Blue Bubble in a Red State

Julie Denesha for The Chronicle

To get to his hometown, Ike Uri drives three hours — west, then north — past small towns and farm fields until he reaches a hill. From there, he says, he can see all of Concordia, population 5,400.

People there take pride, says Mr. Uri, a senior at the University of Kansas, in having never set foot in Lawrence, home of the state’s flagship university. Only a handful of natives of his county attend the university, which draws a significant share of its students from just three counties in the eastern part of the state. In Concordia, Lawrence is seen as liberal, elitist, and disconnected.

In many ways, it is. Like most college towns where state flagships are located, Lawrence is a liberal enclave — a bubble or an oasis, depending on your view. Across Kansas, 57 percent of voters chose Donald J. Trump in November, compared with only 29.7 percent in Douglas County, where Lawrence is located. The gap in voter preference between the flagship’s county and the rest of the state was one of the largest in the nation.

What does it mean that universities like Kansas are blue dots in seas of red on maps of voting patterns in state after state? Does it matter that these campuses are separated, at least in some ways, from many of the communities they were created to serve? Should the universities be doing something about that? Would the universities be better, would our nation be better, if the bubble were more porous?

Moving to a place he saw as a progressive oasis is part of what drew Mr. Uri to the University of Kansas. It was the only in-state university he considered; he didn’t think he would fit in elsewhere. Not all college towns are liberal bubbles; beyond flagships, many aren’t. In Kansas, voters in the six counties that are home to the state’s other public universities, many of them regionally oriented, favored Mr. Trump. In two of those counties, voters favored the Republican by an even wider margin than the voters of the whole state did.

For Mr. Uri, being in Lawrence, in turn, has highlighted the ways he feels disconnected from where he grew up. He sees value in Concordia, in its people, his extended family, but their views and his own have only diverged. Mr. Uri doesn’t eat meat, which is a point of contention when he goes home. Conversations about his research — in which he analyzes capitalism through a fairly unsympathetic lens, using classic Marxist theory and current economic theory on inequality and environment — elicit some negative reactions.

At family gatherings, he tries to avoid talking politics. He’s given up on changing the minds of relatives who are more conservative.

“The difference is incredibly stark,” he says. “There’s no other place like Lawrence in the state.”

Lawrence is the kind of city where people live when they like the state of Kansas but not its politics.

In the reliably red state, Douglas County has long stood out as a haven for activists and progressives. In the 1800s, people from New England settled in Lawrence intending to block the spread of slavery. In 1995 the city became the first in the state to add sexual orientation to its antidiscrimination policy. In 2005 the county was the only one to reject an amendment to the state Constitution prohibiting gay marriage and civil unions.

The city’s progressive leanings are visible. Downtown, businesses display Black Lives Matter stickers in their windows. In neighborhoods, houses fly rainbow flags.

In the book What’s the Matter With Kansas? (Metropolitan Books, 2004), Thomas Frank wrote that Lawrence “remained one of the truly liberal places” in the state. Mr. Frank grew up in what he called the “churchified suburbs” of Kansas City, Kan., and attended the University of Kansas. To him, Lawrence was a bohemian paradise. He heard the Sex Pistols on the student-run radio station at a time when such music, he recalled, would have been an “unthinkable perversion” for Kansas City stations to air.

A majority of in-state students who attend the university are from the eastern part of Kansas, where most of the larger cities are. The overrepresentation of people from that region — more than 60 percent of in-state students this fall hailed from three counties there — contributes to the sentiment that the university is out of touch with large swaths of Kansans.

Julie Denesha for The Chronicle

In Mr. Uri’s experience, people at the university don’t really understand what the western part of the state is like. “People say here that western Kansas starts in Topeka,” he says. Topeka, the state capital, is about 65 miles from the eastern border of a state that is 425 miles wide.

The remove of college towns like Lawrence from large portions of their state populations is problematic for democracy, says Terrell Strayhorn, director of the Center for Higher Education Enterprise, at Ohio State University. Higher education, he says, can help teach people to live together and interact productively, a foundation of our system of government.

The very fact that metaphors like “liberal bubble” and “ivory tower” are so often ascribed to higher education indicates a problem, he says. Both suggest communities that are isolated from their surroundings. Colleges should work to establish reputations to counter that impression, he says, by valuing and putting a high priority on the application of research to real-world problems.

Higher education has become a progressive echo chamber, Mr. Strayhorn says. People talk about the importance of diversity and try to use inclusive language. “It’s taken for granted that we would not want to act in ways or talk in ways and certainly not make decisions that can be perceived as racist, sexist, homophobic,” he says. “We, on average, work to remove any of the barriers that get in the way of people being successful.”

But the world outside of higher education doesn’t share the same concerns, he says. “The larger public doesn’t necessarily think this way, isn’t always conscious of the ways in which language can be exclusionary and create divisions.” And “I don’t think the greater public is as bothered by some of these divisions.”

Within these flagship bubbles, students like Mr. Uri can find camaraderie. Students like Adam Steinhilber experience frustration.

Mr. Steinhilber, a senior studying political science who identifies as a conservative, had seen the maps and knew Lawrence would be different from his hometown, a suburb of Kansas City.

For him there’s not just one moment that highlights the difference in the political climate between where he is from and where he goes to college. Rather, it’s a collection of moments.

“Whether it be the continual presence of protests in the center of campus or whether it be the pro-Trump chalkings that you can tell had water thrown on them, it just continually makes you realize that this is so different from the rest of Kansas, politically,” says Mr. Steinhilber, who is president of the campus chapter of the College Republicans.

The group did not officially endorse a candidate in the presidential election, staying out of the controversy over Mr. Trump. Instead it worked on the local level.

When he got involved in the group, in his freshman year, it was on “life support,” he says, with few meetings and only a handful of members. Over the next three years, he and a group of friends worked to build it up to about 50 members now.

“We really did feel that there was a need for a place for Republicans and conservative students on campus,” he says. “Last year we were able to revive the organization and really make it into a more permanent presence on campus, which I think is sorely needed.”

Kansas Board of Regents

On another side of the political spectrum is Stephonn Alcorn, president of the student body, who sees the liberalism of Lawrence as a benefit.

The relative diversity of the campus, where 40 percent of the students come from outside the state, has given him an opportunity to meet people from around the world and hear different perspectives, he says. He’s found the campus to be “a marketplace of ideas” rather than a homogeneous bubble.

Mr. Alcorn comes from Gardner, a southern suburb of Kansas City. He moved there with his mother, who immigrated from Jamaica, when he was 9. Leaving Gardner for college was a chance to experience the world, he says.

Still, only 4 percent of the students at Kansas are, like Mr. Alcorn, black. Last year black students sought to form a separate multicultural student government, but the chancellor vetoed the $2 student-fee increase that would have financed the effort.

As student-body president, Mr. Alcorn tries to see that all students feel safe on campus since Election Day. For him, both the color of his skin and whom he represents are on his mind.

He says he feels a responsibility to give a voice to those who don’t have one. “I know I’m helping shape this place for the better,” he says.

Clarence Lang doesn’t buy into the bubble conversation. Mr. Lang, chair of the department of African and African-American studies, wants to complicate the thinking about the liberalism of college towns. They are not utopias where everyone gets along in harmony, he says.

A graduate of the University of Missouri at Columbia, he’s taught at Kansas since 2011. Before that he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Julie Denesha for The Chronicle

College towns typically grapple with inequality, Mr. Lang says. People can grow up in the shadow of a university and feel that it isn’t available to them. To Mr. Lang, Lawrence’s liberalism is more a matter of self-regard, which can mask systemic problems. It breeds political complacency.

The self-regard also clashes with actual experience.

Before the 2016 election, a local middle-school teacher, who is white, was suspended after making racist comments in class, reported the Lawrence Journal-World. The local chapter of Black Lives Matter and the NAACP have criticized the school district’s handling of the investigation and said it was protecting the teacher, who has resigned.

“If he was black and it was the other way around, it would’ve been learned that he was out the door immediately,” one parent said at a December meeting of the school board. Parents and other residents disrupted the meeting to demand answers from the board.

Mr. Lang says the community seemed surprised by the grievances of people of color. While racism in Lawrence might not be as bad as in other parts of Kansas, he says, it still exists there.

“There’s not that many people of color in the town, so people can think they are liberal,” he says. “People can lull themselves into thinking it’s OK.” About 85 percent of the county’s residents are white. Sixty-nine percent of the university’s students are.

Mr. Lang wants to disrupt the notion that Lawrence is a liberal bubble. Such a mind-set doesn’t help the city or the university’s relationship with people in the state, he says.

University officials want to do more to connect with all of Kansas, to get past the perception that the campus is an island of liberalism and to take their work and their message to the people.

That’s what Carl Lejuez did last summer. Dean of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, he drove 1,000 miles of Kansas roads as part of the Rock Chalk Roadshow, an annual tour put on by the admissions office.

The university, he says, needs to share the message that it’s for all students.

Political differences between Lawrence and the rest of the state weren’t among the concerns he heard from parents and students, he says. Rather, many told him they were worried about the size of the campus. With about 28,000 students, the university’s population dwarfs those of the towns on much of the dean’s tour. He lets them know that the university is student-centered, that students can get to know their professors, and that through participation in extracurricular activities, students can make the campus seem smaller.

University officials point out that its reach extends beyond eastern Kansas in concrete ways, too, through training institutes, health-care services, and other programs.

And even though students like Mr. Alcorn do leave the state, plenty of others stay. On the tour, Mr. Lejuez met many who want to bring a university education back to their communities.

Yes, there are challenges, the dean says. The roadshow is a once-a-year event, and the university’s location, on the eastern side of Kansas, makes it more difficult to be present, consistently, throughout the state. “It makes it more challenging to show how much we care,” he says. “I will tell you we do a lot, but it is a challenge given the location.”

Mr. Uri’s drive to the university is about 175 miles from home.

His sentiments toward Concordia have “ebbed and flowed” since he’s been at college, he says. At first he was glad to get away and didn’t see much value in where he came from. In Lawrence he started working for a community-service organization and listened to conversations about social justice. He realized “just how terrible some of the overtly racist comments were by my high-school teachers, and how growing up in such a homogenous setting really skews social views.” Only one person of color was in his high-school graduating class of about 100.

Now he’s recalibrating again. He’s come to have a better understanding about people in his hometown and places like it. He studied communities in developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia in his sociology courses and saw parallels between them and those in rural Kansas. Both are concerned about being left out of broad policy conversations.

“As I’ve come to understand the more political nature of what’s going on, I’ve come to better understand why people maybe have the reactions that they do,” he says. “Particularly in the last election, regarding the fear of white conservatives in central Kansas of being left out of political processes — not necessarily grounded in discriminatory views, but more just being concerned about voices being heard.”

After the election, much was made of the divide between white voters in terms of higher education. Two-thirds of those without a college degree backed Mr. Trump, while 28 percent backed Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Uri identifies with white voters on both sides of the political, educational, and geographical divides. Now he feels a sense of responsibility to bridge those gaps.

How to do that?

He would like lines of communication more open between his university and the state as a whole. He hopes the election results will spur more thought about how Lawrence could improve that communication.

And Mr. Uri will try to engage better with his hometown.

“The election shows more than ever just how much communication has broken down,” he says. “Like Hillary Clinton said in her concession speech, the divisions in our country are much larger than we thought they were.”