Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning

Opinion|Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning

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.