U. Academic Conservatism in the Trump Era

US ACADEMIC CONSERVATISM IN THE TRUMP ERA There has been an outpouring of research on populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and extreme right movements in Europe. Much less studied, however, is the growing political conservatism in the American academy and how it relates to populist sentiment. While conservative academic voices have grown in recent years, they have not always articulated a unified position. Some conservative faculty embraced the Trump presidency and the populist sentiment it express while other conservative faculty sharply opposed Trump. This paper studies this important division within the American academic conservative camp. The paper compares 100 politically conservative professors who supported Trump and 80 conservative professors who did not. All 180 functioned as public intellectuals who advocated their views in social media and beyond. Comparisons look at their educational and career trajectories as well as institutional locations in the field of American higher education. In addition, the paper examines the network affiliations to major think tanks and other associations where these individuals try to influence the public agenda with their views. Preliminary findings suggest the following patterns. The conservative public critics of Trump are located in more prestigious schools than are the Trumpists though the latter are by no means on the margins of the field of American higher education. Political science stands out as the discipline most represented by Trumpists and anti-Trumpists alike. Law is the second most represented discipline. The Trump supporters tend to affiliate with a relatively few conservative think tanks whereas the anti-Trumpists are more dispersed and more likely to affiliate with external scholarly associations like the American Political Science Association. While both groups are sharply critical of identity politics in colleges and universities, the Trumpists are more likely to embrace populist politics more broadly. The paper draws inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s field analytical framework to show where these two groups of academic conservatives stand relationally in the academic and in American politics more generally.