The Review: J.D. Vance's ambivalent intensities

What Trump's veep pick portends. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. J.D. Vance’s feelings about higher education are intense. “The professors,” the Republican vice-presidential nominee infamously [announced]( a few years ago, echoing Richard Nixon, “are the enemy.” But that intensity might mask an underlying ambivalence. As Gabriel Winant [put it]( in n+1, Vance’s “fame and fortune owe everything to the favorable intercession of Ivy League faculty.” Vance is indeed a pure product of the meritocracy, rising from the troubled origins he described in his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, through scholarships to Ohio State University and then law school at Yale, that citadel of elite formation. When someone who owes so much to the professors declares them the enemy, you might reasonably ask whether there’s more going on than meets the eye. In a recent work of literary criticism titled We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction From Vietnam to Trump (University of Virginia), the English professor Douglas Dowland names “resentment” as the key to Vance’s psychology and political rhetoric: “If Elegy asks us to feel, it asks us to feel resentment.” Nor is Vance himself at all coy about his propensity to the feeling. “For my entire life,” he wrote in his memoir, “I’d harbored resentment at the world.” Those emotions, rooted in a bad childhood and subtilized but not healed by his academic success, have been disciplined into an essential resource in Vance’s political campaigning. The educational system that was so good to him is one of his central targets. “Elite universities,” he said recently on Twitter, “have become expensive day-care centers for coddled children.” To the extent that his ire is genuine and not merely rhetorical — perhaps a nonexistent distinction in a politician — it is occasioned not only by political convenience (who does like universities these days? Certainly not the Republican electorate) but also by a wounded sense of the distance between the world of his childhood and the hallways of Yale. In Elegy, Vance already began to convert those wounds into the pat language of the campaign memoir. “Yale Law, with its prestige and privilege,” he wrote, “was a culture shock unlike anything I had ever experienced.” He took great pride in his degree, a pride commensurate, as he presents it, with the sense of shamed marginality (“like an awe-struck tourist”) with which he arrived. Those motifs — of the provincial arriviste, the outsider admitted to the halls of power, the “hillbilly” suddenly surrounded by the rulers of the universe and their pampered offspring — are the matrix from which his political power springs. They are potent figures, and it is Vance’s good luck that the university, which Americans have never quite known whether to love or hate, is as resonant a symbol as it has ever been in our politics. As a matter of personal psychology, Vance himself used to express at least as much affection for the university as contempt for it. As Eboo Patel has [observed]( recently in our pages, Elegy contains a paean to the university’s capacity to bring students from radically different backgrounds into a common conversation that wouldn’t be out of place in a college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion brochure. Vance remembers his favorite constitutional-law seminar — its members “became kind of a family for me” — this way: “We called ourselves the island of misfit toys … a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia, the supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants, a Black Canadian with decades’ worth of street smarts, a neuroscientist from Phoenix, an aspiring civil-rights attorney born a few minutes from Yale’s campus, and an extremely progressive lesbian with a fantastic sense of humor, among others.” The “supersmart daughter of Indian immigrants” was Usha Chilukuri, who became literal family when she married Vance, in 2014. Her mother, Lakshmi Chilukuri, is a molecular biologist and a provost of the University of California at San Diego. Usha’s 96-year-old great-aunt, Shanthamma Chilukuri, is a physics professor in India. Vance’s extended family is now replete with the enemy. The schizophrenic heart of Republican populism’s attitude toward higher education is differently expressed by Donald Trump, whose notorious brag that “the poorly educated love me” has the disarming virtue of transparency: Trump wants to wow the uneducated, but he does not identify with them. On the contrary, he is fond of insisting that “I went to the best schools,” as he told a Michigan crowd in 2019. And he loves to invoke his uncle, the late John G. Trump, a distinguished physicist who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A typical boast: “I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.” In fact, unlike Vance, Trump doesn’t ever seem to have been much of a student. Had he been born into Vance’s circumstances, Yale Law would not have been his destination. But both men want everyone, educated and uneducated alike, to give them the respect they believe their educations have earned them — even as they want everyone to hate the professoriate. Managing that apparent contradiction will be the task of a great deal of higher-ed-related campaign rhetoric in the coming months. SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. What about actual policy? Vance, a U.S. senator from Ohio, has promised to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The only major piece of legislation he’s introduced to that end, as far as I can tell, is a bill that, as Katherine Knott [reported]( in Inside Higher Ed, “would increase the excise tax on endowments’ net investment income from 1.4 percent to 35 percent for secular, private colleges and universities.” That’s an enormous increase, and it will be interesting to see what happens. Some activists on the left have also [argued]( for reducing wealthy universities’ various tax exemptions, and Vance’s language on this front could come from the left as easily as the right: “Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens, people who are struggling to put food on the table and buy Christmas presents this season?” Vance has also proposed a [law]( to “establish the Office of the Special Inspector General for Unlawful Discrimination in Higher Education within the Department of Education.” That bill, going nowhere in a Democratic Senate, would make it an Education Department priority to prosecute violations of SFFA vs. Harvard’s prohibition of affirmative action. As Vance told Rod Dreher in an [interview]( this year, “We need to really go after the university bureaucracy focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion.” And he invokes Harvard’s post-10/7 climate, as filtered through the congressional hearings on campus antisemitism: “What happened at Harvard is a perfect manifestation of the idea that the universities are not so much after the pursuit of truth, as they are about enforcing dogma and doctrine.” That dire state of affairs, on Vance’s interpretation, is in part attributable to preferential hiring practices whereby “obviously mediocre people are protected because they fit a particular political narrative.” Whatever the fate of his legislative proposals, it seems likely that the very central place DEI has assumed in the Republican political playbook, especially since October 7, remains assured. Then there is the question of academic freedom, under pressure in red states for the last several years. Vance’s rhetoric on this front is perhaps his most extreme. He hopes to “do what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary, which is basically say, ‘You’re not allowed to teach critical race theory anymore, you’re not allowed to teach critical gender theory anymore … You’re not allowed to do those things and get a dollar of federal money or a dollar of state money,’” as Vance [said]( in an interview with the podcaster Jack Murphy. When it comes to institutions of higher education, such curricular interference would run into significant legal hurdles; to date, of the 85 pieces of state-level legislation introduced to restrict college [DEI efforts]( none that directly intervene in curricula in this way have both passed and held up in court, with the exception of [Florida’s SB 266]( which [mandates]( that “general education core courses may not … include a curriculum that teaches identity politics … or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” Vance’s proposal, at least as phrased in the conversation with Murphy, goes much further than Florida’s SB 266. A federal ban on certain topics in the classroom would be the end of academic freedom as we know it. ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Library and Institutional Success Program | July 2024] The Chronicle is partnering with Ithaka S+R to host a brand new [professional development program for librarians]( in July. This innovative two-week program will help library leaders understand the many roles they might take on, boost the success of the campus library, and better align with their institution’s goals. Learn more about our seminars and workshops, and [register today]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks]( By Colin Dickey [STORY IMAGE]( The vexed legacy of Charles Fort. ADVERTISEMENT [The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks]( THE REVIEW | ESSAY [J.D. Vance Is Coming for Higher Ed]( By Eboo Patel [STORY IMAGE]( Trump’s pick for VP has academe in his sights. Recommended - “With all the best storytellers, whether it’s authors or directors or painters, you can feel when they’re doing it for them because it’s something they need to express, or when they’re doing it for commercial success and for other people to respond to. He makes films because he’s interested in them and maybe that’ll resonate. I think the more personal something is, the more universal it actually becomes.” That’s Emma Stone [talking]( to The New York Times about Yorgos Lanthimos’s newest film, Kinds of Kindness. (From May.) - “In Omaha in the 1990s, my public library still displayed a relic of this chapter of American progress in the form of the scalp of William Thompson, a settler attacked during a raid in 1867, who had preserved the lopped-off sliver of his head and had it tanned for posterity.” In the London Review of Books, Thomas Meaney [writes about]( the colonization of North America by way of three new books on the subject. - “Several decades after the taxonomic frenzy of 1830 to 1920, when Western scientists went deep into far-flung regions of the world, molecular genetics revolutionized our ability to classify species, and began vacuuming up funding while the analog field of taxonomy was left to languish.” In The New York Times, Robert Langellier [explains]( why taxonomy needs a renaissance. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Future of Graduate Education - The Chronicle Store]( [The Future of Graduate Education]( Graduate education has enjoyed a jump in enrollment over the past five years, but it faces a host of challenges. [Order this report]( for insights on the opportunities and pitfalls that graduate-program administrators must navigate. JOB OPPORTUNITIES [Search jobs on The Chronicle job board]( [Find Your Next Role Today]( Whether you are actively or passively searching for your next career opportunity, The Chronicle is here to support you throughout your job search. Get started now by [exploring 30,000+ openings]( or [signing up for job alerts](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. [Manage]( your newsletter preferences, [stop receiving]( this email, or [view]( our privacy policy. © 2024 [The Chronicle of Higher Education]( 1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037