New York Times Op-Ed: Universities Like Yale Need a Reckoning, by David W. Blight (Yale):
The worst thing we university liberals could do right now is to keep wondering why “they” hate us, why blue-collar workers seem to vote — as we understand it — against their own interests in sidling up to an authoritarian in a red tie who courts other billionaires, or why human nature itself did not come through for us and make the arc of history bend toward justice as we define it.
History has been waiting to explode our hubris; and sometimes, even as we have facts, truth and rule of law on our side, we make ourselves good targets with our jargon, our righteousness and our fragmentation. We are out of touch with working class Americans, even if the policies that Democrats have enacted work for them. ,,,
In what lies ahead, liberal intellectuals will have to take the offensive in these wars on the fronts worth fighting for: saving and reviving public schools against the right’s effort to kill them; a genuine, substantive national commemoration of American independence in 2026, lest we allow Trumpists to own and tell our national story; and a coherent economic plan that reaches and convinces working Americans we are on their side and not simply stuffy academic theorists. We — a difficult pronoun in America just now — must look in the mirror to know why we have already lost some battles and social respect and part of our democracy.
The political disaster of Mr. Trump’s re-election is as potentially devastating to Democrats as 1800 was to the Federalists, or 1860 to the 19th-century Democrats, or 1874 to Reconstruction-era Republicans, or Ronald Reagan’s 1980 defeat of the Democrats’ New Deal coalition or Mitt Romney’s defeat to the 2012 Republicans. Democrats need to be searching their souls and asking why growing swaths of Americans, especially among the working class, men under 30 who appear to have voted for Trump by a 14-point margin, and those who do not attend college (more than half the country), distrust, even hate, “us.” …
Election outcomes, if nothing else can, should make us aware that substantial parts of our society may like to know why history or science or art themselves even matter in their daily lives. “We” know they do, but “they” are scared by the price of milk, and tuition, and by hurricanes. Universities like the one at which I am privileged to teach, need their own reckonings that can make us look outward, to get outside of ourselves and do what we do best — create knowledge and teach about and to the whole world, not merely to those within our own gates in language only we can hope to understand.
Trumpism is a dire threat to all that universities believe in, but let us not forget that democracies tend to die from within, not by conquest.
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