When Erin Cole went to bed on election night, she didn’t expect the outcome of the presidential race to affect her introductory sociology class the next day. Cole, who teaches at Bucks County Community College, in Pennsylvania, and Mercer County Community College, in New Jersey, had cautioned her students that it would probably take at least several days to learn who had won.
So when Wednesday morning brought news of a quickly determined victory for President-elect Donald J. Trump, Cole changed gears. She used Poll Everywhere, a software program, to assess how her racially and ethnically diverse students were feeling about the election — and whether they wanted to talk about it.
How students felt about the election and whether they wanted to talk about it varied from campus to campus, from classroom to classroom. So, too, did whether or not their instructors brought up the topic. Some, like Cole, thought it was important to give students a chance to discuss the election in class. Others gave it a brief mention, or none at all. Some professors weighed whether to share their own feelings, while others shuffled lesson plans or stuck to business as usual. And some faculty members canceled class, a decision that made it into news accounts and received resistance from other instructors on social media, thus fueling even more public discussion among faculty about how to respond.
It’s unclear what the most common responses were, said Nancy Thomas, senior adviser to the president for democracy initiatives at the American Association of Colleges and Universities and executive director of its Institute for Democracy and Higher Education. The institute released a guide on how colleges should prepare to handle the period following the election in and beyond the classroom, and hopes to conduct a survey to better understand how they responded.
For now, the emerging picture is a reminder that teaching is contextual, that higher ed is vast and varied, and that there was no single experience of going to college classes on Wednesday, November 6.
Last week’s election was not the first event where professors were confronted with questions of how much to let outside events change classroom plans, and it’s unlikely to be the last. By now, the possibility of teaching distracted — and on some campuses, polarized — students during a volatile time that many professors were also processing themselves is something many of them have prepared for, because it’s something they’ve done before.
In her classes on Wednesday and Thursday, Cole gave her students three prompts. Two would be shared anonymously with the class: a one-word description of how they felt about the election, for inclusion in a word cloud, and a “yes” or “no” vote on whether they wanted to discuss the election in class. The third question, just for Cole and signed with their name if they chose, invited students to tell her how they really felt.
I think it is just good pedagogy to take this monumental event that just happened and use your class as a way of talking it through.
The word clouds for her classes on both days revealed that the students, mostly 18- to 22-year-olds, many of whom were able to vote for the first time, were feeling a mix of excitement, worry, and indifference. In her Wednesday class, where about two-thirds of students indicated they wanted to talk about the election, two students were wearing MAGA hats. The discussions were both fraught and productive. One student, in tears, asked classmates to explain why they supported Trump. A Trump supporter expressed understanding about why classmates who disagreed were upset.
One student asked Cole how she felt, which the instructor decided not to share. While she felt emotional, she didn’t want any students to tune out — or to think that she was presenting her opinions, especially with potentially polarizing chapters on race and gender left to get to in the course.
The discussion was short, only about five minutes, Cole estimated. Should she find another current event capturing students’ attention, Cole thought, she’d take a similar approach. The activity let students see the range of emotions they were all feeling, and put them in charge of the discussion while also giving those who wanted to communicate just with her the opportunity to do so.
Handling Major Events
Recent history has shaped the way many professors navigated the days after the election.
Many of the professors who considered saying something about the election in class this past week were advised, even directed, by their colleges throughout the pandemic to acknowledge that the challenges students face outside the classroom often seep into it and, at times, to adjust their courses accordingly. Some who canceled class may have learned, with or without institutional recognition of it, to protect their own mental health.
And some of them heard, perhaps in The Chronicle, Thomas’s encouragement that they make a plan for discussing the election in class, based on the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education’s finding that students resent it when professors ignore major events.
At the same time, some observers noted that assumptions about the significance of the election may not be universally shared. Whatever else a Trump win might mean to a traditional-age student, it’s hardly extraordinary that someone who was president when you were a kid won another election.
The idea that it’s important to at least mention major events stretches back decades. Josh Eyler, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, points to a touchstone article in the field of faculty development, “In the Eye of the Storm: Students’ Perceptions of Helpful Faculty Actions Following a Collective Tragedy,” which examines how professors handled the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in class and what students made of it. The upshot: Students appreciated it when professors acknowledged what had occurred, briefly mentioned actions students might take, or adjusted short-term deadlines and workload. Trump’s victory may feel like a tragedy to some students and professors but quite the opposite to others, which makes it unlike a terrorist attack, pandemic, or natural disaster. But navigating political division is increasingly part of what it means to teach on some campuses.
Still, other professors firmly believe that their job is to teach their courses as planned. That’s the position of William J. Luther, an associate professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University who wrote a post on X that begins, “Fellow academics: This is nuts. Stop doing this,” linking to a story in The Harvard Crimson, a student paper, about some professors canceling class and extending deadlines after the election.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Luther offered more nuance. “Any time you read a story like that, it’s not clear how representative the examples are,” he said. He said it was “perfectly reasonable” for students to have an emotional reaction to the election, or any major event. “But I guess the starting point for me is, What is my job here? I’m an economics professor, and a big part of my job is teaching undergraduates and graduate students economics.” To do anything else, he said, “I need to have a really good reason.”
Luther was also concerned about what professors’ reactions to the election might signal to conservative students. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be an 18- to 22-year-old, right-leaning student who wakes up on election day and gets an email from a professor who has chosen their words very carefully all semester long, has been very careful about not using words that are harmful to specific groups, suddenly expressing sympathy to a portion of the student body that is not the hypothetical student here and implicitly is conveying that that right-leaning student is an outsider.”
Jeffrey A. Sachs also posted on X that canceling classes was a mistake. Sachs, an instructor in politics and classics and history at Acadia University, in Canada, was responding to another professor in Canada’s post that discussed plans to cancel class. “Teach your classes. That’s why we’re here. If appropriate and germane to the course, discuss the election in a measured, informative way,” he wrote.
In an interview, Sachs provided several reasons for his position, including the risk of playing into the notion that professors are pushing their own values, which only increases public anger at higher ed. Sachs also noted that professors might not have as keen a grasp as they imagine on what students need or feel, and might even be projecting their own political worries onto a group of young people who don’t necessarily share them.
The election was pertinent to his own teaching: He spent the first half of his law-and-politics class on Thursday talking about the likely legal consequences of the election. During the class, he said, students shared their hopes and fears. “Not only is that appropriate,” he said, “I think it is just good pedagogy to take this monumental event that just happened and use your class as a way of talking it through.”
“What’s terrible,” he added, “is when you cancel class you deny students that opportunity.”
Changing Course
Plenty of professors didn’t want to have a class discussion about the election. Not every course topic is conducive to it; not every course is discussion-based. And evidence suggests civil dialogue on contentious issues takes advance preparation. It’s also possible to acknowledge the election without devoting class time to discussing it.
Justin Weinberg strives to keep his opinions out of the classroom. On Wednesday, he started the day with no plan to mention the election to students. But as Weinberg, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, read other professors’ plans on several social-media platforms that morning, he changed his mind. He was teaching a course on contemporary moral problems. Maybe students would find it strange if he led that class without saying anything about the election.
So, as he described in a post on Daily Nous, a news site for his discipline, he decided to tread lightly. Weinberg mentioned to the class that the election was significant and that students might be happy or unhappy with the results. He then turned to a theme of the course: the importance of developing, and then relying on, one’s own judgment. But he didn’t think a discussion about the election would be productive, so he didn’t open one.
Kevin M. Kruse made a different kind of calculation, by re-evaluating what was on the syllabus for that day in light of the election results. He was scheduled to teach about 1968 in his mid-20th-century history course. But Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, decided that the planned lecture, which he framed as an examination of one of the two years in the 20th century when “people really thought the country was coming apart,” might feel “a little too relevant” to students that day.
Kruse had arranged the course thematically rather than chronologically, so he was able to swap the lecture. He started off the class by explaining the change to students, joking that they’d instead cover something light: the Vietnam War.
That topic, too, may have felt close to home for some students, Kruse noted, given the parallels between the anti-war movement then and today’s pro-Palestinian activism. Still, he thought a bit of distance between election night and the 1968 material might help students feel less raw about it — and be better positioned to see that historical parallels, while important, can also be overstated.
Flower Darby, an associate director of the Teaching for Learning Center at the University of Missouri at Columbia, surprised herself by designing her first class period after the election to give students a break from thinking about it. Earlier in the week, she’d focused on the event by conducting an Election Day activity where students drew slips of paper listing one of the theories they’d covered in the course and were assigned to analyze how it pertained to either the Harris or Trump campaign.
Darby said she had worked hard earlier in the term to build community in the classroom, laying the groundwork to tackle difficult material together.
As the week went on, Darby, who had mentioned her concerns about the election to her students, considered canceling the next class period, on Thursday. But as she thought about it more — inspired, in part, by a LinkedIn post by Karen Costa, an author and faculty developer who teaches as an adjunct — she decided to hold it.
Darby wrote to her students to let them know that the Thursday class period would not address politics or the election at all. But, she added, if they wanted to talk about it with her individually, they could.
She wanted to strike a balance, supporting students who were struggling with the results without alienating students who were conservative, or those simply sick of thinking about the election.
Perhaps the ways professors approached the election in class speak, more than anything, to the way they see their role in students’ lives. Some of that has to do with the subject matter they’re teaching and to which students. It’s also a matter of philosophical differences among faculty members.
Charles H.F. Davis III had thought ahead about how he might respond to the election. Davis, an assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, sent an email to the students taking his interdisciplinary graduate course, “Power, Privilege, and the Politics of Difference,” ahead of their class meeting. He opened the message, which he also posted on X, by saying he wouldn’t begin with “hope this finds you well,” because after Trump’s win, “we are not well.” Davis then explained why he would still hold class, described how the time would be spent, and reminded students they could always miss class if they needed to.
The email, Davis thought, could offer a model for colleagues. Students, Davis said, “expect professors to demonstrate moral and ethical leadership.”
Davis carefully designed his class. He first had students give a presentation as planned before examining preliminary voting data, and only then did they discuss the election, an approach that helps “temper” the deep emotions such a discussion can provoke.
“Although not all faculty may be equipped to do this,” Davis said, “universities absolutely have faculty that are there, that have expertise, that they often do not call upon or engage with in a meaningful way.”
And, he added, given that not every professor is positioned to lead this kind of discussion, institutions have a responsibility to provide students with other resources for responding to the election beyond the classroom.
