Why Does William Deresiewicz Believe the Culture of Elite Universities Elected Trump?

A former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz has become one of the country’s most erudite and insightful commentators on the cultural trends that have remade higher education on elite campuses. He is a prolific essayist and the author of four books, including Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite (2014), which is based on an essay in the American Scholar that went viral, and which argued that the country’s most prestigious colleges were producing conformist, incurious careerists riven with status anxieties and uninterested in self-discovery or critical thinking.

Deresiewicz remains a sharp critic of elite universities’ self-congratulatory self-fashioning, and of their dogmatic commitment to a set of cosmopolitan progressive cultural beliefs around issues of race, gender and sexuality. And he has been arguing for some time – and with pointed urgency in the wake of Trump’s 2024 re-election – that the culture of the elite universities is no longer confined to their campuses, but rather has been colonizing the broader culture of blue urban America. With disastrous results for the Democratic Party, and, by extension, the country.

So we welcomed Bill on to the latest episode to talk about what has gone wrong with elite education in America, and how and why it has contributed to the current political disaster of Trump's ascendency. It’s a fascinating (for us, former grad students ourselves) and candid conversation, one in which Deresiewicz pulls no punches, arguing that the rise of wokeness and identity politics in academia has undermined liberal values and led to a rejection of enlightenment principles. The conversation also delves into the broader implications of these trends for American society and politics, including the disconnect between academic elites and working-class voters.

As Bill tells us, “This politics that had incubated in the academy for a long time, had leaped the walls of the zoo and was now running loose in the country… it is rhetoric of a very extreme variety, and it is now driving a certain segment of our politics. And outside of very blue areas… people don’t want it.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

Outside sources: 

William Deresiewicz, “On Political Correctness: Power, class and the new campus religion,” The American Scholar, March 6, 2017

William Dereseiwicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite, Free Press (2014).

William Deresiewicz, “Academe’s Divorce from Reality: Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 21. 2024

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