When campus microaggressions are real: Glenn Reynolds

Shortly after the election, I noted that colleges and universities seemed to be taking sides, treating Hillary Clinton’s defeat by Donald Trump for the presidency as some sort of national calamity. In fact, with safe spaces, offers of counseling and therapy dogs, and so on, they seemed to be treating Trump’s victory as something more akin to a terrorist attack than an election result.  

In particular, I noted a campus email from University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel that, though it spoke of diversity, inclusion and respect for all points of view, made pretty clear that Trump’s victory was a bad thing, and suggested by implication that Trump supporters must be bad people. I thought that this wasn’t very nice, and certainly not within the spirit of diversity and inclusion, given that a large percentage of University of Michigan students had undoubtedly supported Trump, even if they were afraid to say so on campus.

It seems that things haven’t gotten any better at Michigan, and that there are similar problems elsewhere in higher education. A recent New York Times report notes that things are bad enough at Michigan and elsewhere that some conservative students say they need a “safe space” simply to talk about the election.

Michigan sophomore Amanda Delekta was “outraged” by professors’ assumption that everyone was unhappy about the election’s outcome, and by President Schlissel’s email offering counseling services. “The United States has not died. Democracy is more alive than ever. Simply put, the American people voted and Trump won.”

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That seems hard for some people to accept.  As the Times notes, “Conservative students who voted for Mr. Trump say that even though their candidate won, their views are not respected. . . .  Administrators are struggling to maintain a balance between political factions. But some college presidents have entered the fray with statements that seem more sympathetic to the left, in some cases provoking a backlash.” Yes.

Harvard student Emily Hall watched the election results at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and, as one of the minority of Trump supporters there, saw her pro-Hillary classmates literally sobbing as the results came in. “I felt bad for them,” she told The Boston Herald. “But I also recognize that people would not have felt bad for me if I had been the one crying.”

At least sometimes people are honest. When SUNY Buffalo’s law school held a forum on the election and its traumas, the Dean, Jim Gardner, remarked that if someone else had won, “we would not be here.” But he then went on to attribute Trump’s election to “profound democratic immaturity,” implying, I guess, that Trump supporters are immature. I’m sure that made the Trump supporters among his faculty and student body feel included.

People who study patterns of discrimination talk about behaviors like “othering,” about marginalization, and about microaggressions. But in my experience, these behaviors are prominent in the world of academia, and they’re often aimed at conservative or libertarian students and faculty who depart from whatever the current left-leaning orthodoxy is.

When professors or administrators act as if Trump and his supporters are uniquely evil, as opposed to simply one political coalition, they are engaging in “othering.” The message is that Trump — and, more significantly, his supporters on campus — aren’t really members of the community in good standing. They’re a dangerous “other” who must be closely watched, carefully scrutinized, thoroughly stigmatized, and maybe shunned.

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When Trump supporters, or campus Republicans or libertarians, find their perspectives excluded from events or reflected only in token fashion (a conservative professor I know was asked to do a panel on the election as the only conservative among 6 otherwise-leftist panelists), or are treated as outliers despite the fact that Trump won, that’s marginalization.

And the thousand tiny in-group signals constantly emitted by members of the university community, to the effect that leftists are good, Republicans are racists, and middle-class, working-class, or rural Americans are ignorant and bigoted, are microaggressions. And pretty common ones, most places.

Universities and their administrators are exquisitely sensitive to these kinds of things when they afflict people they care about, and almost wilfully blind to them when they affect people who — not to put too fine a point on it — they don’t really care about. If all the talk about diversity and inclusion is to be taken seriously, they’re going to have to work on recognizing the political diversity on their own campuses, and making those who hold different views feel included. Right now, many are doing a poor job. I hope that students, alumni, legislators and trustees will encourage them to do better.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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