Coming Full Circle on Teaching Trump

In the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign I did a risky thing for a college president, particularly one whose office is two blocks away from the birthplace of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wis. Ignoring the (perhaps apocryphal) story about how the legendary basketball star and Nike spokesperson Michael Jordan declined to endorse a black Democrat running against the Republican senator Jesse Helms in North Carolina because “Republicans buy shoes too,” I published an opinion essay in the Washington Post that explained how college professors ought to teach about Donald Trump during the coming fall semester.

My thesis was a simple one: Just because then-candidate Trump had made bigoted and ignorant statements, it didn’t mean that his supporters should be maligned as well. I thought our liberal-arts, moderate, purple-battleground community in rural Wisconsin would get the idea. I was wrong.

Within minutes of the article’s posting online, something similar to how President Trump would later describe the home countries of Haitian and African immigrants hit the fan. The college’s social-media pages lit up with comments, both pro and con. Students working our phone-a-thon to raise money for the annual fund got earfuls from alumni about my liberal bias. One trustee emailed to thank me for getting the college’s name into a national publication but asked when I was going to write a similar article about Hillary Clinton’s deficiencies. An alumnus who was planning to make a donation for our new athletic center said that as long as I was president there would be no further gifts.

At alumni weekend, an older gentleman with a Southern accent got in my face about “that article about teaching Trump” and keeping your political opinions out of the classroom because professors shouldn’t have opinions, they should “teach the facts.” A local resident wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap burst into my office and past my assistant, stuck his finger in my face and called me “an idiot who wrote an idiotic article!” I looked both ways as I exited the building at dusk that night and wondered if we should get a panic button for the office.

I also began to question my judgment. Perhaps I had gone too far? Maybe reasonable people could disagree that Trump had made bigoted comments? And as Pope Francis said about an entirely different matter, “Who am I to judge?” One sentence in my Post essay raised particular ire: “If Trump were a student, he would have already been called into the dean’s office to explain comments about women, minorities, immigrants, veterans and people with disabilities.” Was I conforming to a conservative safe-space stereotype of a politically correct snowflake who couldn’t handle free speech? Worst of all: Was I jeopardizing the best interests of the institution that I was charged to lead?

I got some quiet pats on the back from faculty and staff members. A few trustees called to tell me to hang in there. My algorithmically modified friends on social media, of course, loved it, and Wisconsin Public Radio did an interview. But after Trump was elected, and carried Wisconsin by just over 25,000 votes, my doubts returned in force. Now that Trump was president, I was out there on a limb. I had called the president of the United States and leader of the free world a narrow-minded bigot, and a good portion of our alumni and town had supported him.

Over the course of the last year those misgivings began to subside — and Trump himself had a lot to do with it: the Muslim ban, DACA, Charlottesville, Colin Kaepernick, an assault on science and fact, a disregard for the rule of law. You know the list. A growing number of people within our community (let’s just call them the silent minority) began to tell me how much they appreciated what I had written: the young alumni couple at the happy-hour mixer, for example, who cornered me and told me, sotto voce, that they were proud that the president of their alma mater had taken a public stand against Trump’s lack of decency. I took note of the Eisenhower Republican editor of the local newspaper who stopped to commiserate with me about the latest outrage from the White House. I even derived comfort from the conservative trustee who made sure to tell me that he had voted for the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and that I shouldn’t blame him if our Muslim and Dreamer students were freaking out about the possibility of deportation.

The haters, of course, were still going to hate, but something had changed. Despite bending over backwards to host Michael Flynn, Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, and our Republican members of Congress on our campus over the past three years in the name of political balance, I began to feel less defensive about what I had written about Trump. And while some alumni thought the college had moved too far to the left, the president’s behavior was no longer just about conservative and liberal politics. It was about decency, fairness, and respect.

A college president’s job should not just be about raising money, bringing in next year’s class, and maintaining town-gown relations. The leaders of colleges and universities must continue to take a public stand against any national administration’s policies (Republican or Democrat) that harm our students and our institutions. We must stand tall for civil discourse in public life. And we need to keep calling President Trump out for mean-spirited and yes, ignorant and bigoted comments that would cost any of us our jobs if we had said them ourselves.

It’s our responsibility to be out in front on these issues, even if our community isn’t quite there yet. And while in the short term some donations may be lost, over the long haul the values that we celebrate, that protect differences of perspective, background, and heritage, are far more important.

Zach P. Messitte is president of Ripon College.