"Stop with the rural-bashing on campuses"

Here's the lede from the essay (op-ed) I published today, co-authored with Emelie Peine, in Inside Higher Ed: 

“My parents actively taught me to hate rural people because they all vote for Trump—so why should we care about them?”

This comment came from a San Francisco Bay Area student in a fall 2022 class one of us, Emelie, taught on rural communities at the University of Puget Sound.

In a course on law and rural livelihoods the other of us, Lisa, taught at the University of California, Davis, the few students who hail from rural areas have noted their peers’ lack of empathy for rural folks—for folks like them.

Kami Steffenauer, then a sophomore at Georgetown University, wrote poignantly in The Georgetown Voice last fall about the shame she felt when a professor called her a “country bumpkin” during a class discussion.

Many rural students can relate to Steffenauer’s experience; we often hear this kind of casual bashing of rural areas and people from our students and colleagues. So it’s no surprise that some conservatives are railing against university elites who fail to appreciate rural folks or, worse still, lump them all into one big, toxic basket of deplorables. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance—who often represents himself as standing up for rural folks—has gone so far as to describe universities as “hostile institutions.”

Sadly, conservatives are not entirely wrong. As we embark on another fall semester that coincides with a contentious presidential election in which rural-urban dynamics—and tensions—are attracting attention, we have a responsibility as educators to challenge antirural bias. It is incumbent upon us to ensure that our institutions are places where rural students and faculty know that they, too, belong.