CHAPTER 6

The Polarization Cycle

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Isaac Newton’s third law of motion

We began this book with a presentation of three Great Untruths—ideas so out of tune with human flourishing that they harm anyone who embraces them. In Part II, we narrated a variety of campus events that have attracted national and sometimes global attention, and we showed how some students and professors involved in these events seem to have embraced the Great Untruths. Now, in Part III, we widen the lens and look at how we got here. Why did a set of interrelated ideas—which we have called a culture of safetyism—sweep through many universities between 2013 and 2017? Students who graduated from college in 2012 generally tell us that they saw little evidence of these trends. Students who began college at some elite universities in 2013 or 2014 tell us they saw the new culture arrive over the course of their four years. What is going on?

There is no simple answer. In Part III, we present six interacting explanatory threads: rising political polarization and cross-party animosity; rising levels of teen anxiety and depression; changes in parenting practices; the decline of free play; the growth of campus bureaucracy; and a rising passion for justice in response to major national events, combined with changing ideas about what justice requires. We believe that it is impossible to understand the state of higher education today without understanding all six. Before we present these threads, however, we must make two points explicitly and emphatically.

The first point is that there are different threads for different people. Part of the complexity of our story is that not all of the threads have influenced each person and group on campus equally. The rising political polarization in the United States, in which universities are increasingly seen as bastions of the left, has led to an increase in hostility and harassment from some off-campus right-wing individuals and groups. Some of these events qualify as hate crimes and are targeted especially at Jews and people of color. We discuss that thread in this chapter. Rising rates of teen depression and anxiety affect both boys and girls but have hit young women particularly hard (as you’ll see in chapter 7). The rise in overprotective or “helicopter” parenting and the decline of free play (chapters 8 and 9) have negatively affected kids from wealthier families (mostly white and Asian)1 more than kids from working class or poor families. The increase in the number of campus administrators, along with the scope of their duties, may be having an effect at all schools (chapter 10), but new ideas and stronger passions about social justice may matter most on campuses where students are more engaged politically (chapter 11).

The second point is that this is a book about good intentions gone awry. In all of the six chapters in this part of the book, you’ll read about people primarily acting from good or noble motivations. In most cases, the motive is to help or protect children or people seen as vulnerable or victimized. But as we all know, the road to hell can be paved with good intentions. Our goal in Part III is not to blame; it is to understand. Only by identifying and analyzing all six explanatory threads can we begin to talk about possible solutions, which we do in Part IV.

The Boiling Point

In the last two chapters, we told many stories about students and faculty reacting to words in ways that seemed inappropriate, over-the-top, and in some cases, aggressive. Whether about a response to an email, an effort to shout a speaker down, or a petition to denounce a colleague, the stories in this book have mostly presented problems on campus that arise from a part of the political left. Sometimes the targets were on the right (such as Heather Mac Donald and Amy Wax), but more often the targets were themselves on the left (such as Nicholas and Erika Christakis, Rebecca Tuvel, Bret Weinstein, and the professors who taught the humanities course at Reed College). If we were to limit our analysis to events on campus, this would be most of the story. A set of new ideas about speech, violence, and safety has emerged on the far left in recent years, and the debate on campus is largely a debate within the left, pitting (mostly) older progressives, who generally have an expansive notion of free speech, against (mostly) younger progressives, who are more likely to support some limitations on speech in the name of inclusion.2

But if we step back and look at American universities as complex institutions nested within a larger society that has been growing steadily more divided, angry, and polarized, we begin to see the left and the right locked into a game of mutual provocation and reciprocal outrage that is an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve in this book. Allison Stanger, the Middlebury professor who suffered a concussion at the hands of protesters, said exactly this in a New York Times essay titled “Understanding the Angry Mob at Middlebury That Gave Me a Concussion.”3 In it, she wrote:

In the days after the violence, some have spun this story as one about what’s wrong with elite colleges and universities, our coddled youth or intolerant liberalism. Those analyses are incomplete. Political life and discourse in the United States is at a boiling point, and nowhere is the reaction to that more heightened than on college campuses.

She next listed several of the ways in which President Trump had insulted or offended members of marginalized groups while inspiring hateful speech among many of his followers, and added: “That is the context into which Dr. Murray walked [where he] was so profoundly misunderstood.”

We agree with Stanger that the national political context is an essential part of any story about what has been happening on college campuses in recent years. Things are indeed at a “boiling point” in the United States. You can see the temperature rising in the next two figures.

Figure 6.1 comes from the Pew Research Center, which in 1994 began asking a nationally representative sample of Americans about their level of agreement with a set of ten policy statements, and repeated the survey every few years. The policy statements include “Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and healthcare,” and “The best way to ensure peace is through military strength.”4 Pew computes how far apart members of different groups are on each issue, then takes the average of the absolute values of those differences across all ten statements. As you can see in the line near the bottom marked “Gender,” men and women are just about the same distance apart in 2017 (7 points) as they were in 1994 (9 points). Only two of the lines show a clear increase. People who attend religious services regularly are now 11 points away from those who never attend, compared to just 5 points apart in 1994. But that 6-point increase is dwarfed by the 21-point increase in the distance between Republicans and Democrats over the same time period, nearly all of it occurring since 2004.

Issue Polarization

FIGURE 6.1. The distance between Republicans and Democrats, on a set of 10 policy questions, has grown very large since 2004. Differences by race, gender, education, and age have not changed much since 1994. (Source: Pew Research Center.)

If the people on the “other side” are moving farther and farther away from you on a broad set of moral and political issues, it stands to reason that you would feel more and more negatively toward them. Figure 6.2 shows that this has been happening. Every two years, the American National Election Study measures Americans’ attitudes on a variety of topics. In part of the survey, the researchers use a “feeling thermometer,” which is a set of questions asking respondents to rate a variety of groups and institutions on a scale where 0 is defined as “very cold or unfavorable” and 100 is defined as “very warm or favorable.” The top two lines in the graph show that when Republicans and Democrats are asked to rate their own party, the lines are in positive territory and haven’t moved much since the 1970s.5 The bottom two lines show what they think about the other party. These lines have always been in negative territory, but many will be surprised to see that the cross-party ratings weren’t all that negative from the 1970s until 1990—they hovered in the 40s. It’s only in the 1990s that the lines begin to drop, with a plunge between 2008 and 2012 (the years of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street).

Affective Polarization

FIGURE 6.2. Affective partisan polarization. Americans’ feelings toward their own party have barely changed since the 1970s, but Americans have become increasingly “cold” or hostile toward the other party since the 1990s. (Source: American National Election Study,6 plotted by Iyengar and Krupenkin, 2018.)

Why is this happening? There are many reasons, but in order to make sense of America’s current predicament, you have to start by recognizing that the mid-twentieth century was a historical anomaly—a period of unusually low political polarization and cross-party animosity7 combined with generally high levels of social trust and trust in government.8 From the 1940s to around 1980, American politics was about as centrist and bipartisan as it has ever been. One reason is that, during and prior to this period, the country faced a series of common challenges and enemies, including the Great Depression, the Axis Powers during World War II, and the Soviets during the Cold War. Given the psychology of tribalism that we described in chapter 3, the loss of a common enemy after the collapse of the Soviet Union can be expected to lead to more intratribal conflict.

A second major reason is that, since the 1970s, Americans have been increasingly self-segregating into politically homogeneous communities, as Bill Bishop showed in his influential 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. Subsequent research has shown that we live in increasingly economically and politically segregated communities right down to the city block.9 The two major political parties have sorted themselves along similar lines: as the Republican Party becomes disproportionately older, white, rural, male, and Christian, the Democratic Party is increasingly young, nonwhite, urban, female, and nonreligious.10 As political scientists Shanto Iyengar and Masha Krupenkin put it, “The result is that today, differences in party affiliation go hand in glove with differences in world view and individuals’ sense of social and cultural identity.”11

A third major reason is the media environment, which has changed in ways that foster division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s, there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s, most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo chamber. And then there’s the “filter bubble,” in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds.12 Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

A fourth reason is the increasingly bitter hostility in Congress. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives for about sixty years, with only brief interruptions in the mid- to late twentieth century, but their dominance ended in 1994, when the Republicans swept to victory under Newt Gingrich, who became Speaker of the House. Gingrich then imposed a set of reforms intended to discourage his many new members from forging the sort of personal relationships across party lines that had been normal in previous decades.13 For example, Gingrich changed the work schedule to ensure that all business was done midweek, and then he encouraged his members not to move their families from their home districts, and instead fly to Washington for a few days each week. Gingrich wanted a more cohesive and combative Republican team, and he got it. The more combative norms then filtered up to the Senate as well (though in weaker form). With control shifting back and forth several times since 1995, and with so much at stake with each shift, norms of civility and possibilities for bipartisanship have nearly disappeared. As political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, “Parties [have] come to view each other not as legitimate rivals but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.”14

These four trends, plus many more,15 have combined to produce a very unfortunate change in the dynamics of American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship. In a recent review of data on “affective polarization” (the degree to which members of each party feel negatively toward the other party), Iyengar and Krupenkin summarize the change like this:

Prior to the era of polarization, ingroup favoritism, that is, partisans’ enthusiasm for their party or candidate, was the driving force behind political participation. More recently, however, it is hostility toward the out-party that makes people more inclined to participate.16

In other words, Americans are now motivated to leave their couches to take part in political action not by love for their party’s candidate but by hatred of the other party’s candidate. Negative partisanship means that American politics is driven less by hope and more by the Untruth of Us Versus Them. “They” must be stopped, at all costs.

This is an essential part of our story. Americans now bear such animosity toward one another that it’s almost as if many are holding up signs saying, “Please tell me something horrible about the other side, I’ll believe anything!” Americans are now easily exploitable, and a large network of profit-driven media sites, political entrepreneurs, and foreign intelligence agencies are taking advantage of this vulnerability.

The vulnerability comes with an unfortunate asymmetry: the faculty and students at universities have shifted to the left since the 1990s, as we showed in the last chapter, while the “outrage industry” of talk radio, cable news networks, and conspiracy websites is more developed and effective on the right.17 (The mainstream media overall leans left,18 but the left simply never found a format or formula that could match the influence of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity.) Right-wing media has long loved to make fun of professors and stir up anger over “politically correct” practices spotted on university campuses. But as campus activism increased in 2015 and offered up an unending stream of dramatic cell phone videos (including students cursing at professors and shouting down speakers), right-wing media outlets began to devote far more attention to campus events, which they portrayed gleefully, usually stripped of any explanatory context. The rising expressions of anger from the left on campus, sometimes directed against conservative speakers, led to rising expressions of anger from the right, off campus, sometimes directed in threatening ways at left-leaning professors and students, which in turn triggered more anger from the left on campus . . . and the cycle repeats.

Outrage From the Off-Campus Right

In the last two chapters, we examined protests, shout-downs, open letters, and witch hunts originating from the left, because the left is the dominant force on most college campuses (leaving aside religious and military academies). But if we step back from campus, we see that some people and groups on the right engage in moralistic, aggressive, and intimidating actions aimed at campus, too.

We told the story of Evergreen State College, but we left some of its aftermath for this chapter. As we noted, three days after the Evergreen implosion began at Professor Weinstein’s door, when no national news outlets were covering the chaos, Weinstein agreed to appear on the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight. After the show aired, the backlash began. Three days after Weinstein’s appearance, a student protester posted an essay on the website Medium reporting that a spray-painted swastika appeared on the side of a seminar building, and that she and other protesters had been subjected to “doxxing” by the alt-right: “The faces, names and phone numbers of student organizers were published online on subreddits dedicated to harassing leftists and people of color,” she wrote.19 In a New York Times essay published weeks later, the student described protesters being harassed “with hundreds of phone calls, anonymous texts and terrifyingly specific threats of violence that show they know where we live and work.” She also recounted finding rape threats directed at her on online message boards.20 Sandra Kaiser, Evergreen’s vice president for college relations, said the college received “the most stunning wave of social-media harassment you can possibly imagine.”21 But the mob wasn’t just “phoning it in” from far away. Although it was quickly determined that the New Jersey man’s phone threat was not credible, right-wing extremist groups did visit campus. For example, the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division placed posters on campus buildings reading BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER and JOIN YOUR LOCAL NAZIS. Then they posted a video depicting their members, dressed in black, with faces obscured, walking across campus at night, taping up those posters.22

In physics, as Newton’s law tells us, every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. In a polarization spiral, however, for every action there is a disproportionate reaction. Many critics of campus protesters in 2015 accused them of overreacting to small things (such as Dean Spellman’s email at Claremont McKenna). But beginning in late 2016, we began to see more examples of off-campus overreaction from the right in response to speech by professors on the left.

Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in Newark, New Jersey, was hired in the spring of 2017 to teach Mass Communication and Popular Culture, as well as essay writing. Before coming to Essex, Durden was a motivational speaker, hosted her own talk show, appeared on various networks as a pop culture expert, and worked as a TV and movie producer. Then, on June 6, 2017, she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to defend a Black Lives Matter “all-black” Memorial Day party (at which she was not present) in Brooklyn, New York. At one point, in response to Carlson’s antagonistic questioning, she responded: “Boo-hoo-hoo. You white people are angry because you couldn’t use your ‘white privilege’ card to get invited.”23

Admittedly, what she said was provocative. But the “all-black” event was not at the college, so Durden wasn’t defending the exclusion of white students—in fact, no one has ever alleged that Durden discriminated against students. Nonetheless, Durden’s television appearance was met by wrath from the right; she received hate mail and anonymous threats, which included “I will come to your house and kill you dumb black bitch” and “Talk to me like you did that guy on Fox News, and I would beat you to a broken pulp and kick your throat in you racist devil.” Durden showed us many more, which we will not reprint here, but suffice it to say, they were horrifically racist, sexist, and threatening.

The barrage of vitriol and the threats of violence have had a lasting effect on Durden. “I still get knots in my stomach whenever I think about it or talk about it,” she told us in an email. “People say that things will get better because that’s the politically correct thing to say to someone in my position. But things don’t always get better, they sometimes get worse. And that’s how I am feeling.”24 To make matters worse, the college suspended Durden and launched an investigation, claiming they had been “immediately inundated” with complaints.25 FIRE filed records requests to see those alleged complaints, which Essex County College ignored until FIRE filed a lawsuit. As it turned out, the supposed deluge of complaints before the suspension amounted to a single email.26 Nonetheless, on June 23, the college president announced that Durden had been fired.27 Despite all of this, Durden tells us unequivocally that she doesn’t regret speaking out.

Professor Durden’s story is not unique. On Christmas Eve 2016, George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, posted the provocative tweet “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” The tweet went viral, amplified by a Russia-linked Twitter account pretending to be based in Tennessee.28 Taken at face value, the tweet sounds horrifying, but its meaning changes once you learn that “white genocide” is a term used by white nationalist groups to express their fear that mass immigration and racial intermarriage will eventually lead to the extinction of white people. As Ciccariello-Maher later explained: “‘White genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies. . . . It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”29 Despite initially promising Ciccariello-Maher that he would not face punishment for the tweet, Drexel quietly initiated an investigation in February 2017 and later barred him from campus, citing “safety concerns.” The investigation ended only because he resigned at the end of December 2017, one year after the initial tweet.30 Ciccariello-Maher said he was subjected to “nearly a year of harassment by right-wing, white-supremacist media outlets and internet mobs, after death threats and threats of violence” were directed against him and his family.31

On May 20, 2017, Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, gave a commencement speech at Hampshire College in which she called President Trump “a racist and sexist megalomaniac” who poses a threat to students’ futures. The next week, Fox News publicized excerpts from her speech, which they called an “anti-POTUS tirade.”32 By May 31, Taylor reported having received “more than fifty hate-filled and threatening emails,” some containing “specific threats of violence, including murder,” as well as “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum put in [her] head.”33 Out of concern for her safety and that of her family, Taylor canceled her future scheduled speeches.

Conservative readers may dismiss the three cases we just presented on the grounds that the professors said things that were aggressive or deliberately provocative, so what did they expect the reaction to be? Progressives may see the humor in “white genocide,” but if you make genocide jokes on Twitter, you’ve got to expect some people to take you literally. Therefore, one might conclude that if the three professors had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble. But speaking in a scholarly way is not necessarily enough. In June 2017, Sarah Bond, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Iowa, published an article in an online arts magazine, Hyperallergic, titled “Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color.”34 The title refers to the little-known fact that ancient Greek and Roman statues were usually painted with skin tones and bright colors, but when these buried and weathered statues were rediscovered during the Renaissance, the paint had worn off. Renaissance artists and their patrons believed that the unadorned white marble was part of the intended aesthetic, and these artists created new statues (such as Michelangelo’s David) using what they mistakenly believed was the Greco-Roman ideal.35 As a result, the white marble statues of the Renaissance have shaped our current image of what the ancient world must have looked like: white marble statues everywhere.

According to Bond, the erroneous idea that the Romans viewed white marble as depicting the idealized human form led to the idea among scholars in the nineteenth century that Romans were “white” (although there was no concept of a “white” race in ancient times). Bond wrote in her essay that the misunderstanding about white statues “provides further ammunition for white supremacists today, including groups like Identity Evropa, who use classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority.”36 This strikes us as a novel and interesting idea, which Bond illustrates with compelling photographs and links to academic articles. Regardless of her thoughtful and academic presentation, the outrage machine went into action.

UNIVERSITY PROF: USING WHITE MARBLE IN SCULPTURES IS RACIST AND CREATES “WHITE SUPREMACY,” read one headline.37 IOWA UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR SAYS “WHITE MARBLE” ACTUALLY INFLUENCES “WHITE SUPREMACIST” IDEAS, read another.38 On Twitter, Bond was called an “SJW moron” and people tweeted that they hoped she would be fired or die.39 She received death threats, calls for her firing, and a deluge of other online abuse.40 One headline captured how the polarization spiral looks from the right: LIBERAL PROFESSORS SAY BIZARRE THINGS—AND THEN BLAME THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA FOR REPORTING ON THEM.41 (The view from the left might very well be LIBERAL PROFESSORS SAY THINGS—AND THEN CONSERVATIVE MEDIA REPORT THEM AS IF PROFESSORS ARE CRAZY.)

The polarization cycle influencing university life since 2017 typically proceeds in this sequence:42

  1. A left-wing professor says or writes something provocative or inflammatory on social media, in mainstream media, in a lecture, or (less often) in an academic publication. The statement is often a reaction to perceived injustices committed by right-wing groups or politicians off campus. A video clip or screen shot is then shared on social media.

  2. Right-wing media outlets pick up the story and then retell it in ways that amplify the outrage, often taking it out of context and sometimes distorting the facts.43

  3. Dozens or even hundreds of people who hear about it write angry posts or comments on social media, or send emails to the professor, often including racist or sexist slurs, sometimes including threats of rape or death. Some people publicly call for the university to fire the professor.

  4. Meanwhile, the college administration fails to defend the professor. Sometimes an investigation follows, and sometimes the professor is put on leave. Professors who are untenured are at high risk of being fired or of not having their contracts renewed.

  5. Most partisans who hear any part of the story find that it confirms their worst beliefs about the other side. The right focuses on what the professor said or wrote. The left focuses on the racist/sexist reaction to it. With their anger fortified, people on both sides are primed to repeat the cycle.

This pattern is different from the pattern when professors arouse the ire of students on campus, and calling someone racist or demanding that they be disinvited is in no way equivalent to making rape threats or death threats. That distinction is recognized in law; the First Amendment does not protect credible rape or death threats. Those are criminal. But whether the reaction comes from the off-campus right or the on-campus left, the response from university leadership is usually weak and often doesn’t support the professor. Things spiral rapidly out of control, and observers on the left and the right draw the same conclusion: the other side is evil.

Many professors say they now teach and speak more cautiously, because one slip or one simple misunderstanding could lead to vilification and even threats from any number of sources.44 Add to that an insidious new problem: professors are being closely watched because of their politics. The conservative campus group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) even created a “Professor Watchlist” in order to “expose and document” faculty members “who discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”45 Many free-speech advocates watched the unveiling of TPUSA’s watchlist with concern—after all, the keeping of lists of disfavored ideas and the people who hold them has a distinct and ugly history in the United States.46 These lists are meant as a warning for those on them to watch what they say. Provoking uncomfortable thoughts is an essential part of a professor’s role, but professors now have reason to worry that provocative educational exercises and lines of questioning could spell the end of their reputations and even careers.

Threat Comes to Campus

After declining for twenty-five years, reported incidents of hate crimes increased in 2015.47 In 2016, those numbers, tracked by the FBI, rose a further 5%.48 One study of major U.S. cities from January to August 2017 suggests a 20% rise in reported hate crimes compared to the first eight months of 2016.49 It is extremely difficult to obtain accurate statistics on hate crimes, and some widely publicized events have turned out to be hoaxes.50 Nonetheless, there is a widespread perception on campus that hate crimes are increasing in the Trump era, and as far as we can tell from our review of the available research, there is some truth to that perception.

On campus, threats take concrete and sometimes terrifying forms. In 2015, a white student at Missouri University of Science and Technology was arrested for posting on social media that he was going to the Mizzou campus (the main campus of the University of Missouri), where black students were protesting, and would “shoot every black person” he saw.51 This happened five months after Dylann Roof murdered nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. In October 2017, a white University of Maryland student was charged with murder and a hate crime after stabbing to death Richard Collins III, a visiting Bowie State student, who was apparently targeted for being black.52

In the aftermath of the murder of Heather Heyer and the violence at the white supremacists’ march through Charlottesville, the physical threat posed by the alt-right and neo-Nazis became far more real for many observers who might have previously thought the alt-right was limited to internet trolls. In October 2017, only two months after the Charlottesville march, avowed white nationalist Richard Spencer spoke at the University of Florida. An hour and a half after Spencer’s speech ended, three men proclaiming to be white nationalists drove their car over to a group of protesters at a bus stop and began to yell neo-Nazi chants at them. After one of the protesters hit the rear window of the vehicle with a baton, the three men jumped out of the car, reportedly yelling, “I’m going to fucking kill you!” and “Shoot them!” One of the white nationalists, Tyler Tenbrink, was carrying a gun. He fired one shot, missing the protesters, and then the men fled. All three were later caught and charged with attempted homicide.53 Months later, at Wayne State University in Michigan, a student pulled a knife during a dispute with a group that was handing out pamphlets in favor of immigrants’ rights. He said he wanted to “kill all illegals that don’t belong in our country.”54

Students of color facing ongoing threats to their safety, and seeing frequent reports of threats elsewhere, are not new phenomena; the history of race in America is a history of discrimination and intimidation, intertwined with a history of progress. And yet, this new wave of racial intimidation may be particularly upsetting because of recent progress. In 2008, with the election of Barack Obama, many Americans had the sense that the country had turned a corner in its struggle with racism.55 In late 2016, college students in the United States had spent the previous eight years in a country with a black president, and most experts and pundits were telling them to expect a transition to the country’s first female president. The shock of Trump’s victory must have been particularly disillusioning for many black students and left-leaning women. Between the president’s repeated racial provocations and the increased visibility of neo-Nazis and their ilk, it became much more plausible than it had been in a long time that “white supremacy,” even using a narrow definition, was not just a relic of the distant past.

We close this chapter by repeating Allison Stanger’s assessment: “Political life and discourse in the United States is at a boiling point, and nowhere is the reaction to that more heightened than on college campuses.” This is the context in which today’s college students are trying to make sense of major national events and are reacting to seemingly small local incidents. We have suggested throughout this book that some interpretations of events are more constructive than others, but our point in this chapter is that there are reasons why students are doing what they are doing. There is a backstory. There is a national context. The polarization spiral and the growth of negative partisanship are influencing political activity all across the country, driving many Americans to embrace the Untruth of Us Versus Them.

In the next three chapters, we’ll show that it is not just the college campuses that have been changing; it is also the young people coming into them. Changes in adolescent mental health and in the nature of American childhood may have rendered many current students more easily burned by the “boiling” that they find once they arrive on campus.

In Sum