Higher ed better brace itself for J.D. Vance.
The title of Vance’s speech at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021 was “The Universities are the Enemy.” Colleges, Vance said, are “hostile institutions” doing “research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas.” He has pledged to “aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
As the Republican candidate for vice president under Donald Trump, Vance will have ample opportunity to do just that. He’ll be able to broadcast his attacks against colleges all day, every day, for at least the next four months. As if higher-education leaders did not have enough to worry about for the upcoming academic year.
When Donald Trump said, “We love the poorly educated,” he was talking about a group of people he had little personal contact with. J.D. Vance is actually from the downwardly mobile white working class, victims of “deaths of despair,” and he has spent enough time in the realm of elite higher education to be able to credibly report on how segments of it sneer at communities like his own.
As he recounts in his book Hillbilly Elegy, he grew up in Middletown, Ohio, the buckle of the addiction belt, and made it out through a combination of tough love from his grandparents, personal grit, and joining the Marine Corps.
Against all odds he wound up at Yale Law School, where, he says, he was shocked by the self-absorption of his classmates — and even more surprised by how the university encouraged their insularity and entitlement. The distance between people in the 1% and the .1% was the inequality that seemed to get the most attention. Claiming even the slightest marginalization based on race, gender, or sexuality gave you status. Conversely, if you were white, male, Christian, and poor, you were either ignored or derided.
Vance recalls a time when he took some Yale classmates to what his family considered a fine-dining establishment: Cracker Barrel. They laughingly called it a greasy public-health crisis. As he describes it, “For all of the Ivy League obsession with diversity, virtually everyone — Black, white, Jewish, Muslim, whatever — comes from intact families who never worry much about money.”
It’s not hard to imagine Vance on the campaign trail looking into the cameras and gleefully stoking populist resentment against higher-education elites: Those people live on a luxury planet with luxury beliefs, and when they’re not ignoring you, they’re calling you deplorable.
About that, he is not entirely wrong.
In the fall of 2016, I was invited to speak at an elite liberal-arts college a couple of hours away from where Vance grew up. “This is opioid country,” my driver told me on the ride from the airport. “Half of these houses,” he said, pointing out the window, “have addiction in their family. And nobody at that fancy college you’re speaking at cares. I don’t even think they know.”
During the afternoon, a few hours before my talk, I met with the Students of Color group. They regaled me with stories of what it felt like to be a cultural outsider at a predominantly white institution.
A few minutes after the session started, a food-service worker entered the room and began setting up the standard afternoon campus fare of coffee and cookies. None of the students paid her any mind; she might as well have been part of the wallpaper. In the middle of one particularly overwrought monologue during which a student said she had no agency on campus because she was marginalized by white supremacy, the food service worker turned and gave me a “Can you believe these kids are saying this stuff?” look.
Here was a shriveled white female in late middle age, with several missing teeth, condemned to stay silent as she laid out coffee and cookies for 19-year-old undergraduates who were getting an $80,000-a-year education that was teaching them to affirm one another’s feelings of oppression.
On the face of it, that story might seem like a perfect illustration of J.D. Vance’s argument: The world of elite higher education highlights some dimensions of identity, and spurns others.
The staff person who set up the session actually had another meeting, so I was left alone with the students. But as the conversation unfolded, I started to wish I had been joined by a high-caliber DEI professional, an expert in constructive dialogue who encouraged students to speak of their identities as sources of pride rather than statuses of victimization, and pointed out that their stories about themselves needed to relate positively to the wider community around them — in this case, people like the food-service worker.
This is precisely how DEI professionals like Maria Dixon Hall, the chief diversity officer at Southern Methodist University, approach their work. As she told Dallas’s D Magazine, “Good DEI leadership means considering all iterations of diversity and seeing those differences as strengths.” Dixon Hall involves all layers of the university in her DEI programs, from food-service workers to the president, and makes it a point to build bridges between the campus and the surrounding community.
As it happens, J.D. Vance’s best experience at Yale Law School was a seminar that, to my mind, resembles an excellent DEI program. Here is how he describes it in Hillbilly Elegy: “We called ourselves the island of misfit toys … a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the super-smart daughter of Indian immigrants, a Black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil-rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others.” These folks “became kind of a family for me.”
I believe higher ed’s best response to Vance’s forthcoming fusillade of criticism should leverage that paragraph. When Vance attacks, higher-education professionals should remind him that they excel at facilitating exactly the experience he enjoyed so much at Yale: bringing diverse people around a common table to learn from one another and cooperate together.
And that work is led by the DEI department.
