Last weekend, Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times that the academy’s insularity has led to the creation of a political echo chamber, and the 2016 election outcome is the proof:
“I share apprehensions about President-elect Trump, but I also fear the reaction was evidence of how insular universities have become. When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans. … Already, the lack of ideological diversity on campuses is a disservice to the students and to liberalism itself, with liberalism collapsing on some campuses into self-parody. …”
Kristof is only the latest and most liberal writer to use Trump as an intellectual hatchet designed to expose the rot in the ivory tower. George F. Will did this last month, concluding: “Institutions of supposedly higher education are awash with hysteria, authoritarianism, obscurantism, philistinism and charlatanry. Which must have something to do with the tone and substance of the presidential election, which took the nation’s temperature.”
Conservative students are also starting to articulate their post-election thoughts about how tough life has been. Trump-supporting students are telling the New York Times about their need for “safe spaces.” Even at the Fletcher School, my home institution, conservative student Frances Tilney Burke wrote an essay in the Weekly Standard decrying her own marginalization:
“When I arrived at school on Wednesday morning after the big Clinton crash, it was like I was entering a funeral home. People were huddled in groups, whispering, comforting each other, crying. (There was even a cuddly dog to pat.) Others were angrily plotting revenge: How do we start community organizing so that Trump racism, Trump sexism, and overall Trump badness does not permeate our rosy lives? …
“At my university, I am very wary of admitting my political party. I don’t particularly feel comfortable discussing my Catholicism (not liberation-theology Catholicism, but the normal kind). When I tell classmates that I used to work for Paul Wolfowitz (and I loved every minute of that job), their eyes grow wide and I see them surreptitiously looking at my hairline for the nubs of my devil horns.”
Burke’s description of the Fletcher School the day after the election is spot-on. Will is correct to point out that higher education was the primary fault line of the 2016 electorate. And Kristof is right when he says that the academy, always left-leaning, has trended further left in recent decades.
When it comes to critiquing the academy, however, sometimes a little local knowledge is a good thing. And it’s worth pointing out that the 2016 election might not be the best example to use of academic closed-mindedness.
If 2016 had produced the standard liberal vs. conservative presidential race, I’d understand the cocooning claim. But in contrast to the 2012 or 2008 presidential elections, conservative academics — they do exist — were not exactly Trump enthusiasts. Sure, there were a few conservative scholars who supported Trump, but even his boosters had their reservations. A month before the election, conservative scholar Mark Bauerlein made the case for Trump in Vox, and even he had to acknowledge Trump’s “raunchy braggadocio.” A fair number of Republican writers and scholars came out in opposition to Trump.
As Ross Douthat noted in the Times a month before the election: “The Republican Party’s politicians have mostly surrendered to Donald Trump. The Republican Party’s entertainers have mostly been enthusiastic about his candidacy. But the conservative intelligentsia — journalists, think-tankers and academics — has been conspicuous in its resistance.”
What made 2016 unusual wasn’t the vilification of the GOP nominee by liberal academics — that’s par for the course, and a topic that Kristof, Will, et al. are right to raise. What made 2016 unusual was that conservative intellectuals were equally appalled by Trump. It’s not surprising that students, who tend to take intellectuals seriously, were shocked by the election outcome.
As for the reaction at Fletcher, I would gently suggest to Burke that the post-Election Day blues weren’t primarily about ideological homogeneity. More than 40 percent of Fletcher’s students come from outside the United States. A candidate who took great delight in denigrating Mexicans and proposing an outright ban on Muslims entering the country had just won the election. Being in graduate school is supposed to be about being exposed to different points of view, so it might behoove Burke to imagine what international students must have inferred after the election outcome.
Trump’s potentially disastrous effect on one of America’s leading export sectors is a topic for another day. But the concerns of Kristof et al. are worth remembering. It seems ever more apparent that Trump is grafting the traditional conservative apparatus into his government. Which means that traditional ideological fault lines are likely to re-emerge.
All I ask is that critics of the academy not use the 2016 election as an exemplar of liberal cocooning in the academy. Because it wasn’t.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.