, now seem strangely prophetic. Letica’s third form of silence comes from “the simple fear of repression and revenge of those in power.” It is enough to cite one of the recent titles from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Nearly One-Third of Faculty in Red States Say They’ve Censored Their Research.”[1] This is not an exception, but a daily occurrence. Even in the blue states, try teaching a class about the genocide in Gaza, or about racial bias in the US, or opposing the dismantling of DEI offices and initiatives.

Letica’s conclusions are a stark warning to all of those who are waiting for “this” to pass with the next round of elections, whether state, mid-term, or presidential. He deserves to be quoted at length: 

The times of crisis bring about a specific cultural climate to which intellectuals generally have difficulty adjusting. Today, that climate is marked, on the one hand, by a strange mixture of inertia and meaninglessness (which are almost becoming a political philosophy), and on the other, the neurotic mass-psychological need to change everything that exists (ideology, the political and economic system, people in the position of leadership, etc.). 

Let me remind you that Letica was writing this in 1989, during the period of a brief interregnum between the economic crisis in Yugoslavia that preceded the multisided political crisis of catastrophic proportions; and, of course, smack in the middle of the epochal crisis of the end of the Cold War. 

At that fateful moment, many intellectuals went silent because they were waiting to see which side was going to prevail in the political clashes around them. Some of them profited from that silence, at the expense of many others who suffered in the mayhem that followed. To Letica’s three, I would add the fourth kind of intellectual silence, which itself went unspoken in his book: strategic silence. The responsibility of intellectuals is not to know stuff. Even dumb chatbots can spew information. Those who calculate in the time of crisis are not intellectuals, but opportunists. They are giving up their highest responsibility: to speak up against blind violence, inequities, and injustices that are happening around them. To stay silent in the time of crisis is to betray one’s own intellectual mission.

Notes

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/nearly-one-third-of-faculty-in-red-states-say-theyve-censored-their-research, accessed May 1, 2026.