Is the American University Ready for Donald Trump?

In a year of the unexpected, one thing surprises me more than anything else: Cosmopolitan America is trying to take the white working class seriously.

The white working class has spoken. It spoke for Bernie Sanders and it spoke for Donald Trump. And so in the run-up to Election Day, the media’s been churning out feature after feature on “forgotten middle America.” Even Foreign Affairs is getting in on the action!

But at Harvard, cosmopolitan America’s most famous training ground, while there are plenty of Sanders voters to be found, there are almost no Trump supporters at all.

You’d think that Harvard would try to understand Trumpism better—it’s chock-full of sympathetic, unobjectionable liberals who often agree with Trump on free trade and campaign finance. But Harvard the University has trouble processing the Trump phenomenon because Harvard the Admissions Office and Harvard the Research Institution are not particularly interested in the archetypal white working-class Trump voter. The last 18 months have demonstrated that the sentiment is wholly reciprocated. And that’s a shame, because Harvard has so much to contribute to our understanding of Trump’s rise.

The first bone Trump’s original base has to pick with Harvard is that it is unrepresentative, particularly with respect to them. The slogan of Trumpism is “unfair”—unfair racial preferences, unfair trade deals, unfair Supreme Court decisions, unfair elections, unfair everything. And the truth is that if working-class and lower-middle-class Trumpites (in my experience, the most fervent kind of Trump supporter), understood how unrepresentative Harvard is they would try to burn it to the ground.

Income is a popular talking point, and last year, the median Harvard senior was raised in a household making more than $125,000 a year. That’s two and a half times greater than the national median.

Moreover, if there’s a working-class student at Harvard, that person’s very unlikely to be white. We can argue whether race-based affirmative action is a good thing. We cannot deny that the way Harvard does it, race-based affirmative action disproportionately hurts the white working class because it is not coupled with a sufficient commitment to economically based affirmative action. Poor white people are just as incapable of paying for test prep as poor minorities, after all. If you don’t see classic Trump voters around campus, it’s not because they don’t want to be here, it’s because we won’t let them in. Last year, only 8.9 percent of white Harvard seniors were first-generation college students (not a perfect stand-in for class, but close enough). This is even smaller than the figure for South Asians (10 percent), the single wealthiest ethnic group in the United States. (If you were wondering, Hispanics are at 33 percent.) With barely any representation from Trump’s demographic base, how exactly can a student community like Harvard’s approach the Trump phenomenon in any intellectually rigorous way? As prejudiced as many of Trump’s views have been, if we are not going to provide a forum where we can approach them head-on, we are not going to figure out how to change anybody’s minds. That process starts with taking an honest look at why Trumpites vote the way they do. We can’t do that without actually meeting Trump voters, and students just can’t do that here. If we brought in more students who are demographically likelier to vote Trump, we’d dim the flames of Trumpism a little, and we’d learn about Trump voters a lot.

The second big issue is that Trumpism is in large part a rejection of experts, and in 2016 Trump’s voters fervently rejected the sort of policy wonks that tend to congregate at places like Harvard. The kneejerk reaction is to cry anti-intellectualism. There’s still more to it than that.

Speaking broadly, Trump’s base doesn’t feel like Harvard has the answers they need. If I might hazard a suggestion, it’s because Harvard has chosen to focus on the plights of minorities far more discrete and insular than the white working class. A university whose human-studies professors predominantly specialize in ethnic studies or critical legal studies (or, for that matter, in computer science or art history or financial modeling) is hardly the sort of school that is best placed to understand the rise of Donald Trump. And it’s not just Harvard—across the board, grant funding in sociology and anthropology is rarely going to go to somebody who wants to study the plight of the lower-middle- or working-class white American. But if you were looking for a university with the prestige and the resources to buck that trend, you’d probably put your finger on a school like Harvard. The new trend might as well start with us.

Even now we can make a difference. Harvard does have people who can shed light, little by little, on how the Trump base feels. We have economists who can talk about wage stagnation and sociologists who’ve explored the soaring price of rent. We have policy experts in every field known to man. But as Colin Powell noted, coaches who have never played lack a certain credibility, and most of our professors did not come from the white working class. Even fewer have devoted their careers to studying it specifically.

The credibility issue can’t be solved overnight. (It doesn’t help that New England’s universities have the most liberal faculties in the country by a factor of five.) But even coaches who have never played the game can win over their players with success. We need to offer clear, coherent, and actionable answers to the problems of the white working class—and so far we have failed to provide them.

Until that happens, I leave you with the fact that the American university was not ready for Donald Trump in 2016. And I’m not sure we’re going to be ready for him in 2020.

Perhaps somebody will understand why Trump voters feel the way they do, connect with them, and channel their energies into a different direction. But all the evidence suggests that the person to do this will not be found at Harvard.

Winston Shi is a current first-year at Harvard Law School. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.