Sowell of course is an intellectual as Milton Friedman, Hayek, Walter Williams, Rand etc are/were. The issue is not intellectual or not but rather statist or not.
I believe Sowell’s point is somewhat that since people will take their opinions on things they might now little about seriously, intellectuals have an incentive to make such statements. Really the problem with US universities is not they they are too intellectual, but that with speach codes ect they are becoming less intellectual.
As for who we have had as presidents. Clinton went to Georgetown not an Ivy. He went to Yale for law school. George H.W. Bush went to Yale ages ago, graduating in 1948 two years before William F. Buckley another Ivy intelectual who was not so bad. George W. Bush did go to Yale and then Harvard MBA. I tought most here agree with the hard left that G.W. Bush was no intellectual?
My point is that there is no reason for FR to be anti-intellectual like the hard left. We should be pro-intellectual including intellectual diversity, the one kind of diversity ignored by the left.
It’s like the old book, the Peter Principle, where people who were doing well in their jobs were promoted to higher jobs they couldn’t handle.