J.D. Vance’s feelings about higher education are intense. “The professors,” the Republican vice-presidential nominee infamously announced a few years ago, echoing Richard Nixon, “are the enemy.” But that intensity might mask an underlying ambivalence. As Gabriel Winant put it in n+1, Vance’s “fame and fortune owe everything to the favorable intercession of Ivy League faculty.” Vance is indeed a pure product of the meritocracy, rising from the troubled origins he described in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, through scholarships to Ohio State University and then law school at Yale, that citadel of elite formation. When someone who owes so much to the professors declares them the enemy, you might reasonably ask whether there’s more going on than meets the eye.
In a recent work of literary criticism titled We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction From Vietnam to Trump (University of Virginia), the English professor Douglas Dowland names “resentment” as the key to Vance’s psychology and political rhetoric: “If Elegy asks us to feel, it asks us to feel resentment.” Nor is Vance himself at all coy about his propensity to the feeling. “For my entire life,” he wrote in his memoir, “I’d harbored resentment at the world.”
Those emotions, rooted in a bad childhood and subtilized but not healed by his academic success, have been disciplined into an essential resource in Vance’s political campaigning. The educational system that was so good to him is one of his central targets. “Elite universities,” he said recently on Twitter, “have become expensive day-care centers for coddled children.” To the extent that his ire is genuine and not merely rhetorical — perhaps a nonexistent distinction in a politician — it is occasioned not only by political convenience (who does like universities these days? Certainly not the Republican electorate) but also by a wounded sense of the distance between the world of his childhood and the hallways of Yale.
In Elegy, Vance already began to convert those wounds into the pat language of the campaign memoir. “Yale Law, with its prestige and privilege,” he wrote, “was a culture shock unlike anything I had ever experienced.” He took great pride in his degree, a pride commensurate, as he presents it, with the sense of shamed marginality (“like an awe-struck tourist”) with which he arrived. Those motifs — of the provincial arriviste, the outsider admitted to the halls of power, the “hillbilly” suddenly surrounded by the rulers of the universe and their pampered offspring — are the matrix from which his political power springs.
They are potent figures, and it is Vance’s good luck that the university, which Americans have never quite known whether to love or hate, is as resonant a symbol as it has ever been in our politics. As a matter of personal psychology, Vance himself used to express at least as much affection for the university as contempt for it. As Eboo Patel has observed recently in our pages, Elegy contains a paean to the university’s capacity to bring students from radically different backgrounds into a common conversation that wouldn’t be out of place in a college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion brochure. Vance remembers his favorite constitutional-law seminar — its members “became kind of a family for me” — this way: “We called ourselves the island of misfit toys … a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the supersmart 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.”
The “supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants” was Usha Chilukuri, who became literal family when she married Vance, in 2014. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a molecular biologist and a provost of the University of California at San Diego. Usha’s 96-year-old great-aunt, Shanthamma Chilukuri, is a physics professor in India. Vance’s extended family is now replete with the enemy.
The schizophrenic heart of Republican populism’s attitude toward higher education is differently expressed by Donald Trump, whose notorious brag that “the poorly educated love me” has the disarming virtue of transparency: Trump wants to wow the uneducated, but he does not identify with them. On the contrary, he is fond of insisting that “I went to the best schools,” as he told a Michigan crowd in 2019. And he loves to invoke his uncle, the late John G. Trump, a distinguished physicist who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A typical boast: “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”
In fact, unlike Vance, Trump doesn’t ever seem to have been much of a student. Had he been born into Vance’s circumstances, Yale Law would not have been his destination. But both men want everyone, educated and uneducated alike, to give them the respect they believe their educations have earned them — even as they want everyone to hate the professoriate. Managing that apparent contradiction will be the task of a great deal of higher-ed-related campaign rhetoric in the coming months.
