What Trump’s Win Compels Scholars to Do

My pulse raced and my blood pressure spiked when I realized that Donald Trump would be president. I felt afraid — first for the millions of people who are immediately threatened by Trump’s campaign promises: the border wall, a ban on Muslims, more “law and order” (clearly code for incarcerating minorities), the end of Obamacare, the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Then for everyone, now and in future generations, whose fate depends on our acting quickly to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

I awoke the next morning with another scary feeling: a kind of identity crisis. I felt gutted. On November 9, getting to campus and returning to my research was a struggle. Doing serious scholarship and teaching requires throwing yourself into it, mind and body, and committing most of your waking hours to the job. It’s impossible to make this kind of commitment unless you believe your work is meaningful and effective. Trump’s victory called that into question.

It’s hard not to see Trump’s triumph as a repudiation of everything that universities stand for: free speech, open inquiry, inclusion, and civility; logic, reason, and the relentless pursuit of truth and wisdom.

He ran, without shame, as an authoritarian, a misogynist, and a nativist. He questioned established climate science, threatened journalists who turned up inconvenient facts, and showed blatant contempt for truth in every debate. If all of that made him attractive to American voters, what does that say about our shared culture? What does it mean for those of us who’ve made scholarship a vocation? How can we respond?

Of course, Trump’s disdain for academic norms and values didn’t win him the election. The big drivers in politics lie beyond our control. The white middle class has long supported Republicans, and even the so-called “values voters” who identify as Christian preferred Trump to Clinton. There’s a contentious debate about how class mattered, but there’s no doubt that millions of working-class whites feel left behind by free-trade agreements and economic globalization, deprived of new opportunities, and abandoned by Democrats who once championed their cause.

History leaves little doubt about our nation’s capacity for bigotry, and there’s no denying that the majority of whites in every age group voted for the candidate who channeled racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia, and even got endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Gender mattered, even though women didn’t turn out for Clinton as expected, and we’ll never know for sure how many men just couldn’t vote for a female candidate. The media mattered, because lavishing free attention on the reality-TV-star-turned-politician made him a credible candidate, and it refused to probe policy issues (like climate change) that will shape our future whether or not we discuss them in debates.

Despite all those reasons for Trump’s victory, we know that institutions of higher education shaped the electorate, too. Most important, voters with college degrees were far more likely to vote for Clinton, while those without degrees were far more likely to vote for Trump. That’s vindication for those of us who hope that students internalize core academic values like openness and inclusivity on campuses — although the fact that white college graduates preferred Trump by four points tells us we have work still to do. It also raises the stakes for everyone concerned about access to higher education. The soaring cost of college and the specter of crippling debt are enormous problems for American families. Now we know that they are problems for American political culture as well.

As a social scientist, I’m especially aware of how universities have contributed to another problem in American political culture: excessive faith in Big-Data analytics, and insufficient concern about the quality of the data we’re producing. Even those of us who merely consume that data are implicated. In the run-up to the election, I checked in daily for reports from FiveThirtyEight, the Upshot, and Sam Wang’s Princeton Election Consortium. On November 8, I devoured Slate’s VoteCastr, which promised scientifically sound updates on the election in real time, and delivered unequivocally good news for those of us who feared a Trump presidency: Clinton would very likely win every major swing state!

In retrospect, there were flaws with both the data (its reliance on land lines, and its failure to account for those who didn’t feel comfortable acknowledging that they’d vote for Trump) and the models used to analyze them (in crucial states, turnout levels were far lower than in the recent past). And the truth is that preventing those kinds of mistakes is extremely difficult. It’s one reason many of us — even, or perhaps especially, in the social sciences — worry that the Big Data revolution may go too far, pulling resources away from other valuable forms of knowledge production, such as ethnography, history, and philosophy. Consider the extraordinary insights about American political culture and behavior in recent books like Strangers in Their Own Land (Arlie Hochschild), White Trash (Nancy Isenberg), Evicted (Matthew Desmond), $2 a Day (Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer) and Privilege (Shamus Khan). Universities must continue to invest in this kind of research, too.

Of course, universities aren’t the only institutions that are pushing the Big Data revolution. It comes from engineering firms in Silicon Valley, media companies in New York City, and a variety of other industries. But universities have played a special role in legitimating this emerging form of research, and emphasizing it over other ways of knowing. Did the new data-driven polling we helped pioneer affect how the candidates ran their campaigns, shaping who and where they targeted scarce resources and time? If so, perhaps now is the time to ask whether we’ve overstated the public benefits of Big Data analysis while underestimating the risks.

There’s one other thing that universities must do better: teach students skills for learning, discerning, reasoning, and communicating in an informational environment dominated by quick hits on social media like Twitter and Facebook. Like it or not, social media is at the center of the new public sphere. This election leaves no doubt that candidates, campaigns, and their surrogates can make great use of it: planting memes, spreading rumors, building communities. Professors know how to help students work through difficult ideas in books and articles. But except for some of us in the learning sciences, few of us have thought much about how to help students develop critical-thinking skills for the media that they use most.

I don’t blame academics for neglecting this kind of pedagogy, and we did not create this civic problem. But professors — particularly humanists and social scientists — are well positioned to help students navigate the new informational environment. We should rise to the challenge.

I’ve been sharing these ideas with colleagues over the past few days. And they’ve added suggestions for other projects, like helping the faculty learn how to communicate beyond their disciplines, pushing universities to do more about inequality, and opening up more civic space to publicly discuss our enduring racial divide. The conversations I’ve had on campus begin with resignation but quickly turn positive and productive, uplifting enough to at least carry us through the day. That’s a low bar, I know, but it’s a start.

The deeper questions, about the value of scholarship and teaching in what some are calling the “posttruth era,” aren’t easy to answer. But presidents aren’t always predictable, and the forces that carried Trump to victory are complex and contradictory. Today they amount to something terrifying. Before long they could give way to other forces and carry us to places we can’t yet see. We need to be ready for that moment. If we work hard enough, we might even help create it.

Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. In 2016-17 he is a fellow at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Follow him on Twitter @ericklinenberg.