The academic Trumpists: American professors who support the Trump presidency

Abstract

The Trump presidency has been remarkable in its attacks on many mainstream institutions. It has tapped populist sentiment that reflects little confidence in the key decision-making centers in American society. Higher education has not escaped this attack. Indeed, criticism of the academy has gone well beyond the debated policies of affirmative action and political correctness to the very status of expert knowledge itself, questioning what is legitimate knowledge. Claims of “false data” and “alternative facts” parade in the public arena without the benefit of reasoned scholarship that might separate fact from fiction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the attack on science, particularly scientific research focusing on environmental issues and climate change. Nonetheless, a small number of academicians—supposed arbiters of truth—advocate for Trump. How does one explain this apparent anomaly? Why would scholars support a president and populist movement that attack the very foundations of their professional life: knowledge and expertise? I have identified 103 such professors who offer their public support of Trump through blogs, essays, op-ed pieces, public lectures, tweets, YouTube videos, and even a couple of trade books. These are public intellectuals who intervene beyond the classroom and laboratory to promote a political agenda that is supportive of Trump. They are public advocates for Trump: academic Trumpists. Who are these individuals? Where do they teach? What do they teach? What kinds of connections external to the academy do they cultivate? How do they justify their support of Trump? This article offers some answers to these questions. It draws inspiration from Bourdieu’s field analysis of the politics of higher education and the sociology of conservative intellectuals.

The Trump presidential campaign and ensuing presidency have been remarkable in their attacks on many mainstream institutions.¹ They have tapped populist sentiment that reflects little confidence in many of the key decision-making centers in the American polity. Populist sentiment was certainly present in the Tea Party movement though Trump is not a mere extension of the Tea Party (Skocpol and Williamson 2012, p. 16); he was able to mobilize voter discontent with the political establishment and anti-Hillary sentiment well beyond the Tea Party ranks. He rode the wave of populist discontent (Kivisto 2017).

Higher education has not escaped this attack. Indeed, the criticism of the academy has gone well beyond the debated policies of affirmative action and campus codes attempting to regulate appropriate behavior (e.g., “political correctness” claims)—though those are not exempt—to the very status of expert knowledge itself, questioning what is legitimate knowledge. Claims of “false data” and “alternative facts” have been thrown into the public arena without the benefit of reasoned scholarship that might separate fact from fiction. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the attack on science, particularly that scientific research focusing on environmental issues and climate change. Indeed the politicization of academic knowledge—though never completely exempted from a political dimension—has been increased considerably by presidential politics during the Trump era.²

Nonetheless, a certain number of academics supported Trump during his presidential campaign and continue to do so in spite of the political attack on the very institutional base of their careers. How does one explain this apparent anomaly? Why would scholars support a presidential candidate and populist movement that attack the very foundations of their professional careers—expert knowledge and science (Carter, Desikan and Goldman 2019)? This article attempts to shed some light on this question by identifying who those scholars are and how they offer their support to the Trump presidency.

This article addresses the following four questions: 1) What is their institutional location in American higher education? Do they cluster in particular types and ranks of institutions? 2) Can one identify connections between their scholarship and their political stance? Do their academic disciplinary specialties help explain their political preferences? 3) How do they justify their support of Trump? What rationales do they offer in support of Trump? 4) What kinds of connections external to the academy do these scholars cultivate? Are these individuals academic conduits of external right-wing economic and political forces seeking to disrupt and destroy the liberal academy? In Bourdieusian field analytical terms, do these individuals represent a heteronomous pole within the academic field?³

A field analytical perspective on Trumpists

An important literature on left-leaning intellectuals is to be found in the sociology of intellectuals—one important subfield of political sociology (Brint 1985; Brym 1987; Coser 1965; Karabel 1996; Kurzman and Owens 2002; Lipset 1959; Szelenyi and Martin 1988/89). But intellectuals on the political right have received far less attention (Gross, et al. 2011). One finds considerable interest in populist movements, opinions, and political leadership particularly in Europe and the United States, but strikingly little on scholars supporting populist agendas (Blee and Creasap 2010; Gross, et al. 2011). Consider the number of panels and paper presentations on populism at social scientific conferences in recent years. The focus of most of this scholarly attention is on political phenomena external to the university.⁴ This study attempts to fill this gap in the professional literature.

This study falls within a growing literature on political conservatism and populism though with a particular focus on conservative/populist intellectuals. One might think of Weber’s (1978, pp. 507–508) classic designation of “proletaroid intellectuals” or Mannheim’s (1971) classic statement on “conservatism.” Varieties of conservatism and the radical right have been receiving increased attention in recent years (Rydgren 2018). There are important works by (Bell 1964; Berry and Sobieraj 2014; Binder and Wood 2014; Blee and Creasap 2010; Cunningham 2014; Hochschild 2016; Klatch 1986, 1999; Sapiro 2004, 2013) to name but a few. Gidron and Bonikowski (2013) offers a review of recent studies on populism; indeed, there has been a burgeoning literature on the varieties of populism with particular attention given to the Tea Party (Rosenthal and Trost 2012; Skocpol and Williamson 2012); moreover, there is now The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Kaltwasser et al. 2017). Still, few of these studies focus on the professorate embrace of conservative, populist, or right-wing political causes. For example, there is no specific treatment in The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (Rydgren 2018) of professors who support radical right causes. Fritz Ringer’s (1969) classic study of German professors and Pierre Bourdieu’s (1991) study of Heidegger are important exceptions. So is the Shields and Dunn (2016) more recent study of 153 conservative (“right-wing,” see note 12) American professors. This study focuses on one particular group of conservative intellectuals; namely, professors who publicly support the populist appeal of the Trump presidency.

We start the analysis by identifying where and what the Trumpists teach. The question of institutional location and possible connection between disciplinary scholarship and politics draws inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) seminal work Homo Academicus on the French professorate. In that work, Bourdieu shows from data in the 1960s and 1970s that the Parisian higher education institutions, faculties, disciplines, and professors were all differentiated by the opposition of economic and political power on one side and cultural power on the other that characterizes the field of power.⁵ The law and medical faculties were closer to (more dependent on) the poles of economic and political power whereas the natural and social sciences and arts faculties stood closer to the pole of cultural power. Bourdieu’s analysis reveals two different relationships among faculty to the dominant classes: knowledge for service to economic and political power and knowledge for its own sake. Further, professors in the natural and social sciences who invented new forms of knowledge were more likely to question the status quo than professors in the humanities who sought to preserve and transmit the cultural heritage of the social order.⁶ A provocative implication that one might draw from Bourdieu’s analysis is that by inventing new knowledge and accumulating expertise faculty in the social and natural sciences are less inclined to be swayed by the siren songs of populism.

While this study does not work with all the variables that Bourdieu did or employ Geometric Data analysis, it does draw inspiration from his field analytical perspective.⁷ From this standpoint, we proceed with the four questions raised above. In response to the first question, what is the prestige or standing of the institutions where these scholars occupy their primary positions.⁸ Are they relatively marginal institutions, mainstream, or elite in the current prestige configuration of the field of American higher education? On the second question, the study considers whether certain disciplinary forms of cultural capital can be transformed into conservative political discourse capital, that is, a type of knowledge and rhetoric that promotes a conservative political agenda that is supportive of Trump. For the third question, the study examines the principal rationales used by these professors in their support of Trump and asks how specific are they to concerns of the academy? The fourth question explores what kinds of connections external to the academy do these scholars cultivate? Do these connections suggest an active attempt to intervene in academic life as representatives of right-wing political or financial interests? In Bourdieusian field terms, are they conduits of heteronomous forces within the academic field? In polemical terms, are they pawns in the hands of the Koch brothers or agents of right-wing think tanks?

We do not try to define a “conservative” academic here. What actually constitutes an American conservative is an object of some debate and several types have been proposed: traditionalist, right-winger, populist, libertarian, etc.⁹ Behind such classifications stand attempts to identify common sets of philosophical or policy views.¹⁰ Clearly there are different subgroups that can be identified under the broad rubric of “conservative.”¹¹ The emphasis here follows the direction suggested by Eyal and Buchholz (2010) to focus on modes and spaces of intervention rather than on debates over types of intellectuals. Moreover, there is debate among conservatives themselves whether Trump is in fact a conservative or an opportunist riding the current wave of populist revolt against the political establishment. Reflecting on his study of academic conservatives, Shields (Green 2016) says “I suspect they would dislike Trump much more because not only is he a populist—it’s not even clear that he’s a conservative. He’s a narcissist.”

We do not take a normative position on these questions; rather, our approach draws inspiration from Bourdieu’s field analytical perspective where claims for a conservative identity by insiders and designations of a conservative label by outsiders reveal the definition to be a contested object. There is struggle over the very definition of a legitimate conservative and the various stances taken vary not just in labeling but also in political strategies and policies. It is a struggle for symbolic power. Our study does not attempt to define a genuine conservative scholar. Like Gross et al. (Gross, et al. 2011), we do not offer an essentialist position for both epistemological and empirical reasons: epistemologically because, sociologically speaking, unities are constructed relationally and, empirically, because of the diversity of competing expressions.¹² We adopt a decidedly relational perspective in this study (Emirbayer 1997).

We look at only those scholars who support the Trump presidency and who do so publicly. Most of them self-identify as conservative or libertarian and Republican.¹³ None identify as progressive or liberal. We examine key biographical and career characteristics of those who chose to identify publicly their support for the Trump presidency. We do not try to identify those professors who voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. We consider only those academics who function as public intellectuals since they try to intervene beyond the classroom and laboratory in the larger public arena to express their political views and shape those of others. That is, their intellectual work is not entirely disciplinary; they make explicit efforts to exercise some intellectual influence in the public arena. Many blog, give public presentations, associate with think tanks, write op-ed pieces, etc. to shape public opinion regarding the Trump presidency. This is a study of Trump supporting scholars. They are public advocates for Trump: academic Trumpists.¹⁴

The academic field & beyond

This article reports findings on 103 scholars supportive of Trump. Sixty-nine of the 103 were selected from the 177 individuals who signed the “Scholars & Writers for America: Statement of Unity” that appeared online October 30, 2016 just prior to the 2016 presidential elections.¹⁵ The list was organized by Francis H. Buckley, Professor of Law, at George Mason University and gives Buckley’s email address fbuckley@gmu.edu as a contact point. The “Statement of Unity” offers five topical reasons for supporting Trump’s candidacy: constitutional governance, corruption in government, economic stimulus, religious liberty, and education.

From the list of 177 names, we selected sixty-nine individuals, only those who held academic teaching/researcher positions in colleges and universities and could clearly be described as individuals who do scholarly research as measured by their professional peers.¹⁶ In other words, these are not academics who just blog, write op-ed pieces, or write trade books. Many of them also do all of these things and one of the objectives of this study is to describe in some detail the scope of these kinds of intellectual interventions beyond the confines of the academy. But the individuals selected for this study are first and foremost scholars; their academic peers acknowledge the scholarly value of their work. Yet, they are scholars who have also played a public intellectual role in support of Trump.

To correct for a possible Buckley network effect, we then added thirty-four names bringing the total to 103. Although not appearing on the unity statement list, the add-ons are academics who through op-ed pieces in major newspapers like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, internet blogs, YouTube videos, writings in conservative publications, etc. have clearly expressed their public support for Trump. Some of these come from the Wikipedia page “List of Donald Trump Campaign Endorsements” to be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign_endorsements, accessed 7/27/2018). We identified others from references by individuals already on our list. This is an illustrative sample of scholars supporting Trump; it does not represent the complete population nor should it be considered a nationally representative sample selected by random sampling methods. There may well be other professors who advocate for Trump in local media that we have not been able to pick up through internet searches.

All of the biographical data reported here come from information available online.¹⁷ We consulted personal web pages, university web pages, CVs, digital archives, and a selection of personal statements appearing in blogs, YouTube talks, etc.¹⁸ Because of the small number of cases (N = 103) we report raw numbers and a few simple percentages based on the 103 scholars. The sample is overwhelmingly white, male, older, and tenured. A few are foreign-born but all are residing American scholars. For example, Amar Dev Amar, business professor at Seton Hall University, is Indian born and a staunch Trump supporter. Recently retired from the University of Virginia, Fred S. Singer, who is Austrian-born, received his graduate degrees from Princeton. We do not include Trump-supporting academics who hold their primary university posts outside of the United States. The youngest was born in 1971, the oldest in 1924. Only four appear to be without tenure. Twelve are female, one whose husband is also on the list. Seventeen are emeriti but are included in the sample because their retirement is recent and they continue to be active in political affairs.¹⁹ Only five appear to be non-white.

Higher education field location

To situate the Trumpists in terms of the field of American higher education, we look at type of school and national standing as measured by the familiar U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings for 2019. These faculty members are distributed across seventy-nine institutions of higher learning. In terms of types of schools, the Trumpists tend to hold positions in large research universities rather than in small liberal arts colleges with a few notable exceptions. Only nine liberal arts colleges are represented. There are, however, some concentrated patterns. Fifteen schools have two or more. Five schools have three or more. University of Texas at Austin, a very large public research institution, has four and Emory University has three. Three small schools have a surprisingly large number: Chapman Dale E. Fowler School of Law has three, Hillsdale College has eight, and University of Dallas has five. Thus the list shows some clustering of individuals around certain academic centers. In addition, some research centers within certain schools, such as the James Madison Program in the Department of Politics at Princeton (fifteen of the 103 are members) or the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado- Boulder, tend to attract Trumpists for temporary appointments as visiting scholars or invited speakers (N = 8).

If one considers the institutional prestige of the schools as measured by the 2019 USNWR rankings, twenty-four of the top one-hundred national universities are represented, though only six of the top one hundred national liberal arts colleges are. Thirty-four of the 103 scholars, or 34%, are located in the top one-hundred national universities. And fourteen of the 103, or 14%, are locate in the top one-hundred national liberal arts colleges.²⁰ Thus, almost half (46%) of these faculty teach in the most highly ranked institutions of higher learning. The Trumpists are by no means isolated in the institutional margins of the American field of higher education. The least elite sector—two-year public and privates—is barely represented; only two Trumpists teach here. The latter finding is striking since it contrasts with the general finding from national survey data on political attitudes of the professoriate that political conservatism is more frequently found among faculty at two-year institutions (Gross 2013). This may reflect another reality; namely, that professors who take up public intellectual roles are more likely to draw on the prestige of the more selective universities or four-year colleges.²¹ Moreover, and in general, instructors at two-year institutions do not enjoy the light teaching loads or institutional prestige to play public intellectual roles.²²

Another interesting pattern is the significant representation of religious schools where almost a quarter of the Trumpists (twenty-five of the 103) teach. Twenty-one of the seventy-nine schools have distinctly religious identities. Thirteen are Catholic and eight are Protestant including one seminary for each. These are schools that are clearly religiously oriented (judging from how they present themselves on their websites) and tend to be the most theologically conservative schools in their particular religious grouping. With the exception of two faculty members at Georgetown University, the flagship Catholic schools, such as Notre Dame, Villanova, Fordham, and Boston College, are absent whereas the less prestigious and more conservative University of Dallas is strikingly overrepresented with five. One might speculate a bit here. In looking at the individual Catholics in the sample, opposition to abortion figures prominently if not the front-burner issue leading these individuals to oppose Clinton in favor of Trump. Such would be the case of Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School and Anne Hendershott at the Franciscan University of Stubenville. Yet, the abortion issue appears not to have brought many practicing Catholic academics at the elite Catholic schools into the Trump camp by encouraging them to take highly public positions in favor of Trump because of his anti-abortion stance.²³

Thus in Bourdieusian field analytical terms, these scholars supporting Trump tend not to be located in the centers of the highest concentrations of academic capital and symbolic capital or at the lowest margins. They tend to locate in the upper-middle tiers of American universities with an over-representation at religious schools.²⁴

Elite school representation is considerably stronger if one looks at the Ph.D., J.D, and MBA granting schools. Thirteen Trumpists obtained their highest degrees at Harvard, another thirteen from Claremont Graduate University, six from the University of Chicago, five from Columbia University, three from University of Michigan, three from MIT, and three from UCLA. Otherwise, the degree-granting institutions are spread across the country. In short, almost half (fifty-one of the 103 scholars) received their degrees from top tier institutions. This resembles the general pattern of graduates from elite institutions: a few find positions at comparable elite institutions but most locate at selective but less elite public research universities.²⁵

Claremont Graduate University produced thirteen Ph.Ds. and two signers of the 2016 list are faculty at Claremont. This makes Claremont Graduate University and the Claremont Institute (though separate institutions) with its Claremont Review of Books a key center for producing scholars supporting the Trump presidency. Claremont and Hillsdale College are two of the academic beachheads for the so-called West Coast Straussians. All were influenced by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago but Harry V. Jaffa, also a Strauss student, was a professor at the Claremont Graduate University, a distinguished fellow at the Claremont Institute, and their more proximate intellectual leader. Author of the famous Barry Goldwater line “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Jaffa sought to combine ideas from Aristotle with Biblical principles and the American Constitution to make a zealous argument for natural rights against relativism and nihilism.²⁶ Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and who is in our sample, is the current leader of the West Coast Straussians. The Claremont Review of Books, sometimes considered the conservative counterpart to the New York Review of Books, is a major intellectual voice in support of Trump.

Disciplines & areas of expertise

The most highly represented academic disciplines are political science/government, law, history, philosophy, and economics. Twenty-two trumpists teach political science/government. Eleven teach law. Several list both law and political science as their disciplines. Thirteen teach history. Fifteen teach economics and business.²⁷ Nine teach philosophy.

The dominance of four disciplines, political science/government, law, history, and economics suggests forms of scholarly capital that Trumpists are more likely to draw on than others. Almost two-thirds (sixty-one of 103) teach in one of those areas. A more refined analysis of those Trumpists in political science, law, and history, shows intellectual orientations toward political theory (rather than say political parties or voting patterns), constitutional law, and early American history. In other words, these disciplinary orientations show preferences for original intent of the founding fathers and documents, fundamental values of the Republic. That another seven trained in philosophy further suggests a general intellectual orientation toward common values that these conservatives see echoed in the Trump presidency.

We gathered data on special interests and expertise expressed by the Trumpists. Among the twenty-two specialized in political science/government, there is a clear preference for political theory. Constitutional law is by far the most frequently indicated area of legal expertise (N = 11). Another social interest concerns the economics of limiting regulatory powers on markets (N = 13). American history and political thought are cited by thirteen. Another area of special interest is religion with the philosophy of religion, religious education, and the abortion issue (N = 13). Finally, at least five have argued in their scholarly work against affirmative action and that total would rise to eleven if one included op-eds.

Outside of political science and economics, there are only three Trumpists in the social sciences: one sociologist, one anthropologist, and one social psychologist. The one sociologist, Anne Hendershott, has spent most of her professional career in conservative Christian schools (University of San Diego and the Franciscan University of Steubenville) and is specialized in family sociology/social policy with a strong anti-abortion stance. The types of academic capital one finds in sociology and anthropology do not appear to fit well with proclivities for supporting the Trump presidency.

A closer examination of these disciplinary preferences and areas of special intellectual interest suggest cultivation of forms of academic capital that convert into political stances favorable to the Trump presidency. Not all constitutional law professors support Trump, of course, but it is significant that other types of law such as criminal, labor, corporate, private, etc. do not figure highly in the range of disciplinary preferences.²⁸ Likewise the focus by the historians on the country’s founders and American political thought and the criticism of the Progressive Era (several historians and political scientists take critical aim at the Progressive Era, e.g., Moreno 2016) rather than on American global expansion, treatment of minorities, twentieth-century wars, etc., suggests an accumulation of types of intellectual capital that can convert into a type of political discourse capital useful for conservative politics. We do not address the possibility that certain individuals explicitly chose these disciplines and areas of specialization by virtue of pre-existing political positions. Nor can we determine if study in these disciplinary subfields stimulated conservative political thought.²⁹ We do not have the subjective data that would permit identifying that kind of politically informed disciplinary choice. We would note, however, that there being so few Trumpists in the social sciences (outside of economics) correlates with national survey findings that American professors in those subfields tend to be more liberal politically. As Gross (2013) argues, this may occur through a process of self-selection, though we cannot evaluate that given the data we have. But together these parallel findings suggest that the social sciences, particularly sociology, anthropology, and psychology, may furnish forms of academic capital that do not easily lend themselves to justifying ultra-conservative politics, or certainly the kind of presidential politics represented by Trump.³⁰ The critical outlook of the social sciences toward absolutist cultural claims, such as nationalism, evokes skepticism towards “Make America Great” sloganeering, and their concern for empirical demonstration doubts the invention of “alternative facts.”

We would also call attention to the virtual absence of natural scientists among the 103. This likely reflects the fact that natural scientists are less likely to play public intellectual roles than are faculty in political science, law, and the humanities. But it probably also reflects their reaction to a candidate (and president) who has attacked expert knowledge including that of natural science, particularly in the area of environmental science. For example, more than 2300 professors at University of California and California State University campuses signed an open letter to President Trump urging him not to drop out of the Paris accords on climate change and to continue to support work on the issue. They noted: “Despite misleading portrayals, there is widespread consensus in the scientific and academic communities that human-caused climate change is real, with consequences that are already being felt” (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Education: Learning Blog, February 1, 2017).

Public engagement beyond the academy

These Trumpists did not first enter the public arena by signing the October 2016 list. The signers are not new converts to conservative politics. Most of these scholars had been intervening in the public arena beyond the confines of the academy for conservative causes well before the arrival of Donald Trump on the political scene. Trump did not convert them to conservative causes; they were already there. Virtually all are long-standing conservatives, some going back to support for Goldwater in 1964. Many of them blog, tweet, write op-ed pieces, give talks, participate in public forms, associate with conservative think tanks, or write trade books—all designed to reach the broader public. Many also participate in leadership roles in associations beyond the academy specifically designed to promote conservative political public policies and views of American society. These take the forms of think tanks and societies that produce newsletters, journals, reports, conferences, and forums for public officials and the general public. Seventy-seven (75%) of the 103 Trumpists have external ties to non-government organizations, all conservative think tanks.³¹ Over two-thirds (53 of 77) are not just members but also have played some kind of leadership role, as director, board member, editor, etc., in one or more of these political advocacy organizations external to the academy. For example, Robert C. Koons is on the board of The Philadelphia Society; Gladden Pappin is editor of American Affairs, and Amy Wax is on the board of the National Association of Scholars. The most prominent external organization is the Claremont Institute (N = 16), followed by the Heritage Foundation (N = 9), the Heartland Institute and the Federalist Society (8 each), the National Association of Scholars (N = 7), and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute and the Independent Institute each at six. Fourteen external organizations have four or more Trumpists in affiliation. All but one of these think tanks are ranked among the fifty most influential ones in the United States. The Heritage is in fact ranked third and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute is ranked nineth.³²

Several Trumpists accumulate think tanks connections. Allen Mendenhall and Marshall DeRosa are each affiliated with eight. Allen C. Guelzo and Paul Rubin are each affiliated with seven. John C. Eastman, Burton W. Folsom, Larry Paul Arnn, Thomas DiLorenzo, and Stephen B. Presser are each affiliated with six. Larry Paul Arnn is president of Hillsdale College, former president of the Claremont Institute, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation and of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and on the board of directors for the Henry Salvatori Center. And Francis H. Buckley, who organized the October 2016 support list, is also senior editor of The American Spectator and columnist for the New York Post.³³

The Claremont Institute, which ranks forty-ninth of the most influential think tanks in the country, is the key nodal point assembling the strongest support for Trump. The sixteen Trumpists affiliated with the Claremont Institute are also associated with thirty other conservative think tanks. Three are with the Heritage Foundation, two with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, three with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, two with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, two with the Hoover Institution, and two with the Claremont Review of Books. Although we did not do a formal network analysis of all ties to external organizations, it is clear from inspection of the data that the Claremont Institute represents a key nodal point of Trump support among these academics. The Claremont Institute Trumpists connect with the most powerful conservative think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, and provide a broad spread of representation for many other conservative think tanks, some of which also rank among the fifty most influential in the country. Thus the Trumpists tie into powerful conservative networks beyond the academy.

A number have brought their conservative political views into public view through testimony, advising, or administrative roles in public service institutions, the courts, or government commissions/committees and advisory bodies. Thirty-seven have served in important advisory bodies to national and state government agencies, such as to the US Commission on Civil Rights or as members of a state advisory committee to the US Commission on Civil Rights (N = 11). Several have worked as government economists/policy analysts or attorneys for various departments. Mary Ann Glendon was a diplomatic appointee to the Vatican. A couple of academic Trumpists have testified before Congress and a few others have filed amicus briefs in the courts arguing conservative positions. Glynn Custred authored Prop 209 in California and Larry Paul Arnn was the founding chair of the initiative. So the Trumpists voices are being heard within the halls of government, at both state and federal levels, as well as through private political advocacy organizations. Virtually all (35 of the 37) of those with some kind of government involvement were also affiliated with think tanks. Although we have confined our sample to just academics, their connections to government appear to be mediated through think tanks rather than directly from their academic positions. This is consistent with available evidence that the Trump team has drawn most of its advisory and administrative appointments from conservative think tanks rather than universities in contrast to the previous Bush, Clinton, and Obama presidencies (Kirkner 2018).³⁴ Thus, the October 2016 list of “Scholars & Writers for America: Statement of Unity” was but one way for this group of conservative academics to take a public stand for their politics.

Heteronomy within the academic field

To what extent do these individuals receive financial support from sources that could be considered heteronomous within the academic field; that is, opposed to academic professional autonomy in knowledge and governance? Bourdieu’s field perspective posits that the academic field is polarized between those professors who embrace professional autonomy through culture for its own sake and those willing to draw on outside political and economic forces beyond the academy. In partial answer to this question, we looked for funding ties from just one source: Koch-supported advocacy organizations. This is a minimal estimate since there are numerous billionaires funding far-right causes in the United States. Nonetheless, the multibillionaire Koch brothers (David died in 2019) are significant. One source estimates that by 2016 Koch-funded organizations controlled more operational resources than the Republican Party itself did (Skocpol and Williamson 2012, pp. 207–208). And much of that funding in higher education is directed toward programs, faculty, courses, students, with the express purpose of cultivating libertarian ideology (Levinthal 2015). By this view, competitive market forces rather than professional expertise should determine the appropriate distribution of knowledge—a view that goes directly against academic autonomy. George Mason University is the school receiving by far the most Koch funding in the nation and it is also the institutional location of Francis Buckley who organized the October 2016 online support group for Trump the presidential candidate. Buckley was also associate dean of the law school when Koch donations were linked to faculty hiring decisions at George Mason.

The point here is not that Koch monies selected out and directly subsidized professors who support the Trump presidency, though there may be such individual cases. In fact, the Koch brothers opposed the Trump candidacy and have expressed misgivings about his presidency—though not so far as to suggest that Clinton would have been, in their final analysis, a better choice. Rather, their objective has been to cultivate an extreme libertarian ideology as a normative view of the social world, one that would be at variance even with most economics departments or practicing economists today. This is not to say that Koch funding initiatives are against scholarly knowledge per se; rather, the Koch brothers are trying to bring a corrective to academic knowledge that they believe does not stress sufficiently the justice and efficiency of market individualism. But in trying to impose this world view, they undermine the professional autonomy of the academy. Their efforts therefore represent a heteronormative force in the academy by trying to cultivate one narrow economic perspective on social life.

Nine people in the sample received direct funding from Koch organizations or are in leadership roles of centers receiving Koch monies. Walter E. Block was a Koch fellowship receipt. Allen Mendenhall was director of the Blackstone and Burke Center that received grants from the Koch Foundation. Marshall DeRosa teaches in a prison education program funded by Koch money. Another thirty-seven are affiliated with organizations beyond the academy receiving Koch monies. Two-fifths (forty-four of 103) are affiliated with organizational networks funded by Koch monies. Examples of organizations receiving significant Koch funding include the Federalist Society, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, the Independent Institute, and the Heartland Institute. While funding per se need not indicate a heteronomous force in the academy and not all of these individuals personally benefited financially from this funding source, the data suggest that the Trumpists have participated at least to some degree in a funding network that would encourage the adoption of competitive market forces rather than professional autonomy within the academy.

To what extent do these individuals present themselves as Trump propagandists at their colleges and universities? Do these individuals serve as organizing nodal points for conservative causes on campuses? Fifteen participate in campus advocacy through organizations localized to their campuses, or larger national organizations. Six function as faculty advisors for conservative student groups on campus, such as the College Republicans or the Young America’s Foundation. Ten of the fifteen are affiliated with national associations, such as the National Association of Scholars and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, that are directly concerned with campus issues. There is some overlap among these figures, as some Trumpists participate in multiple campus groups, national and localized. Other connections to conservative campus activism no doubt exist but are not readily visible in the public record. Very few present themselves as Trump propagandists on campuses in the style of David Horowitz or Ben Shapiro. Their functions appear generally limited to serving as faculty advisors to conservative student organizations, such as College Republicans. Here our observations fit with the findings of Shields and Dunn (2016) in their study of conservative professors. Most do not hide their conservative political views, at least those academics with the protections of tenure, which is the large majority of our sample. While many deplore student and university administrators who oppose invitations of right-wing speakers, such as Ben Shapiro, on campus, these Trumpists are not in the forefront of such initiatives. They do not appear to be the key channels through which outside conservative ideological entrepreneurs such as David Horowitz gain a hearing in colleges and universities.

That said, a few have become controversial and highly visible figures on campus by advancing provocative views and generating strong opposition from students and in some cases college administrators. Carol Swain at Vanderbilt (Lloyd 2017), Amy Wax at University of Pennsylvania law school (Flaherty 2019), Rachel Fulton Brown at University of Chicago (Schuessler 2019), Hadley Arkes at Amherst College,³⁵ and Eric Rasmussen at Indiana University (Brice-Saddler and Paul 2019) are five examples. But as we discuss in the next section, in most cases their notoriety has less to do directly with support for Trump than polemicizing on campus issues.

Rationales for supporting Trump

What are the rationales these scholars offer in support of Trump? We begin with the organizer of the 2016 declaration of support for Trump (“Scholars &Writers for America: Statement of Unity”) Francis H. Buckley, Professor of Law at George Mason University. He was an early supporter of Trump even during the Republican primary campaign. At that time he described Trump as the “perfect” candidate by which he meant “Trump was the only person who could defeat Hillary Clinton.” A second reason Buckley offered in support for Trump was his belief that Trump could “rescue what is living from what is dead in conservatism.” And that would be correcting the “higher thinking of today’s conservatism” for “contempt for the poorest American, the indifference to mobility, the compromises with corruption, and mostly the sense of failure, the small-souled man’s belief that our best days are behind us.” In short, for Buckley there was an instrumental electoral reason for supporting a candidate who could beat Clinton and a more substantive reform reason for changing the character of the Republican establishment that Buckley thought had become too corrupted by state power and had lost connection with the masses.³⁶

Another leading professor supporting Trump, Charles R Kesler, Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna and Editor of the conservative Claremont Review of Books, laid out the ways in which Trump’s platform mirrored that of the Republican Party between the Civil War and the Great Depression, when it favored high protective tariffs, infrastructure investment, cautious immigration, and a non-interventionist foreign policy.³⁷ While those issues certainly animate some of the support for Trump, other concerns appear more important; namely, campus culture issues that more directly affect this professional group of Trump supporters. In this section, we identify the principal views supporting Trump expressed by the 103 academic public intellectuals in our sample.

Anti-Hillary sentiment

Some of the Trumpists signaled, as did Francis Buckley (see quote above), as a deciding factor their anti-Hillary sentiment, which was apparently widespread among Trump voters. Anti-Hillary sentiment proved for many Trumpists to be a negative foil to rationalize their support for Trump in spite of the numerous objections raised about Trump’s lifestyle. Janet E. Smith, Professor of Moral Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan, explained her reluctant support this way. In response to the question “Isn’t Trump awful?” she says:

Yes, he is in many respects—and in some really distressing respects. I make no excuses for his behavior—a lot of which is very objectionable. I wish he weren’t the only viable alternative to Hillary—but he is. Some people think he is more open to conversion and growth than Hillary. I hope he is but I try to base my decisions on who the person is now. And even now, as wretched as Trump is, he is better than Hillary.³⁸

And Smith adds:

But over time as I evaluated what Hillary has done—all the terrible things I know she has done—and when I saw that all of our worst suspicions of her have been verified by what has been found in her emails, I realized I needed to vote for the only person who can stop her. She is the most corrupt person I have ever seen in American politics. [my italics—DS]

And a statement of support, organized by Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College, by several “traditional Catholic academics” in the conservative national Catholic newspaper, The Remnant (October 18, 2016), captures a way of dealing with the questionable personal characteristics of Trump that surfaced during the campaign: “The prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency is more dangerous than the past personal imperfections of a Donald Trump.”

Some acknowledge the personal flaws of Trump but then assign them to secondary importance compared to the greater “Hillary Clinton’s evil”! Or the great evil of a “leftist administration” supporting abortion and expanding federal power. In the words of Susan Hanssen, Professor of History at the University of Dallas:

Trump’s style of evil is all out there on the surface. It is all in the externals—the wives, the gilded lifestyle, the blustering vanity, the crassness, the pornographic vulgarity, the off-the-cuff horrors. But what is all this, really, in comparison with Hillary Clinton’s evil? [my italics—DS] It seems to me that Trump’s moral gaucheries are the mere trappings and suits of evil compared to the continuance of a leftist administration with a systematic agenda of destroying the very notion of “nature” and any notion of restraint on federal power.³⁹

By “nature” Hanssen presumably refers to her anti-abortion position and individual rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that she and many in this group believe have been lost to big government regulation and secularization. Opposition to abortion and criticism of the administrative state, we will see, are two key views cited by many of these conservative professors in their support for Trump.

Populist charisma

None of the individuals we have studied seems attracted to Trump as a person. He is not a charismatic character for them as he certainly is for many of his supporters.⁴⁰ While no one in our sample appears to be attracted to Trump as a person, most nonetheless applaud his charismatic capacity to give voice to popular grievances not addressed by the American political establishment, both Republican and especially Democrat. David Bradshaw, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky, puts it this way: “The victory of Donald Trump was a reminder that millions of ordinary voters have long felt slighted and ignored by the two major political parties.”⁴¹ It is this embrace of Trump’s populist appeal that separates these Trump supporters from other conservative faculty. Indeed one of the overriding messages that Shields and Dunn (2016) report from their study of conservative professors is their dislike for populism. Conservatives and populism are not to be equated.⁴² Ken Masugi, former assistant to Clarence Thomas and now Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and at the Claremont Institute, considers that “while Trump may not be perfect, he at least champions ‘the sovereignty of the people,’” who are rising up against “American elites [who] have long abandoned the basic principles of constitutional governance” (quoted in Beinart 2016). While virtually all of the Trump supporters fall within the Republican camp, several are also quite critical of establishment Republicans for not supporting Trump; they embrace populist reform that would shake up the Republican establishment. Clyde N. Wilson, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, in his book Annals of the Stupid Party: Republicans Before Trump (Wilson 2016), published just prior to the 2016 election, calls for radical reform of the Republican Party and charges party leadership with complicity with the “deep state” that only Trump promises to break up.

Anti-establishment instrumentalism

While many in this sample support the populist appeal for others, they themselves take a decidedly more instrumental attitude in their support for Trump. Several, especially those in law schools, point to the Supreme Court; namely, that Trump will appoint a conservative to replace Scalia. Paul Moreno, the William and Berniece Grewcock Chair in Constitutional History and Dean of Social Sciences at Hillsdale College, for example, celebrated the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Hadley Arkes, Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College, indicates support for Trump, arguing that he will make conservative appointments to the Supreme Court who would then be able to overthrow Roe vs Wade and abolish legal abortion rights. Their support is instrumental; they see Trump as a sort of “wrecking ball,” in the words of Marshal DeRosa, Professor of Political Science at Florida Atlantic University, to be wielded against established practices that they find so objectionable: “I’m looking forward to voting for Trump, because I see him as a wrecking ball and I want to see those sons of bitches squeal in Washington, to be quite frank.”⁴³ Their support is not for Trump the person but for what he might be able to do to shake up the Washington beltway political establishment. The “wrecking ball” metaphor, whether Marshal DeRosa is consciously drawing on it or not, has a long history in the radical right dating back at least to McCarthyism. As Daniel Bell (1964, p. x) in The Radical Right put it: “McCarthy was a wrecker—what the Germans call Umsturzmensch, a man who wants to tear up society but has no plan of his own.”⁴⁴

Behind the anti-establishment rhetoric lies a deep hostility toward what several refer to as the “administrative state” (or “deep state”) and a perceived threat by the political Left’s attack on Western culture. Daniel Bonevac, Professor of Philosophy at University of Texas-Austin, for example, sees this as a key problem that explains Trump’s election.

Someone in the EPA suddenly wants to shut down the coal industry? No one voted for that. There was no act of Congress. This was something issued from that bureaucracy… More and more of our life is controlled by those kinds of things, and Trump was the only candidate who saw that this was the chief political problem in the US right now.⁴⁵

Some bring a historical perspective to this view by rooting the modern origins of the problem in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson onward. As Bonevac (Hendricks 2017) puts it: “Woodrow Wilson and other progressives created this monstrous bureaucracy of Washington, which has increasing control over people’s lives without any accountability.” Others charge that the growth of the administrative state has occurred under Republican and Democratic leadership alike though it has been most pronounced under the latter. For them, the ruling class is not the business or corporate elite but the bureaucratic elite that manages the American administrative state. The problem is government not the modern corporation. This is the guiding argument in Paul Moreno’s book The Bureaucrat Kings: The Origins and Underpinnings of America’s Bureaucratic State (2016). This criticism often refers to idealized origins rooted in fundamental values guiding the founding fathers of the republic and embedded in the key documents of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Bureaucratization, at least in its governmental incarnation, is the great evil that jeopardizes our fundamental values of human freedom and agency.⁴⁶

Some views suggest ominous conspiratorial forces that only Trump could fight against. For several, those forces are the “Left” as a hostile force in American society, an aggressor in the cultural wars against “all American and Western norms.” Perhaps the most extreme view here is taken by Michael Anton, Research Fellow at Hillsdale College, who saw the very foundations of Western culture and the genuine distinctiveness of American founding democratic ideals at stake in the 2016 presidential election. In his famous call to conservatives, “Flight 93,” he alleged the “dangers that militant leftism poses to our country and our civilization” and that “leftists hold virtually every commanding height in our society—financial, intellectual, educational, cultural, administrative—and yet they affect the posture of an oppressed and besieged ‘resistance.’”⁴⁷ Two years later Anton says “I don’t regret a word.” And dismissing the opposition to Trump two years later, Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University, quotes approvingly Anton:

The real resistance is led by President Trump. It is resistance to the Left’s all-consuming drive for absolute power, its hostility to all American and Western norms—constitutional, moral, prudential—and its boundless destructive enmity.⁴⁸

For Bauerlein and many others in this sample, nowhere is this alleged Left presence more felt than on American college and university campuses, a key issue we take up below.

Others talk about the “ruling class.” A few think of their support for Trump in opposition to the ruling class, a sort of populist trope. Angelo Codevilla, retired Professor of International Relations at Boston University, put it this way in the National Review:

But today—Trump himself and everything about him notwithstanding—his candidacy is the only alternative to the intensification of everything that the ruling class has done to the rest of us over the past half-century. His candidacy is the only shield, available now, against the ruling class’s unconstrained expansion.⁴⁹

In Codevilla’s hands, this is a rather loose designation, as if Trump himself did not belong to some kind of elite, certainly in real estate. One does not find in the Trumpists’ texts a set of definitions of who is included in this “ruling class” or “elite” or an empirical investigation of ruling elites and the consequences of their action as one does in another public intellectual, though on the left, C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956).

Abortion

Several of the Trumpists are religious, particularly conservative Catholics or conservative Protestant evangelicals. One obvious difficulty for conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals is Trump’s lifestyle, yet many are willing to push that to the back burner in deference to issues like opposition to abortion they consider more important.⁵⁰ The statement organized by Paul Gottfried and his fellow “traditional Catholic academics” embraces the Trump campaign slogan of “making America great again” and “opposes the viscously anti-Catholic positions of Hillary Clinton.” High on the list is Clinton’s pro-choice stance on abortion.⁵¹ Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas-Austin, writes: “Trumpcare would be the greatest pro-life victory in our history, marginalizing forever the unconscionable slaughter of innocent unborn children under the false flag of ‘women’s health.’”⁵² Anti-abortion is a similar motivating factor in the thinking of Mary Ann Glendon, the arch-conservative Catholic who is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and former ambassador to the Vatican under George W. Bush.⁵³ But one should not conclude from these cases that abortion is the only tipping issue among conservative Catholic academics. Not all conservative Catholics who oppose abortion and gay marriage support Trump. Francis J. Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy & Church-State Studies at Baylor University, is a such a conservative Catholic who organized in 2016 a list of Catholic intellectuals who believed that Trump was unfit for the presidency.⁵⁴

As for evangelicals, Donald E. Miller, professor of religion and director for the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California, and not a Trumpist, says:

So even if Trump’s lifestyle doesn’t accurately reflect the faith of white evangelicals, his rhetoric does echo the fears of those who prefer walls over webs. That’s probably enough to ensure wall evangelicals’ loyalty to Trump in the voting booth. Whether that loyalty will turn out to have been misplaced is another question altogether.⁵⁵

For Miller, white Protestant evangelicals, who feel so threatened by science and globalization, will get behind a “wall-builder” like Trump whose rhetoric, but not his lifestyle, echoes their fears.⁵⁶ Or in the more hyperbolic and demeaning hostility of Eric Rasmussen, an economist at Indiana University, who, in a blog where he takes to task fellow evangelical Tim Keller for being insufficiently outspoken against homosexuality and abortion, says of Trump and Obama:

He lies. He talks dirty. He humiliates people in public (think of poor Jeb Bush: ‘You’re weak, Jeb. You’re weak!’). He’s divorced—twice. His hotels sell pornography. How could anyone stand to vote for him? Barack Obama, on the other hand, was exemplary in his personal life. It’s hard to imagine him doing anything crude. Sure, he has no faith in God, but he’s so polite! As a state senator, senator, and president, Obama encouraged all manner of debauchery, to be sure. But it’s okay to vote for him, because his mass pimping was at arm’s length.⁵⁷

The anger behind the wall runs deep!

Other issues

A number of other issues are mentioned by these academics as reasons for supporting Trump. Some of the supporters, such as Burton W. Folsom (Professor of History at Hillsdale College, Walter E. Block (Professor of Economics at the J. A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans), Thomas DiLorenzo (Professor of Economics at Loyola University Maryland Sellinger School of Business), and Allen Mendenhall (Associate Dean at the Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law), are strongly committed to the idea of free markets. Some identify as libertarian though, as we observed earlier in this article, very few (only thirteen) of the strong supporters are economists or teach in business schools.

A few in our sample, such as Walter E. Block, Thomas DeLorenzo, Henry Nau (Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University), Dan Phillips (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Mercer University), and Robert Kaufman (Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University), single out foreign policy as the most important reason for supporting Trump. For them, foreign policy seems to mean less military intervention and cutting back on certain long-standing military and political commitments. Block, a self-identified libertarian, put it this way:

It is clear that The Donald is the most congruent with our perspective. This is true, mainly because of foreign policy. And, of the three, foreign policy, economic policy and person liberties, the former is the most important. As Murray Rothbard and Bob Higgs have demonstrated over and over again, US foreign policy determines what occurs in economics and in the field of personal liberties. Foreign policy is the dog that wags the other two tails.⁵⁸

And Henry R. Nau adds:

Trump’s foreign policy is more coherent and conservative than many acknowledge. It seeks to realize a conservative-internationalist world order that builds on national sovereignty rather than international institutions and uses the military to strengthen diplomacy rather than engage in nation-building.⁵⁹

Nation building is to occur at home rather than abroad.

Nationalism is also a theme found among these Trump supporters. Daniel Bonevac (quoted in Hendricks 2017) points to defending national interests in justifying Trump’s electoral victory: “I think he correctly identified the dangers of a globalist attitude that threatened to overturn the interests of the United States.” Bruce Frohnen says:

The return of concern for the national interest (beyond the faux national interest in paving other nations as a step toward rebuilding them as cheap copies of our own) is an important conservative development. It constitutes recognition that, as traditional conservatives like Russell Kirk pointed out decades ago, human beings are situated persons, whose characters and personalities are developed within communities, and not monadic inputs into global production machinery."⁶⁰

Not nation building abroad, but nation strengthening at home is the directive here.

White nationalism would be another variation of special interest in our sample as nine Trumpists are known to have some affinity with neo-confederate white nationalist organizations or perspectives. Clyde Wilson was a founder of the League of the South in 1994. Donald W. Livingston founded the Abbeville Institute in 2003 and Paul Gottfrield founded the H. L. Mencken Club in 2008. All three organizations give voice to white supremacy, the Confederate cause, or anti-Federalist state secession.⁶¹ Other Trumpists, like Darren Beattie, Walter Block, Marshall DeRosa, Thomas DiLorenzo, E. Christian Kopff, and Allen Mendenhall, have participated in the life of one or more of these organizations or echoed similar views through their publications. Those views are often couched in extreme libertarian formulations that stress individual freedom, states’ rights, and the right to secession from Federal authority. Marshall DeRosa, for example, finds such ideas in the Confederate constitution and downplays the role of slavery in the war between the states. DeRosa blogs (Aug. 23, 2017) on the Abbeville Institute website that the Confederacy “embodied an advanced Christian civilization” and that the origins of Southern slavery can be attributed to “black supremacy” by “blacks and Asiatic Muslims on the African continent.” Block (2007) argues that secession can be justified on libertarian grounds and that the war between the states was not a civil war or about slavery, but a war of northern aggression. Block, Livingston, and DiLorenzo collaborated with others to publish The Annotated Secession Papers (Clark et al. 2018).

Some also mention the hotly debated topic of immigration. Of Indian origin, Amar Dev Amar (Professor of Business at Seton Hall University), lists immigration as a pet issue and organized a Trump support list among fellow Indian professionals. David Deming (Associate Professor at University of Oklahoma), and John C. Eastman (Professor of American Law at Chapman University School of Law) also speak specifically about immigration. In an op-ed piece, Deming says:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has been vilified for pointing out that illegal immigration into the United States is out of control. Because he wants to stop the flood of people entering this country illegally, Trump has been called a racist and a xenophobe. But Trump is right about immigration. We need to get our borders under control."⁶²

Many show little scholarly restraint in expressing their political views. Echoing Trump’s criticism of the mainstream news media, Bradley J. Birzer (Professor of History at Hillsdale College) refers to the New York Times as “nothing less than a second-rate college paper, with every title mirroring something to the effect of ‘How Donald Trump Created the Ultimate Evil in [insert person, place, date, event, planet, solar system].’”⁶³ A few, such as Fred S. Singer (Professor Emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia), James Trifle (Professor of Physics at George Mason University), Brian Domitrovic (Associate Professor of history at Sam Houston State University), and Jan Leslie Breslow (Professor of Medicine at Rockefeller University), offer their support as deniers of climate change. Domitrovic applauds Trump for “his insistence that climate change is a hoax.”⁶⁴ But climate change is not one of the leading issues that mobilize the Trumpeters. Neither is immigration, nationalism, or the media.

Campus culture

We turn next to an issue that does animate many of the Trumpists and that is specific to this professional group: campus culture. This is the most widely expressed concern by the Trumpists. Indeed, our reading of reasons offered in support of Trump suggests that a deeply seeded opposition to prevailing campus culture is a fundamental motivating factor in supporting Trump. By campus culture we include a range of concerns that directly touch higher education, such as political correctness, identity politics, sexual orientation, diversity, affirmative action, and Title IX. Some of these overlap with what famously has been dubbed the “culture wars”; yet they point more directly to changing campus sensitivities and ensuing behavior regulations on campus.⁶⁵ Codevilla singles out “political correctness” as characteristic of all progressive movements that seek to “monopolize educational and cultural institutions” with “groupthink.”⁶⁶ Edward Erler, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, sees Trump as a means to roll back policies embodying political correctness:

The 2016 presidential election is almost certainly the last chance to stop political correctness, Progressive Liberalism’s ingenious, phenomenally successful invention for suppressing political dissent…. Of all the candidates, only Donald Trump has had the courage to attack political correctness frontally.⁶⁷

In his co-authored book, Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (Hanson and Heath 2001), Victor Davis Hanson (Professor Emeritus of classics at California State University-Fresno, currently Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and visiting professor at Hillsdale College) defends classical education against political correctness and postmodernism in the humanities, supports the claim of exceptionalism of Western culture, embraces whiteness, and opposes multiculturalism and diversity. Amy Wax, Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, points approvingly to an op-ed piece by Shelby Steele:

The Nov. 7 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by Shelby Steele says it all—one of the reasons for Trump’s popularity is that he has tried to scale some of the walls of political correctness. People are tired of all the victimology and identity politics, which distorts and casts a pall over every conversation. One hope is that it will become more acceptable to talk about respectability and the responsibility people from all groups have to obey the law and improve their own lives and communities—and that would be a good thing.⁶⁸

Nicholas Capaldi, Professor of Law at George Mason University, criticizes political correctness for its “doctrinaire liberalism.” Jay Bergman, Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, singles out homogeneity in political views on campus as an overwhelming problem. Daniel Bonevac (2016) outlines a litany of reasons of what is wrong with the country, among which one reads: “Title IX is used on campus to destroy due process and stifle speech.” One senses that the advent of Title IX and its expanded range of implications shaping campus life are key changes that animate much of the hostility of these academic conservatives toward the academy.⁶⁹ A review of Mark Bauerlein’s tweets up through February 2019 shows him railing against political correctness, raucous pop music, liberals, the f-word, identity politics, the mainstream press, but offering nothing critical of Trump. Reflecting on his earlier experience in the academy, Bauerlein put it this way:

When I first saw identity politics at work, I was a graduate student in English at UCLA in the 1980s. These were the years when the heritage of genius and beauty was recast as a bunch of Dead White Males. Western civilization slipped from a lineage of reason and talent, free inquiry and unsuppressed creativity, into “Eurocentrism,” one group’s advance at the expense of others, women and people of color. Art for art’s sake gave way to art for politics’ sake, for identity’s sake. I spent my 20s in a grimy room reading Dante, Wordsworth and Nietzsche—only to find when I went to campus that my intellectual giants had become objects of suspicion and derision.

When Donald Trump stood in that square in Warsaw and unapologetically hailed Western civilization, I felt a 30-year discouragement lift ever so slightly. That’s my experience, and I’m happy to share it this season.⁷⁰

Here Bauerlein offers a particularly poignant testimony of resentment over how his considerable investment in a traditional scholarly capital became devalued by the changing cultural market in the humanities.⁷¹ Much of the academic Trumpists stance can be understood as a backlash against changes in academic life starting perhaps with the diversity introduced by Title IX and ethnic and racial considerations, affirmative action, and the various forms of identity politics and political correctness.⁷² In short, everything seems as if campus culture issues internal to the life of colleges and universities even more than national issues external to the academy animate the political preferences of these Trump supporters.⁷³ Their stance is relational and oppositional to campus culture. And their political support for the Trump presidency is very much tied to their stance in the cultural politics of the campus.

Types of scholarly capital

To what extent do these rationales derive from specialized academic knowledge? We return to this question posed earlier in the article. Is there a form of cultural capital (scholarly capital in this case) that seems particularly important in orienting the political views of these professors? Short of actually observing how these academics perform in the classroom or doing a content analysis of their academic publications, the most visible linkages between scholarly knowledge and support for Trump are among those who teach constitutional law, early American history, and political theory. In those cases, “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution and the views of the founding fathers are emphasized. Several subscribe to a natural rights philosophy, particularly those in law schools, philosophy, and political theory, and defend the Constitution as articulating those rights. For example, Bradley C. S. Watson, a fellow for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy at the Claremont Institute, argues against the idea of a “living constitution,” which he traces to social Darwinism and pragmatism. For him, such an idea undermines the founders’ Constitution dedicated to fixed natural truths and universal values. This by no means says that all faculty in these substantive knowledge areas are Trump supporters. Yet it is striking that constitutional law, early American history, and political theory much more than chemistry, engineering, psychology, sociology, or computer science, to mention but a few other types of academic capital, appear to function as a kind of knowledge capital in rationalizing support for the Trump presidency.⁷⁴

A second type of linkage can be described as a resentful reaction to the devaluation of their scholarly capital investment. We have seen this most clearly in the above quote from Mark Bauerlein. But a similar sharp reaction to the challenges of a more diverse curriculum can be seen in Rachel Fulton Brown’s defense of her traditional expertise in medieval studies.⁷⁵ These scholars have resisted updating or converting their traditional scholarly capital into products more in tune with the expanded and more diversified cultural market demands, particularly in the humanities.

A third linkage can be found in the few cases of those examining the historical rise of the administrative state. One illustration would be Paul Moreno’s book The Bureaucratic Kings: The Origins and Underpinnings of America’s Bureaucratic State (2016) that offers a particular reading of the rise of the Progressive movement and the Woodrow Wilson presidency by arguing that government has come to rely far too much on expertise and science to govern rather than popular expression as idealized in the Federalist papers. Hence the need to support Trump and his attacks on centralized authority. But these academic concerns appear secondary in justifying support for Trump to the overriding concerns with campus culture.

Unwavering support

It is striking that in spite of the high media visibility of distraction in the Trump White House (tweeting, the West Wing’s constant turmoil and high turnover of advisors, hush money paid to an adult film star, and indictments of several appointees), none of the Trumpists have withdrawn their support from this president. Early in 2017, Mark Bauerlein defends Trump saying “He’s learning on the job.”⁷⁶ Denis Binder writes a Dec. 31, 2017 Happy New Year post on his blog attacking the mainstream media and fake news, defending Trump on all accounts, and decrying all criticisms of Trump and a motley assortment of conservative pet peeves: Black Life’s Matter, the Russia-Trump Dossier investigation, white privilege, fake racist attacks, kneeling of NFL players, etc.⁷⁷ Jack Kerwick, who has taught philosophy at several different schools in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas, voices strong support of Trump after the first year:

Now that Donald Trump has had what is, by many accounts, an astonishingly successful first year—according to the Heritage Foundation, at any rate, an even more successful year than the one enjoyed by sainted Ronald Reagan—it is worth looking back on just how spectacularly wrong were some of the president’s “conservative” critics.⁷⁸

But in certain respects our Trumpists are no different from many of the GOP leaders in their ongoing support of Trump. The Conservative Political Action Conference in February 24, 2018, held in Washington DC, showed continued support in spite of the high media visibility of distractions in the White House, as did the same conference in 2019 (February 27–March 2). Despite the many distractions, conservatives point to key accomplishments: 1.5 trillion tax cut, sweeping deregulation, increased military spending, and conservative judges, particularly the Supreme Court nominees. Even Ted Cruz (US Senator from Texas), who clashed sharply with Trump during the 2016 presidential election campaign, is now on board as a Trump supporter. Allen C. Guelzo (Professor of History at Gettysburg College) observes:

But despite the Russia investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, despite the unrelenting flurry of the princes of the op-ed pages, despite President Trump’s hiring of staff he was forced to fire, and despite his much-criticized tweets, the president is still in charge at the White House. And he appears to be wearing down all but his severest critics. In addition, the president is racking up enough of the legislative and policy wins that hit voters in the deepest parts of their pockets to make a re-election bid in 2020 look realizable.⁷⁹

And Steven F. Hayward (Senior Resident Scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California Berkeley) sums things up this way:

In assessing Trump’s accomplishments, let’s not get too distracted by his unconventional conduct. This hitherto ideologically unmoored man has set in motion an administration arguably more conservative than Ronald Reagan’s. While the Congress controlled by his adopted party remains gridlocked, Trump is rolling back regulations and a number of the Obama administration’s most controversial achievements, including the internal structure of Obamacare and the Clean Power Plan. His foreign policy resets look increasingly sure-footed. His judicial nominees are uniformly conservative. It is inconceivable that any of the other leading Republican candidates from the 2016 cycle would have governed as boldly as Trump has.⁸⁰

To the extent that Trump appears to continue wielding the “wrecking ball” against established institutions, including the academy, where the powers of administrative regulation place some limits on individual and collective expression, these academic supporters of Trump offer their unwavering support, not out of personal loyalty but as a means to shake up the system. No one supported his impeachment.

Discussion

Our findings are based on an illustrative sample of 103 scholars who advocate for Trump; the sample does not represent the entire population of academics supporting Trump. No doubt many other scholars voted for or support Trump but have been less public about it. Indeed, one of the consistent claims made by many Trumpists is that they are taking a stand that is very unpopular in the academy and hence the reason one does not find more junior and adjunct faculty as public voices for Trump. They view the academy as a liberal cultural regime that suppresses and penalizes conservative voices.⁸¹ To go public in support for Trump, so the argument goes, might well create negative repercussions down the road for careers in the academy. We do not have the data necessary to assess fully that claim but do note that virtually all the academic signers of the October 2016 list are tenured faculty.

However, as our results show, these individuals are not as isolated from colleagues and peers as they let on or as Fox News would have it.⁸² A field perspective shows that these individuals are not randomly distributed across the American academic field. Our data show that they tend to be concentrated in just a few schools and tend to frequent publications, conferences, forums, meetings, and websites espousing politically conservative views. Several have been chairs of their departments, so the ostracism suggested by Fox News certainly does not extend across the board. The research data reported here documents considerable social network solidarity among many of these individuals.

A few Trumpists do appear to be marginal relative to their professional peers. We think, for example, of the physicist Frank J. Tipler, Tulane University, whose “Omega Point Theory” is by and large dismissed by professional colleagues as pseudoscience. Or Peter Navarro, an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, formerly at the Paul Merage School of Business University of California-Irvine, but now in the White House, whose book Death by China was widely dismissed by fellow economists.⁸³ But our assessment at this stage of our research is that this kind of “marginal academic” is exceptional rather than the norm for these 103 individuals. This is not a study of intellectual deviance whereby individuals defend crackpot theories or perspectives. Rather, the overwhelming majority have produced credible scholarship by the professional standards of their respective scholarly fields. They also, by and large, are not located in marginal institutions within the American academic field. Most are in mainstream research universities. Only a few are in relatively obscure small schools. And many obtained their highest degrees from prestigious institutions.

More interesting, however, is whether these individuals draw connections between their scholarship and their support for the Trump presidency. In some cases we find such linkages that would approach standards of consistency between intellectual endeavors and political stances. We find this kind of connection most notably among those professors of law, particularly those specializing in constitutional law, who defend individual rights in their legal opinions and their opposition to affirmative action and political correctness on campuses. We find it also among those historians focused on American history and political philosophy that stresses the originality of the Constitution and the original intent of the founding fathers of the republic. Along this line of thinking one professor of law, Francis Buckley, says he supported Trump because Trump would appoint another Scalia to the Supreme Court, reflecting a preference for Constitutional “originalism.” More common is a thread of political argument that the election of Clinton would further advance the “administrative state” that since Woodrow Wilson has increasingly given the reins of government over to experts in violation of the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution to found a republic on the basis of popular consent. But in many other instances, the connection between scholarship and support for Trump is more elusive or obviously forced. One thinks of Daniel Bonevac (2016), Professor of Philosophy at University of Texas-Austin, with numerous scholarly publications, who, in response to the question whether he continues to support Trump after the first year, threw together a laundry list of affirming reasons that sound more like Fox News than reasoned argumentation based on his scholarship.⁸⁴ But it is rare that these scholars in their roles as public intellectuals attempt to offer an intellectual framework for understanding Trumpism. Victor Davis Hansen, in his book, The Case for Trump (2019), would be one notable exception. By and large, however, the Trumpists function as public intellectuals in support of Trump, but their public role seems to be more one of advocacy rather than one of furnishing ideas that orient the public debate.

It is striking that one finds very few natural scientists on the list. There is no biologist, no chemist, and only three physicists (though the work of one of the physicists is largely rejected by his professional peers). Might this reflect sample bias? To what extent does the October 2016 “Scholars & Writers for America” list—our starting point—reflect a narrowly configured network of individuals based on the contacts and acquaintances of the organizer Francis Buckley, Professor of Law at George Mason University? Our initial sample perhaps reflected a Buckley network effect since the academics on his list largely come from law, political science, history, and the humanities. Expanding the sample beyond the original sixty-nine to 103 has been one way of addressing the possible bias.⁸⁵ The additional thirty-four tend to replicate the patterns of the original sixty-nine with two notable differences: the number of economists does increase as does that of those in religiously oriented schools. However, we know from national survey data, as reported by Gross (2013), that relatively few conservative professors are found in the social sciences with the exception of those free-market libertarians in economics. There is just one sociologist and one anthropologist in our sample of 103.⁸⁶

A more thorough survey of the web and notably op-ed opinions in regionally as well as nationally important news media might well turn up more highly visible academic supporters of Trump, not just those who voted for him. However, we are reasonably confident that adding additional names to the 103 will not change dramatically the findings reported here. We might find, for example, a few more Trump supporters in business schools and that would likely increase the pro-market, tax cuts, and small government voices. But at the same time, threats of a trade war with China and policies restricting international trade more generally are quite unpopular with economists. So we would not anticipate that increasing the sample much beyond 103 would also increase significantly the representation of any particular group of academic Trump supporters or a line of views at variance with the ones reported here.

We asked to what extent the Trumpists represent a heteronomous force within the academic field. That is, to what extent is the autonomy of the academic profession and academic culture compromised by their presence? The answer may not be as straightforward as the question suggests. And this is for two reasons. First, the boundary between the academic field and the political field in the United States may be more porous than many think. Certainly this is the charge by conservatives when they point to the liberal/left political assumptions in campus culture that tend to exclude conservative voices. And the work by Gross et al. (2013; 2012) on general liberal dispositions of the professorate suggests as much. Moreover, American universities have shown greater toleration for private sector funding than European; and, in addition, state legislatures in recent years have frequently tied state financial support to outcome measures and occasionally political issues.

Second, despite the evidence that many Trumpists are riding the benefits directly or indirectly of external Koch funding, our analysis of the significance of campus culture issues suggests some overlap with the argument that Bourdieu makes in Homo Academicus (1988); namely, that it is struggle within the academic field that shapes political stances as much if not more than the other way around.⁸⁷ We have suggested that support for Trump is motivated by the belief that his administration would help check the expansion of political correctness, identity politics, affirmative action, etc. that these academics so oppose. If there were no struggle over these campus culture issues, one might wonder if the support for Trump would be as forceful as it is among these individuals. It is as if these professors have projected their struggle within the academic field onto the political field.⁸⁸

Labeling the Trumpists as a heteronomous force threatening the “professional and cultural or knowledge autonomy” of the universities is by no means to suggest that they represent the only or even the prime threat to that autonomy. Numerous critics have voiced concern over the increasing business influence within the universities, some of it coming from outside but also because the internal reorganization of many university programs reflects the market logic of business organizations (Brint 2018). Curiously that criticism of the logic of market capitalism is strangely absent from the Trumpists. Indeed, many of them celebrate it. Their critical focus is leveled primarily at cultural and administrative regulation within universities and they appear to see no contradiction or threat to their professional autonomy by bringing in outside political and financial forces to enhance their agenda. Their criticism of the current state of campus culture resonates with a broader suspicion of higher education found largely within the Republican Party and that has been growing over recent years. This criticism has been documented by numerous scholars, like Gross (2013) and Brint (2018).⁸⁹ The Trumpists are but a particularly forceful expression of that criticism.

The intellectual focus of these scholars is almost exclusively on American society. Very few show any interest in global affairs. One important exception would be Peter Navarro whose widely criticized economic analysis of the dangers a trade deficit with China poses to the American economy helped land him a position in Trump’s White House. We also identified five who stress foreign policy as important in their support for Trump. Just a few, such as Ross Terrill, a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbanks Center for Chinese Studies, specialize in area studies beyond the United States. On the whole, however, these scholars are remarkably parochial in outlook. Global challenges seem quite secondary. Campus issues like political correctness and affirmative action appear to be their primary concerns.⁹⁰

Second, the 2016 “Scholars & Writers for America” statement singles out secondary education as a problem that could be corrected by Trump’s support for vouchers for charter and parochial schools. Yet the list contains no specialists of education policy. Nor were any professors of education found when we increased the sample size to 103. Several teach in parochial schools and affirm the quality of those schools. One studied the negative effects of bussing. Most are critical of political correctness issues on campus. But none is really a specialist of secondary education. Professors from schools of education are entirely absent. As relational analysis suggests, who is absent from a sample often reveals key features of those who are in. Trumpists are concerned with campus culture but educational specialists do not join their ranks.⁹¹

Questions for further research

At least two questions point up directions for further research. First, not all conservatives support the Trump presidency. Indeed, many voiced strong opposition to Trump during the campaign and some have been quite critical of his time in office. We think of neoconservatives such as William Kristol, who was co-founder and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard. The National Review, in fact, published an “Against Trump” issue that featured essays from twenty-two prominent conservatives who all made a case for why he should not be the Republican nominee.⁹² So, being a conservative Republican is no guarantee of support for Trump. This raises an interesting boundary question demanding further research—namely, what separates the conservatives on this list from those who are critical of the Trump presidency? Shields and Dunn (2016) interviewed 153 conservative academic scholars during the primary campaign prior to the 2016 elections and Dunn (Green 2016), who identifies as a conservative political scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder, observes “I can’t think of anyone who we interviewed who would be a Trump supporter.” While many of the conservatives they interviewed liked the fact that the Tea Party was concerned about budgets, deficits, taxes, and the Constitution—key conservative issues—Shields (Green 2016) says that “I suspect they would dislike Trump much more because not only is he a populist—it’s not even clear that he’s a conservative. He’s a narcissist.” And Dunn (Green 2016) adds: “Certainly the libertarians are really alarmed by Trump—his hostility to free trade, closing borders, limiting immigration.” These statements point to some fault lines dividing conservatives over the Trump presidency. What issues and views of the current state of American society distinguish those on the list from other conservatives? Clearly the importance of having a global vision for the role of the United States in world affairs would be one possible difference worth exploring. Foreign policy would be one dividing issue. Many neoconservatives who supported the Bush military intervention in Iraq see Trump as an isolationist. Others support him precisely because he is less interventionist than they imagine Clinton would have been. Further, not all conservatives are populists and this might well be another dividing point. And is there a type of scholarly cultural capital that converts more easily into a conservative political discourse capital than others? Do constitutional concerns or preoccupation with the founding ideas of the American republic (a kind of foundationalism) lend themselves more readily to political positions represented on this list than the knowledge capital of natural science or social science? Bourdieu (1988) found in the case of the French professorate that faculty in law were more conservative than faculty in the natural and social sciences. Our data do not permit us to speak to the political inclinations of American university disciplines as a whole yet we think it is significant that so few of the Trump supporters in our sample come from the natural and social sciences. Further research on these kinds of questions would seem desirable to understand better how the kinds of public intellectual interventions represented by the 103 Trumpists are situated within a broader array of political interventions by these conservative academics.

Second, this research would gain in richness if there were international comparisons. Some academics outside of the United States support the Trump Presidency. It would be interesting to compare these US academics with those in other countries who support populist movements and right-wing political leaders in their own countries, such as in Hungary, Poland, France, and Germany. Might there be analogous university field similarities to their American counterparts or would their institutional field locations be quite different? How does their relationship to populism compare to that of these US professors? There is growing interest in comparing populist movements in different European countries. Might it not also be interesting to identify those European scholars who function as public intellectuals in support of those populist causes?