The worst thing we university liberals could do right now is to keep wondering why “they” hate us, why blue-collar workers seem to vote — as we understand it — against their own interests in sidling up to an authoritarian in a red tie who courts other billionaires, or why human nature itself did not come through for us and make the arc of history bend toward justice as we define it.
History has been waiting to explode our hubris; and sometimes, even as we have facts, truth and rule of law on our side, we make ourselves good targets with our jargon, our righteousness and our fragmentation. We are out of touch with working class Americans, even if the policies that Democrats have enacted work for them.
There were signs a Democratic defeat was coming: high inflation; a stubborn wage gap, especially between women with and without a college degree; and the incumbent president’s low approval ratings. A brilliant Black woman opponent ran an honorable campaign about unity in a fractured political culture riddled with fierce tribalism. Donald Trump exploited our social fissures to make them deeper, uglier, ever more bitter and therefore useful. We were reminded that culture wars are won by fueling them, not by seeking harmony. Unity coalitions and kindness and joy don’t win elections in a bitterly divided society where neighbors and family members are not on the same team.
In what lies ahead, liberal intellectuals will have to take the offensive in these wars on the fronts worth fighting for: saving and reviving public schools against the right’s effort to kill them; a genuine, substantive national commemoration of American independence in 2026, lest we allow Trumpists to own and tell our national story; and a coherent economic plan that reaches and convinces working Americans we are on their side and not simply stuffy academic theorists . We — a difficult pronoun in America just now — must look in the mirror to know why we have already lost some battles and social respect and part of our democracy.
The political disaster of Mr. Trump’s re-election is as potentially devastating to Democrats as 1800 was to the Federalists, or 1860 to the 19th-century Democrats, or 1874 to Reconstruction-era Republicans, or Ronald Reagan’s 1980 defeat of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition or Mitt Romney’s defeat to the 2012 Republicans. Democrats need to be searching their souls and asking why growing swaths of Americans, especially among the working class, men under 30 who appear to have voted for Trump by a 14-point margin, and those who do not attend college (more than half the country), distrust, even hate, “us.”
My profession, professors and academia writ large, as well as those whom we have educated, need to think about the whole and not so much our parts as we interpret this election. In beautiful pluralistic America, which is nonetheless polarized in its voting patterns, and separated into rural and cosmopolitan domains, there still is a country, a nation and society to somehow grasp and preserve if we can. The “people left behind” in the pandemic-stressed economy may have just spoken in a small but potent majority saying they are now leaving “us”— universities in particular — behind.
Is public sentiment on college campuses out of step with where the country appears to be headed? That is not necessarily a bad thing; we do not design our research or our curriculum from public opinion. Confidence, however, in universities, is at an all-time low of 36 percent across society, according to Gallup surveys (a precipitous drop from 57 percent in 2015). Americans have more faith in two-year colleges, where over 40 percent of all undergraduates are enrolled. There are many reasons for this decline in confidence in the one institution that has forged so much social mobility in post-World War II America: seemingly uncontrollable tuition costs, steady diets of negative press about alleged leftist ideological purity, opaque admission policies, the expensive obsession with professionalized athletics in colleges, prestige-driven meritocracies that create exclusive bubbles of self-importance and the hoarding of endowments at elite schools.
Universities are hugely complicated modern businesses and engines of learning; their libraries and museums preserve humankind’s infinite knowledge and creativity. Our task, hard as it is, must be to translate at least some of what is known and imagined to the bulk of citizens who will never know us. If they cannot come here, we must find them.
Even the most elitist of Ivy League universities have an enormous public responsibility, not unlike their sister public schools. No institution has more democratically created a middle class and a more equalizing society than the American public school and public university. Roughly 73 percent of all students in higher education are attending a public institution; their history since World War II has been that of an engine for the professions and for social mobility. I and millions of others are direct products of this system. My B.A. and M.A. from Michigan State University and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin made possible my evolving career as a teacher and historian.
Perhaps “we” need above all a moonshot for public schools, secondary and higher (not going to happen under Republicans, but we must keep the long view), founded on an aggressive, positive assertion of the values and faiths that such an education represents. The American university is a profoundly important reinvention of an ancient idea, remade in medieval times in Italy, Germany and Britain, and then recreated again in colonial America. Among Americans’ most treasured values, embedded in the modern university, is that a higher education can remake one’s life. As endangered as such an idea may seem, who does not want to believe in that gospel if it is available? Our herculean task is to make it work again.
“We” need to openly recommit to learning and teaching about the whole of our knowledge — our histories, our literature, our sciences, our social structures, as much or more than we stress our racial, ethnic and gendered parts. Those fields of study are important and established for good reasons. But the whole and the parts have to sing together or there is no democracy or broad learning or informed citizenry in the end. We could drown in the habits of our own particularities and favorite ideologies, and lose hold of how humans connect across a multitude of difference. We need answers for our critics who believe we are an ideological monolith, whether they are right or not. We may not like universals anymore, but there are some, like elections, that stun millions into despair or glee.
Election outcomes, if nothing else can, should make us aware that substantial parts of our society may like to know why history or science or art themselves even matter in their daily lives. “We” know they do, but “they” are scared by the price of milk, and tuition, and by hurricanes. Universities like the one at which I am privileged to teach, need their own reckonings that can make us look outward, to get outside of ourselves and do what we do best — create knowledge and teach about and to the whole world, not merely to those within our own gates in language only we can hope to understand.
Trumpism is a dire threat to all that universities believe in, but let us not forget that democracies tend to die from within, not by conquest.
David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University. He is the author most recently of “Yale and Slavery: A History.”
The post Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning appeared first on New York Times.
