Teaching the 2016 Election

Teaching the 2016 election to first semester students at Ramapo College was a considerable challenge in the fall semester. I knew it would not be easy based on my experience teaching the 2008 and 2012 presidential years, when the freshmen students were much more focused on adjusting to college than on knowing about who might have a significant control over their lives for the next four years. I also found in those courses that the interest of the students in the president-elect diminished dramatically the week after the election. So I was trying to develop strategies for reviving their waning attention.

The course description stated that the students would be introduced to the 2016 election, Clinton and Trump, the electoral process, and the role of money and voters—including the responsibilities of first-time voters, and what students should know about the election. It would answer the questions: Who are the candidates? As college freshmen, what were they like? What were their interests and goals at your age? What were their uncertainties and struggles as young adults? What did they plan to be when they graduated from college? What were their paths to politics? What made them run for office? What is the process of running for office like? How does it impact family life? How does the ambition to be president relate to effectiveness in the office?

I pointed out that my specialty as a presidential psychobiographer is studying the childhoods, coping methods, core values, decision making processes, life crises, personalities, policies, and styles of leadership of candidates and presidents, as well as the ambivalence, patterns of behaviors, and unconscious wishes of the voters. To keep the students focused on the presidency, I had them write a two-page report following each of the four debates and four more reports on a particular media outlet that they chose to follow in 2016. These outlets ranged from CNBC News to well beyond The New York Times and Washington Post. For students whose family has a strong identification with other cultures, I had one each of the following: East Asian news, Puerto Rican news, NS

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Spanish news generally, as well as a very capable student following world news. Students had to write an outline and bibliography (divided between primary and secondary sources) for an eight-page research paper and oral report on a topic. A very wide range of topics were offered, although the majority wrote about Clinton, Trump, and related issues. As always, the class met in one of the very few seminar rooms at my college. I encourage participation from day one by having the students introduce themselves and talk about their interest in the election.

The composition of the class was 14 males and nine females. Seventeen of the students were white (though in class I normally refer to us as the “beige people,” since I like to deemphasize racial distinctions), three are of Hispanic descent (but two are lighter skinned Hispanics), two are East Asian (Korean-Americans), and one student was of Arab descent. The male dominance in composition ultimately made a noticeable difference in the dynamic of the class. As one of my fellow first-year seminar professors, who happened to be auditing another one of my courses, commented, “I’m fortunate that my freshmen are mostly girls because they are much easier to teach, in part because they talk more openly and with less competitiveness than the boys.”

From the first meeting of the course, some of the guys got “all Trumped up,” talking about how much they liked the businessman celebrity candidate, which had an intimidating effect on the young women in the class and the few young men who leaned toward Clinton. The several strong supporters of Bernie Sanders spoke out initially and subsequently appear to have voted for Clinton or the libertarian candidate, but never spoke for Hillary in class. As young, insecure freshmen in their first week of classes, students are very subject to peer pressure and wanting to fit in. Thus, my encouraging immediate free discussion inadvertently inhibited Clinton supporters by allowing the loudest male Trump advocates to come to the forefront early on.

This mirrored what was happening in so much of the nation, which was focused on Trump. His pronouncements and continuous denigration of his competitors (Low-Energy Jeb, Liddle Marco, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, and Crooked Hillary—he called Elizabeth Warren Goofy and Pocahontas) took center stage. This name-calling worked! The students remembered the monikers. While in the country, Trump supporters were inclined not to be very vocal in public settings, outside of the relatively few who attended his elec-

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trifying rallies, the Trump guys in my class felt empowered. In fact, my guess is that there was a self-selection of more Trump-supporting students coming to my class. Whenever I teach about politics, I tend to have more male than female students. In the context of making it clear to my students that I was open to a variety of political views, I mentioned that a good friend of mine is an 89-year-old retired blue collar worker, veteran of Iwo Jima, and Trump supporter, who has always favored outsider candidates such as George Wallace and Ross Perot.

Political correctness is stressed in the first-year seminar (the college does not refer to it as a freshman seminar, since that would be considered sexist). The summer reading was Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which is a free-verse ramble on political correctness and micro-aggressions from the perspective of an African-American professor. The book contains a controversial page marked “In Memory of” with a list of black men who died at the hands of police. Beside the list is text that reads, “because white men can’t police their imagination, black men are dying” (134-135). Professor Rankine spoke at the college’s convocation, which was described by virtually everyone who spoke about it to me as a mumbled, totally uninspiring, rambling, and dull monologue. When she spoke in person to a smaller group of honors students, she was described as having a “dull, professor-like, droning tone and style of speech.” Despite these characterizations, she has been appointed from her professorship at the University of South Carolina to a distinguished professorship at Yale University. The Trump supporters in class were quite vocal in expressing their dislike of the author and her book, which fit in with some of the appeal of Trump. Since March 2016, I’ve been arguing in print that an important part of Trump’s appeal is precisely his political incorrectness in a society where so many are growing tired of a focus on political correctness and its ever-expanding vocabulary. One or two female voices in the class very softly said they found some value in Rankine’s work.

As a way of combatting the loud, intolerant tone of the male Trump supporters, I did several things. One was to start the discussion on several days by having the young women in class speak first about the topic, which made for a more even-handed approach to our subject. Second, in the course of discussing the media, I encouraged some of the very conservative students, such as one who was following Fox News, to go back to what Fox News said about

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Trump before he became the Republican standard-bearer. This enabled the young man to understand that the conservatives he listened to did not start out as fans of the New York celebrity businessman. He gradually changed his attitude from one of “my professor, who must be a liberal because Fox News says all professors are liberals, isn’t going to dissuade me from supporting a good conservative businessman,” to being aware and slightly critical of the particulars of Trump’s policies, personality, and leadership style. Though I have little doubt that on November 8^th he voted for our president, he was somewhat more nuanced about this candidate as the semester progressed. This fit in with my goal of getting the students to understand the personalities, policies, strengths, and weaknesses of whomever they voted for.

For the first time ever in teaching about the candidates and elections, at the end of October I stated my political preference, as I promised I would at the beginning of the year. This fit in with my having published “A Presidential Psychobiographer’s Countertransference to Trump” in Clio’s Psyche (Fall 2016, 1-8), when I briefly stated my reasons for my support (but did not focus on them), and the class listened quietly. Given the depth of my feeling that the country was on the verge of making a terrible mistake in selecting Trump as president, it is clear to me that if I had not trained and practiced as a psychoanalyst, which honed my ability to listen and respond in a nonjudgmental manner, I would not have been able to maintain an analytic tolerance in teaching this course and dealing with some of the intolerant pro-Trump students.

Political amnesia is such a powerful force in an election year and was manifested very clearly among my students, especially when it came to the issue of who won the presidential debates. In the media reports following the debates, almost all students declared Clinton the winner. However, following the logic that whoever won the presidency must have won the debates, a fair number of the students decided retrospectively that Trump must have won the debates because how else could he have won the election. This was despite me pointing out on at least two occasions that debates typically only change the votes of about one or two percent of the electorate. Shortly before the election we had an in-class debate, in which one team spoke for the Republican candidate and the other for the Democratic candidate. It was quite disappointing because two of the most vocal Trump supporters were unprepared and disrespectful of the clearly spelled out rules of the debate, turning it

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into a shouting match. This was a reflection of what was happening in the mass media as well as on social media, where there was a lot of shouting opinions without evidence and ignoring other points of view, often just attempting to shout them down.

A class was devoted to the students specifically spelling out what were the backgrounds, characteristics, experiences, personality traits, and values they thought desirable in a president. I added a few, including the ability of a president not to act in a crisis when there was great pressure to take dangerous action. Each student then came to the next class with a comparison chart of how Trump and Clinton fit into these categories—which we discussed at length. If the students took their presidential standards seriously, then they would have been very pro-Clinton and in the end a majority would have voted for her. Such was not the case. I am fond of telling all my students that “people live in their emotions”: that emotion is what energizes us and is the greatest factor in our decision-making. Although I would rather it was otherwise, the disparity between what these freshman students said they wanted in a leader, and whom they supported and voted for, is a reflection of this discrepancy. In a carefully administered, very anonymous written poll after the election of whom each student voted for, the majority voted for Trump.

Hillary Clinton won 48.5% (65,853,516) of the popular vote, as opposed to 46.4% (62,984,825) for the winner Donald Trump, but lost the Electoral College by 232 to 308. Thus Clinton had 2,868,691 more votes than Trump, but 76 fewer electoral votes. When one of the brightest and most articulate students came to me asking to do an extra credit report, I suggested he do a report on the Electoral College and other undemocratic elements in our system and the ways to remedy them. I laid out the ways very explicitly for him to develop. These ways extended from eliminating the Electoral College, to ratifying the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, to taking money out of politics, ending electoral gerrymandering, compulsory voting, allowing convicted criminals to vote, eliminating overly strict voter identification laws, and so forth. Although the student did a competent job of presenting the arguments in a PowerPoint presentation, the ideas were met with indifference. I don’t think that his own views, as reflected in his being the only student to ever come to class with an “elect Trump” t-shirt, made any difference. Even more than the electorate generally, my students were exhausted by the campaign. They saw the

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election as being over and did not want to think more about it or the processes involved. They were moved far more by emotion than facts.

As much as I enjoyed working with these young people as they began their college careers, I was frustrated in teaching the election. While I don’t know if in three years I will attempt to teach the 2020 election to first year students, I do know that this coming fall I will focus my first year seminar on students’ heroes, mentors, and role models. I am confident that their interest will be sustained for a longer time than it was last year.

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