The Trump era is reshaping how professors are teaching

Thought class would be an escape from one of the wildest elections in modern history? Think again.

Donald Trump’s unprecedented rise from political outsider to president, which included an uncanny ability to glide through controversies and a defeat of Hillary Clinton that pollsters didn't see coming, have forced college professors to rethink the way they teach.

Some are adding new readings to their syllabi to address concepts like authoritarianism and populism. Others are actively encouraging students to engage in conversations about difficult topics, hoping they’ll be exposed to opinions different from their own along the way.

For Jason Blakely, a political science professor at Pepperdine University, the 2016 election proved that ideological principles like constitutionalism and democracy are less “nonnegotiable” than he had thought.

“We’ve been making this assumption for a very long time that you only need to study democratic values,” he told USA TODAY College. “I think that that is just not really a broad enough way to study American political thought anymore.”

Blakely said he will start assigning readings that explore the upsides and downsides of authoritarianism, written by scholars who are "students and advocates" of that kind of system.

“People have this view that it always looks the same,” he says. “That’s naive, and it’s not really helpful.”

Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Michigan, has also adjusted her reading list to reflect what she sees as today's political landscape; for example, she now includes Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism. During the class immediately after Election Day, she decided to forgo what was on the syllabus and devote a session to discussing the election — to the students' delight.

“The students were so engaged with that conversation that even though the class was only an hour long, we continued to talk for another hour outside of class,” she says.

Now, Anderson teaches her introduction to political philosophy course with a greater focus on the political forces that shaped the 2016 race. She'll be focusing on the populist forces that carried Trump to victory as well as the harsh rhetoric towards immigrants and foreigners that energized many of his supporters.

Over the past several months, students at colleges and universities have played a central role in political activism. Millennials were a much-courted segment of the voting population. And the divisions exposed by the contentious election cycle have prompted a renewed focus on empathy among professors tasked with educating the next generation.

At Vanderbilt University, political science professor Marc Hetherington, for example, will task his students with interviewing people on the opposite side of the aisle. He's motivated by a concern that America is divided not only politically but also socially and culturally.

“My personal sense is that we’re not communicating particularly well across party lines any longer,” he says. “We don’t prefer the same food, we don’t watch the same shows, we don’t drink the same beer.”

But Jeremy Adelman, who teaches a massive open online course about global history at Princeton University, says he's noticed a “real eagerness to exchange ideas and compare experiences" in his class, which includes a broad spectrum of people ranging from college students to refugees.

And in light of the economic anxiety that prompted many Americans' votes for Trump, Adelman is currently crafting a new course: global history of the world through capitalism.

Whether or not professors have had to alter their readings or design completely new courses in the aftermath of Trump's victory, they expressed a universal hope that their classrooms could act as a safe haven for free exchange of ideas, despite the harsh divisions laid bare by the 2016 election.

"I hope my classroom is a place where conversations can happen that have stopped happening,” Blakely said. “We all just need to do a lot more of that.”