U.S.A. higher education - dismayed with Trump

Higher education faculty and administrators have not been silent about their opposition to Donald Trump over the last four years but have they done enough to draw attention to the dangers that ultimately brought the U.S.A. to an attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021? There are so many failures that must be accepted and, as a leadership educator, I will continue to ponder what went wrong over the last four years for some time.

Responding to the destruction of January 6, 2021, there have been numerous condemnations and calls for Donald Trump's resignation, impeachment, or invocation of the provision of the 25th amendment. They include:

• Numerous higher education leaders immediately condemned the insurrection and Donald Trump's encouragement that turned protest into riots.
• Additional university presidential condemnations followed on November 7, 2021.
• The President of Wesleyan University called for higher education to return to liberal education core principles to strengthen U.S.A. democracy and later proposed inequality, connection, and compassion as essential elements to address in order to improve it.
• Faculty and staff of Wheaton College condemned the misappropriation of Christian symbols and language used in the insurrection.

It what some view as one of the most consequential immediate actions, Twitter temporarily and later permanently banned Trump from his favorite platform and megaphone. While critics claim Twitter's move is akin to silencing free speech, others see it as a powerful ethical decision that will have implications far into the future. Ben Stoviak, an instructional designer and graduate student in counseling, opined, "Twitter demanded that we speak truth to power. And it instructed us through example not to provide power to voices that seek to dismantle, alter or obliterate a truth-loving disposition that higher education so often cultivates through a complex and intentionally designed enrichment of students' lives."

Hundreds of political scientists deplored the insurrection attempt and Trump's role in it saying, "The President's actions show he is unwilling or unable to fulfill his oath to protect and defend the Constitution. He should be removed from office immediately before further violence takes place or further damage is done to our democracy." Their statement was subsequently revised to assert the importance of accountability rather than a "both sides" equivocation advocated in the first statement. Key questions about public statements include; have university leaders, both faculty and presidents, done enough and have their statements had purposeful and significant impact? In the flurry of condemnations, some scholars are urging more focus on, or a return to, democratic education; among them:

• Colleen Flaherty - by returning to the humanities
• Tracy Fitzsimmons - by emphasizing critical thinking
• William Tierney - by providing hope and enabling a better tomorrow
• John Kroger - by preserving academic freedom possible only in a democratic society
• Greta Anderson - by discouraging the spread of disinformation on campus and not conflating mob violence with protected political speech
• Dennis Jacobs and Patrick Hornbeck - by improving information and scientific literacy and the depth and quality of discourse
• Law School Deans - by restoring confidence in the rule of law
• Asheesh Kapur Siddique - warns that education is only one part of a broader matrix of social relations that have to be fixed

Extreme irony unfolded with Donald Trump's release of the 1776 Commission report, a statement discredited by scholars that called for more patriotic education in schools. On President Biden's first day in office, the Commission that drafted the report was disbanded and the report taken off the White House website. However, the 1776 Report lives on through its authors' commitment to publish the report. 

Determining if, and how, a university president responds to public concerns is an important communications question. The fact that the higher degree of indignation now being expressed comes so late is an example of misjudgment. In many ways, coming late to the realization of the deep danger of an unbalanced narcissist as President of the United States is not surprising. The wave of populism and xenophobia that brought Trump to office was hard to contradict and so many of us continued to deny how bad it could become. Now the U.S.A. knows and the rest of the world is watching.