Trapped in Trump’s Angry Tide

A couple of weeks after a mob of Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the nation’s Capitol, Cathy Cox, then dean of Mercer University’s law school, convened a group of students on a Zoom call for what she described as a real-world lesson in contract law.

At issue was a mock courtroom at the Georgia university named for L. Lin Wood Jr., an alumnus, donor, and ardent Trump supporter. On social media Wood had increasingly trafficked in political conspiracy theories, and he had been accused of inciting violence. Not long before the Zoom call, Wood had taken to Parler, the conservative platform, with what sounded like a call to execute the vice president, Mike Pence. “Get the firing squads ready,” Wood wrote. “Pence goes FIRST.” (Parler removed the post, Mediaite reported, and Twitter permanently banned Wood after the Capitol riot. Wood said he had engaged in “rhetorical hyperbole” and does not believe in violence.)

Wood is a well-known defamation lawyer who represented Richard Jewell, the security guard wrongly accused of planting a pipe bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. By the time of the Mercer dean’s Zoom call, however, Wood had become better known as something else: a chief propagator of Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Cox, a former Georgia secretary of state who is a Democrat, told the students on the Zoom call that she was worried about Wood’s mental health. “I’m no psychologist or psychiatrist,” she said, “but it is really troubling to me to see the significant sort of downturn.” Since the previous summer, Cox said, Wood’s Twitter account had gone “from the supercharged Trump supporter, to the angry Trump supporter, to the insane, to the violent tweets.”

None of that, though, changed a fundamental fact: When Wood, in 2016, committed to donating $1 million to the law school, Mercer agreed to put his name on a courtroom, the dean said. There was no stipulation in the gift contract, the dean explained, that said Wood’s name would remain on the courtroom “as long as we think you’re a reputable lawyer.”

The day before the Zoom call, Wood texted the dean. He was angry, Cox told the students, to learn that discussions were underway about taking his name off the courtroom. Then, something remarkable and extremely awkward happened on the call. Wood chimed in.

“I am on the call,” Wood revealed. “And I am embarrassed for the profession of law that you’re practicing right now.”

Calm in tone, Wood commanded the floor. He waxed between airing his frustrations with the dean — “You have slandered me in this meeting,” he said — and offering up for her review a bevy of right-wing conspiracy theories. Might I send you, Wood inquired, evidence related to Hillary Clinton “with respect to the adoption of children through Jeffrey Epstein”? (Baseless claims of a global pedophile cabal are central to the QAnon conspiracy theory.)

Wood, who had recorded the call, later posted the audio on his Telegram page. (You can hear it here.) In an accompanying post, Wood wrote, “These young students have been brainwashed. Academia has been corrupted by the Communist influence.”

Wood did not respond to an email or a voicemail left at his law office. Cox, who is now president of Georgia College, did not respond to an interview request. William D. Underwood, Mercer’s president, also declined an interview through a university spokesman, who said in an email, “We’re not making any public comments about the Lin Wood matter.”

In the days after the Capitol riot, Wood’s Zoom bomb at Mercer was an easy story to miss. With the fate of the Republic appearing to hang in the balance, the matter of the Lin Wood courtroom at a private college in Georgia seemed of little consequence. But it pointed toward a larger issue with far-reaching implications for higher education. The conspiratorial thinking at the core of Trump’s movement now permeates a segment of society that colleges and universities cannot avoid or ignore.

Over the course of Trump’s four years as president, colleges and universities were often on their heels. The president’s disdain for “elites,” his skepticism of science, his loathing of political correctness, and his targeting of diversity and inclusion programs amounted to a multipronged offensive against many of the values and systems that have come to define a comprehensive liberal-arts education in the United States. Few seemed to think those criticisms would fully recede after Trump left office, but the past year has shown that the defining features of “Trumpism” are now deeply absorbed into the politics surrounding higher education.

A slew of bills in state legislatures seek to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” on matters of race. Idaho lawmakers, angered over social-justice programs at Boise State University, recently cut its budget by $1.5 million as a penance. Last summer a controversy erupted over whether Nikole Hannah-Jones, lead author of “The 1619 Project” — one of Trump’s favored political targets — was worthy of tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In Florida, conservative university board members and Gov. Ron DeSantis — a Republican who is widely viewed as Trump’s kindred spirit, if not his rival — have made plain that public-university presidents have no power to mandate masks or Covid-19 vaccinations, even as the universities’ own medical experts urge them to do so.

Whether they are inspired or emboldened by Trump, or merely of like mind, a host of lawmakers, trustees, and donors have proved in the last year to be effective and willing foot soldiers in a war that the former president so effectively waged on higher education. Different in tactics and scope, all of those efforts are predicated on the notion that colleges and universities are tools of liberal indoctrination that, at long last, must be reined in. While not new, this line of criticism has been infused with a take-no-prisoners style of politics that, a year ago, brought the country to the brink.

Colleges have always been subject to the nation’s shifting political tides. But professors, lawmakers, and policy experts see something different taking shape — an embrace in the political mainstream of what once might have been fringe positions. Colleges are confronting what it means to exist in a post-Trump world, one in which the likes of Lin Wood stand just outside the gates, waiting to burst through the barrier like the Kool-Aid man.

Ryan D. Enos thought he could stop it. This can’t happen at Harvard, he told himself.

In the days after the Capitol riot, Enos, a professor of government, sent a letter to Lawrence S. Bacow, pleading with Harvard’s president to adopt “minimum standards” for those the university would permit within its ranks. Surely, Enos said, Harvard could draw the most basic of lines, barring from affiliation anyone who had aided in the storming of the Capitol.

“If we do not insist that those at Harvard do not try to overturn the free and fair votes of other citizens or that they would not encourage the violent overthrow of our own government, then we have no standards at all,” Enos wrote.

Days later, Harvard announced that Rep. Elise Stefanik, an alumna, would be removed from an advisory committee at its Institute of Politics because she had made baseless claims about voter fraud. Stefanik, who had refused when asked to step down voluntarily, described the removal as a “badge of honor,” and used the moment to double down on a broader critique of higher education.

“The Ivory Tower’s march toward a monoculture of like-minded, intolerant liberal views demonstrates the sneering disdain for everyday Americans,” she said in a statement, “and will instill a culture of fear for students who will understand that a conservative viewpoint will not be tolerated and will be silenced.”

Enos was gratified by Stefanik’s removal, which he thinks his letter may have helped to prompt. But the professor and the congresswoman are unlikely bedfellows in at least one respect: Both say that political imbalance in academe is a problem. Long-term trust in higher education, Enos said, is threatened by the dearth of conservatives in the professoriate and the perception that colleges are hostile to Republicans. But that imbalance is even more difficult to change in the current political environment, he said.

“The belief that the election of 2020 was stolen and that these rioters were legitimate in what they did is becoming very pervasive in the Republican Party,” Enos said. “So if I’m saying we should wall those people off, what I’m saying is that we’re going to wall off a really significant portion of people in the United States — essentially a really significant portion of conservative people. And that’s a real problem.”

Excising insurrectionists could be tricky business. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued that such purging calls to mind Cold War hysteria over Communism that imperiled academic freedom. “The real threat isn’t a horde of evil Trumpers clamoring at our gates,” he wrote for The Review. “It’s our quest to root out the enemies of democracy, which never ends well for the university.” (Responding to that criticism, Enos argued that fear of a slippery slope “does not mean we are paralyzed from doing what is right.”)

Views of Joe Biden’s legitimacy as president remain starkly divided along partisan lines. Just 27 percent of Republicans say Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, compared with 94 percent of Democrats, Bright Line Watch reported.

At the same time, people across the political spectrum are losing faith in higher education, but Republicans substantially more so than Democrats. A survey by Gallup, released in 2018, found that less than half of respondents expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. The gap between the major parties was 23 points, with just 39 percent of Republicans expressing confidence, compared with 62 percent of Democrats.

These forces — a polarized electorate and eroding faith in higher education, particularly among conservatives — are converging in a powerful way that positions colleges as exceptionally appealing political targets. The stage has been set for a renewal of the culture wars, with colleges once again at the center.

Before Trump’s election, Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University, had spent years thinking about the fractious debates that had dominated American politics between the 1960s and the 1990s. When he finished writing A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, in 2014, Hartman had concluded that the culture wars that peaked in the ’80s and ’90s were no longer central to the nation’s political preoccupations. Americans still disagreed about hot-button issues like abortion, evolution, and affirmative action, but Hartman theorized that two historic events had eclipsed those concerns: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the 2008 financial crisis. The nation’s politics were not consumed, for example, as they had been in the late ’80s with the fate of the Western canon at Stanford University.

But then Trump burst onto the scene in a bright, red MAGA hat.

“The whole Make America Great Again theme is a culture-war theme,” Hartman said in a recent interview. “This is a very common theme, actually going back to Nixon, that the ’60s wrecked everything. That’s really part of the Trump appeal and why that slogan worked.”

In his book, Hartman credits the social movements of the 1960s, which took root on college campuses and gave birth to disciplines like Black studies and women’s studies, with stoking fears among conservatives that the nation as they knew it was under threat. But the changes they feared, Hartman argues, had already come to pass. “They grew wary of ‘an assault on Western civilization’ only after the barbarians had crashed the gates,” Hartman writes. “The radical political mobilization of the ’60s — civil rights, Black and Chicano Power, feminism, gay liberation, the antiwar movement, the legal push for secularization — destabilized the America that millions knew.”

Faced with that destabilization, conservatives attacked curricula that, in their view, overemphasized the shortcomings of the American experiment and undervalued its successes. As Hartman notes in his book, Richard Nixon gave voice to that concern in his second inaugural address, on January 20, 1973. “Our children have been taught to be ashamed of their country, ashamed of their parents, ashamed of America’s record at home and its role in the world. At every turn we have been beset by those who find everything wrong with America and little that is right.”

Nixon’s words might just as easily have come from Trump himself, who, in 2020, issued a call for “patriotic education.” In service of that goal, Trump created, by executive order, the 1776 Commission, an 18-member group led by Larry P. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian college in southern Michigan. The commission’s subsequent report was described in a White House news release as a “rebuttal of reckless ‘re-education’ attempts that seek to reframe American history around the idea that the United States is not an exceptional country but an evil one.”

The commission created what might be viewed as a template for battles that have taken shape in the year since Trump left office. Its very name — the 1776 Commission — appears to be a direct response to The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project,” a multimedia series that explores the history of slavery and its legacy in the United States. The controversy surrounding the project, which has been praised as an overdue historical corrective and criticized for inaccuracies, has made Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project’s driving force, a frequent target of right-wing critics. It was against that backdrop that Hannah-Jones’s candidacy for tenure at Chapel Hill created a national firestorm.

Before Trump, it may have been difficult to envision so many Americans invested in the outcome of a single tenure decision. But it felt unsurprising and inevitable in his wake.

The Hannah-Jones controversy was just one flashpoint in a continuing debate that Trump fueled as president, about how history and race should be discussed, from kindergarten through college. Trump intensified and further politicized those arguments, not only with the 1776 Commission, but also with another executive order that he issued around the same time. The order, “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” prohibited federal-grant recipients from holding diversity training “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country.”

As president, Biden swiftly disbanded the 1776 Commission and revoked the order on diversity training. But the spirit of Trump’s orders lives on in legislation that has been passed or is under consideration in states across the nation. A bill in Oklahoma, for example, would forbid teaching “components of the 1619 Project.” The legislation would also prohibit “any teaching that America has more culpability, in general, than other nations for the institution of slavery; that one race is the unique oppressor in the institution of slavery; that another race is the unique victim in the institution of slavery.”

Janai S. Nelson, incoming president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said she is troubled by moves to eradicate certain ideas and texts from the classroom, rather than encouraging students to engage with them analytically. “That is an erasure of history,” she said. “That’s an erasure of memory. And that is a recipe for national delusions.”

Jim Olsen, the state representative who introduced the Oklahoma bill, did not respond to an interview request. In December he told KOCO News 5, an ABC affiliate, that he wanted “to assure that our young people are taught our history, properly and in proper context.”

Under the Oklahoma legislation, colleges could lose up to 10 percent of their state dollars for failing to comply with its dictates. That sort of threat is reminiscent of what happened in Idaho last year, when lawmakers cut Boise State’s appropriations in response to social-justice programming they deemed problematic. Ostensibly, the cuts were a form of punishment, said Chris Mathias, a Democratic state representative. In reality, though, lots of lawmakers, including Mathias, signed onto the cuts in recognition that, if they failed to do so, other work couldn’t get done, Mathias said. Right-wing critics had successfully “hijacked” the state’s agenda, Mathias said, making Idaho’s most pressing political issue the matter of political correctness at Boise State.

Mathias, a former Boise State administrator and Idaho’s only Black lawmaker, credits Trump in large part for inspiring lawmakers to take up wedge issues in higher education, likening the former president to a rocket booster that separates from a space shuttle in flight.

“He was that fuel tank that got us off from Cape Canaveral,” Mathias said. “But once you hit lower space, you don’t need Trump anymore. The ship can do what it was designed to do. And I think the ship was designed to attack any institution that doesn’t perpetuate ultraconservative narratives of American greatness.

“Look, I’m a military veteran, so I don’t take claims of indoctrination lightly,” Mathias continued. “I don’t want people being raised to hate America. But I’m also someone who realizes that the mythmaking of the far right about what makes America great is pretty limited in its understanding of how we got to where we are today and what it’s going to take moving forward.”

At her home near Mercer University, Cathren Page can see a “Let’s Go Brandon” sign on her neighbor’s lawn. Page, a law professor at Mercer, isn’t sure whether the sign, which references an anti-Biden rallying cry, went up before or after she put a “Black Lives Matter” sign in her own yard.

“People who live in a city in a solid Blue State, they’re not confronted with these issues in their daily lives to the same extent,” Page said.

Driving through Georgia, she continued, “you see the big Trump billboards and the bumper stickers, and I would say it feels threatening.”

Page thinks a lot about Trump, and not just because she still sees his name on billboards in Georgia. Her scholarship focuses on “applied legal storytelling,” the study of how narratives — ethically or unethically — can be used to persuade. Trump, whom Page views as a master of plainspoken storytelling, has proved a rich text for the professor. His arguments are particularly seductive, she said, because they often suggest that scholars like Page overthink things. Trump’s appeal to gut-level common sense is tempting to embrace, Page said, because it means that doing the hard work of interrogating something like systemic racism isn’t necessary; instead, it’s probably bad for you.

“We professors come in, and we use big words and long sentences, and Trumpism has a solution for that. It makes us out like we’re a bunch of Charlie Brown teachers,” Page said, mimicking a cartoonish “wah wah wah” voice. “If we teach nuances like systemic causation, before we get to the second sentence, Trumpism rolls its eyes and dismisses it as lacking common sense. It has an easy answer — a label that you can slap on things, like ‘Fake News’ — in order to dismiss without getting into the details or getting into a debate about what the actual facts are.”

The appeal of Trumpian logic, one that sees thorough analysis as potentially pernicious, has outlived his presidency, Page said, and professors are up against it every day. “He still has a base that adheres to that paradigm,” Page said, “and it’s that paradigm that we’re at war with.”

Even in Trump’s absence from office, Page can’t let go of him as a subject worthy of scholarly attention. “It’s insidious, and I fear him,” she said. “And at the same time, and I think this encapsulates part of the problem, I’m fascinated with him.”

After the Capitol riot, Page was among more than 900 law professors to sign a letter calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office. Often against her own better judgment, she said, she speaks out on politically sensitive topics. But Page clammed up when asked about the Trump-infused controversy at her own law school. She could not talk about the courtroom named for Lin Wood at Mercer, she said, and she asked that The Chronicle “explicitly mention” that she had not done so.

Page would not elaborate on why she could not talk about the matter. Nor did a university spokesman respond to an email asking if faculty members had been forbidden to discuss the courtroom. Whatever the reason, it is glaringly clear that talking about the long tail of “Trumpism,” in relation to a specific campus issue or a specific donor, can be combustible.

Historians and old political hands tend to describe Trump along a continuum. The philosophies he espouses, and the rhetorical tactics he employs, aren’t entirely new to domestic politics. But there is something enduring about Trump that has kept higher education, in particular, on the defensive.

“I’m very careful about blaming Donald Trump,” said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government relations and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “I think this started before him; it’s outlasting him.”

Less an everyday presence, but still looming large, Trump is a significant-enough figure to make people question whether he represents a return to something old or the birth of something new. Like the complex problems he might prefer to cut through, it turns out Trump is a bit of both.