Cultural Divide

Illustration by Martín Elfman for The Chronicle

As a “dyed-in-the-wool Democrat” who had no doubt Hillary Clinton would be the next president, Jonathan Zimmerman was shocked and angry when Donald J. Trump won instead. Those feelings were replaced by shame when he realized how badly he’d misread the mood of the country.

“I had surrounded myself with people who think the way I do, and I’d consumed media that reinforced my beliefs,” says Mr. Zimmerman, a professor of education history at the University of Pennsylvania. “All of my assumptions about what was right and proper reflected my isolation.”

He decided to do something about it. His job as a citizen and educator, he says, was to get out and interact with people he didn’t agree with, to find out what motivated them.

Mr. Zimmerman reached out to an administrator at nearby Cairn University, formerly known as Philadelphia Biblical University, a campus whose demographic suggested a sharp ideological contrast with Penn’s. He and Paul T. Neal, Cairn’s senior vice president for marketing and enrollment, pulled together plans for two moderated events last month in which students, faculty and staff members, and people from the community could sit around tables and discuss “Politics in the Age of Trump: Speaking Across Our Differences.”

The Penn students who supported Mr. Trump would be less likely to fear being called racist or ignorant in such an environment, organizers figured. Cairn students who were accustomed to talking politics with evangelical Christians would hear from a very different perspective.

The conversations are just one example of how colleges are responding, post-election, to complaints that they are too insular and out of touch with mainstream America (or much of the country, anyway).

Colleges that have focused diversity recruiting efforts on underrepresented minority groups are starting to make a greater effort to reach students from working-class and rural families. One of the goals is to bring more ideological diversity to campuses.

But many academics, while applauding efforts to expand educational opportunities to students who are typically underserved, refuse to accept the critique that they’re out of touch.

On campuses across the country where people are protesting what they see as threats to the environment, women’s rights, diversity initiatives, and even truth itself, many say higher education should be doubling down on its ideals, not bending over backwards to try to reach across what they see as a moral divide.

Scott MacEachern, a professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College, who was the first in his family to attend college, says he’s tired of hearing academics with working-class backgrounds chastising their peers for not being sensitive to their communities. “There’s an assumption that a white, working-class background is somehow more quintessentially American than the experiences of black people or immigrants in the United States,” he says.

Still, President Barack Obama warned against the tendency to seek refuge in the familiar in his farewell address in January. “For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles,” he said, “whether in our neighborhoods, or on college campuses, or places of worship, or especially our social-media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.”

Those assumptions, on many college campuses, are sometimes fed by a fixation on “identity politics,” according to a common critique in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s victory.

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, argued in an essay in The New York Times that American liberals had become obsessed with politics that focus on personal, rather than group, identity. As a result, he argued, they are alienating many voters who feel left out, like the white working-class men who gravitated toward Mr. Trump. Higher education is largely to blame, he said, because of what he considers its intolerance and hostility toward Republicans, conservatives, and evangelicals.

In an opinion essay in The Chronicle, Roland Merullo, who teaches creative writing at Lesley University, described how working-class white people like the relatives and neighbors he grew up with bristle when academics talk about “white male privilege.”

Mr. Merullo wrote that many less-educated white people resent the focus on racial diversity that they feel excludes them. When highly educated people mock Mr. Trump and his supporters as racists or idiots, he argued, it only reinforces the perception that out-of-touch eggheads are looking down on people who lack their education or social status.

That’s a sizable group, since about 60 percent of Americans of working age lack two- or four-year college degrees, according to the Lumina Foundation.

Both the Lilla and Merullo essays were widely circulated and sparked intense discussions. Some readers argued that it was unfair to blame campus diversity efforts for the alienation felt by many white, working-class men who are often skeptical of academe for other reasons. And the image of faculty members as elitists perched in their ivory towers rubbed some the wrong way.

“Nearly three quarters of faculty members are contingent, most being part-timers earning little more than they would make serving fast food,” says Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, professor emeritus of economics at Wright State University and president of the American Association of University Professors. At regional state colleges in economically depressed regions, first-generation college graduates make up a significant portion of the teaching faculty, Mr. Fichtenbaum adds. “They’re very aware of the obstacles and the economic realities their students face.”

Lisa A. Kirby, a professor of English at Collin College, outside Dallas, is more tuned in than many to the needs of working-class students since she heads the Texas Center for Working-Class Studies at Collin. Hers is one of a handful of such programs around the country that focus on this often overlooked population.

Ms. Kirby, whose father was a machinist and mother a nurse, says many of the two-year college’s students are also working full-time.

“We try hard to recognize that sometimes that 10-page paper is going to have to take a back seat to the fact that the student had a sick child and then had to go to work,” she says.

Even for those who are sensitive to such struggles, the election was “a wake-up call to everyone” about the sense of abandonment many people feel, she says.

Colleges should continue to find ways to connect with people outside academe, she says. Ms. Kirby has conducted writing workshops at her local public library, where people compose stories about their lives. Local labor activists and union organizers were scheduled to speak in February at a working-class-studies conference she organized.

“We make those real-world connections whenever we can.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.