Henry Abbott

Donald J. Trump will become the 47th President of the United States. Let us be clear, the scale of this victory is immense; Republicans won the popular vote, the Electoral College, the Senate, potentially held on to the House and gained a generality of gubernatorial races. Trump secured victory in all seven swing states and significantly eroded the margins of victory in even the safest blue states from Virginia to New York. Trump also won more of the youth vote, Latino vote, African American vote and Arab American vote than any candidate in the history of the modern Republican party. The traditional voting blocs have been monumentally realigned—the Democratic party will now reevaluate where they have failed. Likewise, Bowdoin needs to reevaluate.

Many of you are displeased with these results, and the general mood on campus is one of despair, anger or just general disappointment.

This wasn’t what you expected. It wasn’t even what I expected, and I support the president-elect. You were told repeatedly that the momentum was with Kamala Harris: Fundraising, polling and your general experience deceived you, and you have every right to be shocked.

I don’t write this to gloat but with a serious consideration of how we move forward from here as a campus.

The prevailing sentiment on campus has been one of complete and total shock. You expected a Democratic win because you have been conditioned to do so in a completely liberal environment. You expected a Democratic win because you live in the Bowdoin bubble. The winds of change now brush your face, the shield has broken and the bubble has finally burst.

The issue at Bowdoin is that we are completely unrepresentative of the wider country. We are not even remotely diverse or open-minded, as we refuse to accept or encourage the most important diversity—that of thought.

The Bowdoin Orient found that 91 percent of the college will be voting for Kamala. Moreover, the National Association of Scholars report on “What Bowdoin Teaches” estimates that less than a handful of our 200 faculty members are conservative, and even fewer actually identify as Republican. On the rare occasion a conservative is invited to speak on campus, i.e. David French, we choose the most palatable to the progressive experience. French voted for Kamala Harris; God forbid we hear from anyone representative of the majority of the electorate.

Many of you seem to think that conservatives are exotic, uneducated endangered creatures—limited to the plains of Texas or Wyoming. This is clearly not the case. Conservatives exist. They exist in a nationwide majority, in every state, in inner cities and, yes, even here at Bowdoin.

Based on the unhelpful rhetoric spewed all over Yik Yak in the last couple of days, it is fundamentally clear that so many on this campus have never truly engaged with the other side. It is simply not true to write off the majority of the electorate who voted for Trump as racist, sexist or bigoted—especially when that includes such a large proportion of disaffected African-American or Latino voters who previously put Barack Obama in the White House. Labeling the other side is easy, while engaging in dialogue with them is hard.

This election serves as a wake-up call to Democrats that their platform is unpopular, out-of-touch and remarkably elitist. If you look around, you see that the mission of Bowdoin College has been corrupted and molded into that same platform.

Vast swathes of campus administrators, faculty and, indeed, some students consider an advancement of their political views as a fundamental extension of their job. The growing bureaucracies of this nation’s academies amount to little more than an extension of the Democratic Party’s activist wing. But the nation said NO. They rejected these policies, and it is about time that academia, and Bowdoin in particular, starts to secularize itself from the cultish creed of leftism. I am asking for us to be more representative and open-minded of the country as a whole—to reflect it.

The College should be a marketplace for ideas, where the fervent communist, progressive, conservative or anarchist all receive air-time, respect and can exist. These formative college years are exactly the time to hear everyone out, to build your philosophy and worldview. This is Bowdoin’s duty to us as its students—this duty is yet to be met.

So how do we move forward from here? How do we make sure not to repeat this shock and disengagement from the wider political world?

The solution is clear: diversity and dialogue. Bowdoin needs to reflect more political views and encourage a greater understanding of why people vote the way they do by actually providing them a home within the College. We are less likely to hate that which we understand and those who we are friends with. Seeing the humanity in everyone requires seeing real-life human beings on campus with political differences. We need to befriend more colleagues and classmates with different views from ourselves—and to do that, we need more of these people at Bowdoin. Every school in the country is reckoning with the same issues, and it would be wise to look to their approaches for inspiration.

The Chicago Principles—statements of institutional neutrality and commitments to free speech—are being adopted at a rapidly increasing rate by universities in some form particular to each school. In some respects, President Safa Zaki has bound herself to this practice of institutional neutrality already. Zaki rightly pointed to the importance of not disenfranchising any particular group on campus and the aid to good dialogue that institutional neutrality provides—but we ought to make it official school policy.

This year alone, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, Harvard University and Stanford University are just a selection of those who have decided to embrace political neutrality to support all their students and encourage open and free discussion.

The other much-needed reform at Bowdoin would come in the creation of a committee for intellectual and political diversity. Such a committee, similar to other diversity committees in admissions and faculty hiring, would be paramount in providing insight and encouraging the hiring of new faculty and staff and the adoption of policies to really diversify Bowdoin’s academic credentials.

In the aftermath of this election, Bowdoin needs to reflect in the pool of its disappointed tears. Matching, but most importantly, understanding the country as a whole requires an open-mindedness we are yet to achieve. I would strongly recommend that Bowdoin’s administration adopt the above suggestions. I hope we can move forward with open, honest and community-orientated dialogue on this campus.

Let me leave you with a reflection from CNN’s election night commentator Scott Jennings:

“Cherish your family and friendships. Don’t do or say anything stupid over an election that would put any of what really matters in jeopardy.”

Bowdoin has to improve its political dialogue and diversity. Individually and as a school, we must be a voice, be an ear, and not an echo.

Zak Asplin ’27 is a member of the Bowdoin Conservatives.