RUTHFULLY YOURS

So, Donald Trump won the presidential election, and colleges and universities around the country are predictably canceling classes and exams because students are predictably too devastated to be able to do their schoolwork.

It’s everywhere. A professor at University of Michigan postponed an exam after too many students complained about their “very serious” stress. Columbia University postponed midterms, a Yale University professor made an exam optional, a University of Iowa professor canceled classes and a University of Connecticut professor excused class absences — all because their students just absolutely could not function knowing that they’d have to live in a country where their president would not be the president that they wanted. And it’s not even just the students — a University of Rochester professor canceled all of his meetings with students the day after the election because he decided he just could not bear to talk about it with them.

Reading all of these stories, I really have to wonder: Do any of these people realize that this kind of behavior is exactly why Donald Trump won? The initial appeal of Donald Trump was that he served as a long-awaited contrast to the infantilization and absurd demands for political correctness and “safe spaces” sweeping our society, and the way these people are responding is only reminding Trump voters why they did what they did.

First of all, let me say that I’m far from surprised that these kids are having mental breakdowns over this. Throughout the campaign, the mere sight of “Trump 2016” written in chalk was enough for students to demand a safe space. A professor at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington erased Trump chalkings on campus so students wouldn’t have to see them. A Bias Response Team at Skidmore College determined that writing “Make America Great Again” on dry-erase boards amounted to performing “racialized, targeted attacks.” Realizing that you are going to have to deal with Donald Trump being the president must be a hell of a lot to handle after you’ve been conditioned to believe you shouldn’t even have to deal with seeing his name or campaign slogan, so it makes a lot of sense that the reactions have been so extreme.

For the vast majority of Americans, November 9 only differed from the week preceding it in the lack of political ads permeating their media. For many, it was a welcome end to months upon months of hateful rhetoric and horrible slanders.

On many college campuses, however, it wasn’t the end of the campaign, but the beginning of Armaggedon or something.

At Yale University, supposedly one of the most elite institutions of higher learning in the country, an anonymous professor has decided to let students skip their midterms:

“I am getting many heartfelt notes from students who are in shock over the election returns,” the professor wrote in an email to his students, according to Yale Daily News Managing Editor Jon Victor tweeted.

“The ones I find most upsetting are those who fear, rightly or wrongly, for their own families. These students are requesting that the exam be postponed. On the other hand, I am sure that many students have sacrificed to prepare for the test …Therefore, I am making the exam optional.”

The professor told the class he would “calculate each student’s grade both with and without” the exam.

Remember when asking a professor to postpone an exam for anything short of a natural disaster was grounds to be laughed at? Ah, good times. Good times.

However, that professor’s decision was far from being the silliest example:

At Tufts University, arts and crafts were on offer. And the University of Kansas reminded students via social media of the therapy dogs available for comfort every other Wednesday.

Colleges nationwide scrambled to help students process Republican Donald Trump’s stunning election victory. They’re acknowledging that many students were up late watching results and so may not be at their sharpest in early-morning lectures. More so, they’re responding to a widespread sense of shock and despair on campuses to the victory of a candidate who offended Mexicans, Gold Star mothers, Muslims and the disabled during the course of the campaign.

[…]

“People are frustrated, people are just really sad and shocked,” said Trey Boynton, the director of multi-ethnic student affairs at the University of Michigan. “A lot of people are feeling like there has been a loss. We talked about grief today and about the loss of hope that this election would solidify the progress that was being made.”

There was a steady flow of students entering Ms. Boynton’s office Wednesday. They spent the day sprawled around the center, playing with Play-Doh and coloring in coloring books, as they sought comfort and distraction.

Play-Doh and coloring.

And they wonder why people don’t take them seriously.

In addition to the above examples, Cornell University hosted a “cry-in,” where staff provided distraught students with tissues and hot chocolate. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump wins. Race, sexuality and gender studies graduate students hardest hit.

People at American University burned American flags Wednesday at the Northwest, D.C. campus.

Several dozen people were gathered around a man who held up a small American flag while he pulled out a lighter and set it on fire. At one point, a woman tried to help.

“Watch as your precious little flag of patriarchic white supremacy burns in your f****** flesh and eyes,” the man said to the crowd while the upside down flag went up in flames.

Twitter user Saira tweeted videos of the scene, including one where a woman screamed “This is a representation of America” while holding up the burning flag.

Saira also reported people in the crowd chanting “F*** white America.”

Dissent is the new patriotism all over again. And aren’t these folks just so patriotic.

George Mason University is offering a “healing space” gathering for students distraught over President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory. The snowflakes unable to cope with Trump’s win gathered after Student Body President Nathan Pittman sent an email with the subject header “2016 Post-Election Healing Space” to all Mason students. It said:

Mason Community – Healing Space – Post 2016 ElectionStudent Leaders in the Mason Community have come together to provide a space for students to gather in the wake of yesterday’s Presidential Election. Please feel free to stop by and have conversations with other members of the Mason Community. Time: 7:30pm, Wednesday, November 9 Place: The Hub Ballroom, Fairfax Campus Hope to see many members of the Mason Community.

Earlier, the vice president for university life, Rose Pascarell, offered support services for students unable to cope with Trump’s win.
Psychological and counseling services were made available to students affected by Trump’s win. The email from Rose Pascarell states, in full:

We have just completed a long and hard-fought presidential election, which has forced a national dialogue on a number of issues and sparked a range of emotions. Reactions to the results span a continuum from jubilation and optimism to despair and fear and everything in between. Regardless of your perspective, we want to acknowledge the range of emotions that many in our Mason community have experienced throughout this process.University Life staff are here to provide support. You can visit any University Life Office for assistance. A list of University Life Offices is available at ulife.gmu.edu. For those who live on campus, Housing and Residence Life staff are also available 24/7. And counselors from Counseling and Psychological Services are available to provide support to any students experiencing emotional distress (caps.gmu.edu; 703-993-2380).

For many, this is a time to discuss and make sense of the outcomes. University Life will be hosting a post-election conversation space in Patriots Lounge, Student Union Building I, from 3:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. today and 10:00 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Snacks and refreshments will be provided. University Life staff members will also be present to provide support and refer students to campus resources, as needed. For those who prefer to take a break from politics, a list of other events and activities can be found at getconnected.gmu.edu. In addition to these gatherings, there will also be opportunities ahead for post-election analysis by some of our Mason faculty and content experts.

David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on political philosophy and American political thought. Among his books are The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (1990) and Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007).

One of the hoariest of twentieth-century academic clichés – Harvard philosophy professor George Santayana’s remark that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” – still has bite. As a political scientist and classroom teacher I see evidence of this truth on a regular basis. It was alarming to me to have discovered only recently that practically none of my students had ever heard about the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler’s demand for cession of the Czech Sudetenland and then returned home to announce that he had brought “peace in our time”—while in reality paving the way for what Winston Churchill subsequently called “the unnecessary war”.

Knowing about something isn’t a cure-all. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are old enough that they must at least have learned of Munich in their schoolbooks, but their policy toward Vladimir Putin and his Russia have been one long Munich. And once again an aggressive despot has taken appeasement as a license to acquire his neighbors’ lands. But though Clinton and Obama emulate Chamberlain, my students don’t hear Neville echo in their heads when they look at the daily headlines. Their historical ignorance cripples their ability to judge today’s politics and world affairs.

I also recently found that literally none of the 43 students enrolled in my introductory political philosophy class this semester, or some 20 in American Political Thought II last spring, had ever heard of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule – the 60th anniversary of which we should all be commemorating this week. (I have long had occasion to make reference to the uprising when teaching Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, because, as I learned from the late Harry Jaffa, and as a 1956 refugee who, remarkably, wound up teaching Civil War history at Gettysburg College partly confirms in an op-ed in the October 26 Wall Street Journal, a reading of that address was the last thing listeners could hear on Radio Free Hungary – before the broadcast was ended by the sound of machine-gun bullets as Soviet troops broke into the station. Only once I learned that my students had never heard of the uprising did I realize why my telling them that fact had had so little visible impact on them over the years.)

Since the College of the Holy Cross, where I teach, is highly selective in its admissions policies, I must assume that this lack of historical awareness is typical of my students’ generation – and of its immediate predecessors. It might help explain the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s socialism to the millennial generation – who naively equate it with the welfare-statism of the democratic Scandinavian nations that maintain vigorous systems of private business enterprise. They apparently know nothing of the despotism that socialism has consistently entailed, from the Paris Commune to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and the Castro brothers’ Cuba. But how could they know of the political history of socialist states? The decline of the study of political history was the theme of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, while my undergraduate teacher of diplomatic history, Walter LaFeber, lamented in the Chronicle of Higher Education decades ago, late in his career, that that discipline had effectively disappeared from the college curriculum.

A new academic study reveals left-wing dominance of top university faculties around the country — that’s not news. However, the study, published in Econ Journal Watch, also suggests that the dominance is likely to grow even stronger.

For professors younger than 36, the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans was an astonishing 22.7 to 1 at 40 top universities. The study sampled professors across the fields of economics, history, communications, law, and psychology, using information from Voter Lists Online’s Aristotle database.

“We found that younger faculty have higher [Democrat to Republican] ratios than do older faculty,” said Mitchell Langbert and Daniel Klein, two of the study’s three authors (Anthony Quain in the third). “The trend will continue.”

Moreover, the political registration of assistant professors is the most imbalanced of all categories, with a Democrat to Republican ratio of 19.3 to 1. Emeritus professors’ registrations are the least skewed at 8.6 to 1. These statistics suggest that top universities will only become less politically diverse as older professors retire and younger professors take over the commanding heights of their institutions.

Among all professors, the study found a Democrat to Republican to ratio of 11.5 to 1. Broken down by field, the results are even more depressing. Top history departments have a ratio of 33.5 to 1. Journalism and psychology are also extremely lacking in intellectual diversity, with ratios of 20 to 1 and 17.4 to 1, respectively. Law schools have a ratio of 8.6 to 1, while economics departments are the least skewed, at 4.5 to 1.

Hearing both sides of an argument is essential to learning and forming opinions. “One-sided ideological orientation leads to one-sided teaching, which leads to intolerance of alternative views,” write Langbert and Klein in an e-mail to me.“The ability to disagree requires practice, but neither students nor their professors practice balanced disagreement in universities, because faculty meetings are increasingly held in halls of mirrors.”

Jason Willick, a staff writer for The American Interest magazine, tells me of his similar concerns, “I worry that [the academic process] won’t work as well when it comes to politically charged research areas if all of the people involved belong to the same [political] tribe. Both liberals and conservatives are tribal and less likely to question the assumptions of others in their tribe.”

This study confirms the findings of a number of recent studies. One found there to be approximately three times the number of Marxists as Republicans in the social sciences. Another found that professors of sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and literature were “less likely to hire” a person whom they knew to be an NRA member than a Communist. Two in five sociologists said they were less likely to hire a person they knew to be an Evangelical Christian.