Higher Education in the Time of Trump and Beyond: Resistance and Critique

Abstract

The current Qualitative Inquiry partial special issue titled “Higher Education in the Time of Trump and Beyond: Resistance and Critique” is based on a similarly themed plenary panel that was to take place at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2020. Alas, like so many other events, it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current Qualitative Inquiry partial special issue titled “Higher Education in the Time of Trump and Beyond: Resistance and Critique” is based on a similarly themed plenary panel that was to take place at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2020. Alas, like so many other events, it was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite my privileged position as a White, heterosexual male with permanent work, a steady income, and a significant support network, the sudden onset of the pandemic knocked my work–life balance well off-kilter. The ability to fulfill my commitments suffered, not least my undertaking to write these notes.

Of course, the pandemic is an undercurrent that flows throughout these papers. Professionally, it often meant publication delays, canceled panels and gatherings, and the hard work of covering for colleagues who could not be there. In our home lives, the fear of uneven access to safety and medical care was soon eclipsed by the anguish we felt as suffering and death came to our own communities and too often through the door of our own households. Even those of us whose families have so far come through unscathed can’t escape the stark legacy of what the pandemic further revealed: the massive inequalities in access to health care and other vital services, the failure of authorities to message effectively during a public health crisis, and the inescapable sense that consensus—about anything—has been permanently rendered impossible. The pandemic also served as a humbling reminder that humans are not in control of everything—Some systems are bigger than us.

It is clear that we have been living and working during the populist high tide of a conservative and authoritarian movement. Have we ourselves been swamped by it? And if we are still standing on the shore, can our expertise and our experiences be deployed to construct a breakwater—that defense that our society needs more than ever—of critical thought, justice, and evidence-based action?

In their own way, each article in this volume takes up that very challenge. Threading its way through each is the notion of a White scare(d) (Spooner, in press)—a fear of losing one’s privileged position. It can propel a young White man to head out armed toward a Black Lives Matter protest with the intent to seek violence, or convince lawmakers in 35 states (and counting) to work to ban Critical Race Theory and other equity-seeking initiatives Alfonseca (2022). It is the fear that reduces our positionality in relation to each other, to choose corruption and harmful public policy rather than helping the perceived “other”; to opt for us versus them. As Kalb and Kuo (2018) put it,

These racial disparities are not simply lagging indicators of our racist past but rather the product of repeated political compromises intended to preserve our democratic stability by finding new and different ways to reassure white voters of their privileged place. (pp. 61–62)

And surely, it is a similar fear that is at the root of the suspension of rights, freedoms, and civil liberties during times of crisis. This is experienced more profoundly by individuals whose ethnic background or citizenship status can be called into question or otherwise minoritized. In the specific case of these special issue papers, this often leads to the question: which groups belong “inside” the academy, which are tolerated, and which are simply excluded?

Douglass (2021) explains,

. . . isolationist, anti-globalist leanings of neo-nationalist governments have a significant impact on universities, which are inherently globally engaged institutions. The impact is not only felt in illiberal democracies. In Europe, for example, restrictions on civil liberties, including the persecution of academics, affects the global flow of talent mobility. One version of this story is the flight, or attempted flight, of students and faculty from repressive governments, such as those of Turkey, Hungary, and Poland. The United Kingdom and the United States provide another example: in the wake of Brexit and during Donald J. Trump’s presidency, both countries placed new restrictions on international faculty and graduate students attempting to obtain visas to study and pursue research. Trump instituted a ban on students from a group of largely Muslim-populated countries, and his administration’s concerns with academic espionage led to new barriers to collaborative research with international colleagues. (pp. 16–17)

Echoing these concerns, Ayala, Fine, Cielo Mendez, Mendoza, Rivera, Finesurrey, Villeda, Thelusca, Mena, Azzam, Galletta, Houston, jones, and Mungo begin their article by observing

It is hard to know where to begin, writing mid-COVID crisis, as universities also tremble, as racial and class inequities are in full relief, health disparities, who is deemed “essential,” who is unemployed, who will be without housing or health care, who may be deported as Trump and his colleagues take advantage of “crisis” to pursue corporate, and White supremacist, anti-immigrant national policy.

For a deeper examination of such questions, this partial special issue turns to three articles beginning with “A Welcome, a Warning, and a Wish: On Entering a Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership for Social Justice in the Year 2020,” in which Bryant Keith Alexander encourages students and readers to ponder

What is our role in resistance and critique in the continued necessity to address the social scourge of racism and violence on Black and Brown bodies in this country? What is the role of learned folks like you and me—in making a difference?

Alexander examines how his own approach has been informed by notions on the complexity of intersectionality:

These ways of thinking, researching, writing about, describing, and articulating the lived experience of people—mostly Black people and members of the LGBTQ+ community in shifting aspects of cultural life and my own positionality within those locations—has shaped my sense of self and my social responsibilities.

As he gracefully and profoundly articulates,

I am fixated on the notion of rivers. Not the romanticization of the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi but the turbulent conflux of myopic leadership, indiscriminate disease, and racism as the persistent scourge on blackness in this country.

Next, in the present trilogy, Jennifer Ayala, Michelle Fine, Maria del Cielo Mendez, Andrea Nikté Juarez Mendoza, Juan Carlos Garcia Rivera, Samuel Finesurrey, Ariadna Villeda, Hermanica Thelusca, Viandry Mena, Karim Azzam, Anne Galletta, Angelica Houston, vanessa jones, and Dion Mungo share “ENCUENTROS: Decolonizing the Academy and Mobilizing for Justice.” A powerful scholarly piece that is at once testimony and poetry stretching across four colleges and universities—Saint Peter’s, Cleveland State, The Graduate Center, and Guttman Community College at CUNY—in which they lay bare just how

. . . our pedagogy/curriculum/community engagement/scholarship is a braid of commitments toward academic responseability to the lives of our students, the journeys and struggles they carry, the families they live with, the wisdom buried in their cultural biographies, and the communities they reside in/come from. We ask separately and together, how can the academy be accountable to communities under siege in the era of Trump—but of course also before him, after and always? How can we be critically response-able—as teachers, researchers, activists—to the temblores our students carry, to the journeys their ancestors forged, the struggles they represent, and even to those far away who are assaulted “out of sight” by U.S. state violence?

Proactively they ask,

What would universities look like if they had as much courage as their undocumented students, as the most vulnerable have to show daily? In these times where we can view the pandemic as a portal, as Roy (2020) invites, there is the opportunity to reshape the university into the worlds our students need and deserve.

Rounding out this forceful trilogy, in “Trumpocalypse and the Historical Limits of Higher Education Policy: Making the Case for Study/Struggle,” Leslie A. Williams and Sandy Grande begin with

. . . Trump’s targeted higher education agenda, focusing on his demonstrated antipathy toward low-income, racially minoritized, and immigrant groups which, in turn, reveal his commitment to protecting White supremacy. While the administration’s efforts to reduce financial aid and eradicate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Turning their focus to “. . . the efforts to eliminate affirmative action in higher education admissions as the exemplar of Trump’s ideological campaign.” They further explain, “While each of these myopic policy initiatives merits closer examination, we focus here on affirmative action as a sort of bellwether of the broader landscape on race and higher education.” Moving to a discussion centered on “. . . the assumption that the settler state of ‘America’ is beyond reform and by extension, so is the settler university”; offering a series of provocations beyond reform, they conclude,

While we may rightfully fear the impact of exclusion—on self, on career, on family, on community—we need to also consider the price of belonging. What are the costs of being invited to the table, of being included in the dialogue, of being the first, the only, to being singled out as one of the good ones? In other words, capitalism cannot include and diversify its way out of White supremacy.

Each article in this special issue is a reminder of how the institutions which together contribute to healthy democracies do not defend themselves (Snyder, 2017). It is incumbent on us to defend them, hold them to their aspirational ideals, or to re-imagine them if they are not serving to bring about a better, more equitable world. While each article puts into evidence how to participate within, push against, and defend the institution of higher learning, the last features a provocation for us to aim beyond reform and to re-build higher education altogether.