Donald Trump is the president of the United States. His election in November 2016 turned our campuses in America upside down. The day after his victory, some professors held teach-ins, some students asked to be excused from class, and now many have been joining marches and attending raucous town hall meetings. This warms the heart of an impassioned if centrist liberal like myself.
But something more needs to happen, and soon. All of us liberals in higher education should take a long look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we contributed to putting the country in this situation. We must accept our share of responsibility. Anyone involved in Republican politics will tell you that our campus follies, magnified by Fox News, mobilise their base as few things do. But our responsibility extends beyond feeding the right-wing media by tolerating attempts to control speech, limit debate and stigmatise and bully conservatives, as well as encouraging a culture of complaint that strikes people outside our privileged circles as comically trivial. We have distorted the liberal message to such a degree that it has become unrecognisable.
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