With the election drawing to a close on Tuesday, colleges are bracing for a post-election period that could be contentious regardless of whether former President Donald J. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris wins the White House.
Just months after a season of dramatic protests over the Israel-Hamas war thrust higher ed into the center of the national political debate and led many institutions across the country to change their free-expression policies, large numbers of students may once again be demonstrating, marching, and otherwise making their voices heard.
As ever, colleges will have to balance the promotion of campus safety with the protection of free expression — and support their students’ emotional well-being while encouraging them to be tolerant of opposing views.
Similar preparations were made for the presidential election in 2020, a year rife with protests stemming from nationwide outrage over racial injustice. But with many students at home due to the pandemic, campus unrest didn’t materialize.
Beyond working to ensure that their security teams are on alert — and accounting for the possibility of violence, even if it may be unlikely — there are a number of preparations that colleges have been making: communicating proactively about what forms of expression are allowed on and around campus, working to foster civil discourse across difference, and providing counseling and stress-reduction strategies.
“The Gaza protests are fresh on everybody’s mind,” said W. Scott Lewis, a managing partner at the consulting firm TNG who works on risk management, including in higher ed. He and other experts believe those recent demonstrations may make college leaders better prepared for the post-election period. (In conversations with presidents, provosts, and student-affairs officers, he also hasn’t gotten the sense that they’re expecting protests on the scale of what transpired earlier this year.)
At the same time, Lewis says, the election results will inevitably provoke intense emotions for many students across the political spectrum, whether they’re anguished that America has re-elected Trump or, at the other extreme, in total disbelief that he could have lost to Harris. (Trump and many of his top surrogates have been actively working to cultivate the latter reaction, building on their false claim that he won the 2020 election by attacking the legitimacy of this year’s process, making unsubstantiated allegations about widespread voter fraud, and generally laying the rhetorical groundwork to say a Harris victory isn’t credible.)
Lewis said it’s important to remember that none of Trump’s student supporters has ever attempted anything on their campuses like the storming of the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021: “College Republicans didn’t say, ‘Let’s storm the president’s office.’”
The 2017 white-supremacist march through the University of Virginia and the deadly violence that followed in a nearby clash with counterprotesters were defining events of Trump’s presidency — indeed, President Joe Biden said they impelled him to run against Trump in 2020 — but they weren’t replicated elsewhere.
Still, Lewis cautions, colleges must consider how their proximity to government buildings or other common sites of political confrontation might increase the risks they face.
Laura Beltz, director of policy reform at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, said some colleges are designating “protest monitors” to supervise demonstrations on their campuses.
“They can be good or bad, depending on how they’re implemented,” Beltz said. “You want to make sure you’re transparent about who’s part of that monitoring team, and make clear to students that it’s not just controversial events being monitored.”
Beltz and other experts also said there’s a growing focus on “teaching students about civil dialogue and how to engage with people with different viewpoints.” Some institutions are planning to convene post-election discussions about the results to help students process them.
She said colleges should “adopt a stance of institutional neutrality when making statements about the election,” since taking one side can alienate students on the other side and chill their speech. But she said this approach should be compatible with helping students who are having a hard time and providing them with the support they need. In 2016, college leaders struggled to walk a fine line in their public statements, trying to reassure students from certain identity groups who felt threatened by Trump’s surprise election victory while remaining nonpartisan.
Aggressive Communication
Some campuses are making a pointed effort to support students’ mental health and emotional well-being in the coming days. Erica Pearson directs the counseling center at Kalamazoo College, in Michigan, which is offering special “election support sessions” this week — one-time, one-on-one meetings in which students can process their feelings with her or another counselor on staff.
Pearson had never offered election-related appointments before this year, but a number of students had already signed up for them when she spoke to The Chronicle last week.
She said she’s not preparing for these conversations by “brushing up on political science,” but rather by getting ready to help students manage uncertainty and fear. She’ll help them talk through coping strategies and navigate personal relationships with people who may see the election outcomes differently, such as their roommates, classmates, and family members back home. Pearson said she’s been hearing about other centers across the country offering support groups and expanded walk-in hours tied to the election.
The University of Virginia has promoted what officials describe as “a raft of programming aimed at helping students cope with the stress they may feel in the run-up to and aftermath of the vote.” They can drop in for individual support sessions on the Wednesday and Thursday after Election Day. They can also visit an art room in the same building to make an art project.
Nicole Ruzek, the university’s chief mental-health officer, said the goal is to “reinforce stress-management skills and offer students opportunities to engage with one another or take a break to regulate some of what they’re feeling.”
Whether the issue is safety, expression, or mental health, multiple experts stressed that colleges should be aggressive about communicating at this moment. Campus leaders should be vocal about setting expectations for campus behavior and publicizing their support efforts.
Three communications scholars who spoke with The Chronicle largely had the same advice as other experts for election-related campus disruptions: review your crisis-management plans and protest policies, talk with your campus community early, emphasize free speech and civil discourse, and offer wellness resources. The group included Matthew Seeger, a communication professor at Wayne State University; William Nowling, a communication professor at Michigan State University; and Ralph Gigliotti, an assistant vice president for organizational leadership in University Academic Affairs at Rutgers University.
But the trio also urged institutions not to be overly reassuring in their communication — not to “downplay the possibility of disruption” and “encourage people to not be concerned.” Taking action to prepare campuses is responsible, the scholars said, but offering false guarantees about what will transpire or dismissing legitimate worries is irresponsible and counterproductive.
