The Hopkins chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) hosted a discussion about the impact of the current administration under President Donald J. Trump. The event, intended to promote discussion between undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty, was held on Tuesday, March 28 in Mergenthaler Hall.
Panelists included professors and a graduate student from different departments. Each speaker gave a presentation on a development associated with Trump’s rise. Audience participants had the opportunity to ask questions following the presentations.
Derek Schilling, president of the AAUP at Hopkins, explained that facilitating discussion upholds freedom and equality in academia.
“I hope there will be speaking out. We want to hear from you, all of you in the audience. It’s time to talk Trump. We’re into day 68, and it feels like a millennium. Day after day we are on the edge. Our institutions are being challenged,” Schilling said. “We join our voices with those various unions and chapters around the U.S. in defense of basic equality in the workplace.”
Cognitive Science Professor Kyle Rawlins, who specializes in formal and philosophical semantics, gave a presentation analyzing Trump’s tweets.
“[His tweets] are kind of easy to laugh at, but I think there’s something fairly dangerous going on here,” he said. “I’m going to use some tools from linguistics and some tools from philosophy to try to give an analysis of what phrases like this do.”
Rawlins used the linguistics concept of not-at-issue content which looks at subtext and background content. Rawlins argued that not-at-issue content is often used in political propaganda. According to him, the phrase “fake news,” for example, is connected to not-at-issue content because it implies that the mainstream media is false, a viewpoint that current Republicans generally push for.
“This phrase on the surface appears to contribute to reasonable discourse, but at the same time undermines the possibility of having a reasonable conversation want to suggest that this is happening all over the place,” he said. “You can find easier examples in Trump’s speech.”
Material Sciences and Engineering Professor Michael Falk is a queer activist, and his presentation focused on how trans people are affected by the Republican administration.
Folk recounted the story of Alphonza Watson, a trans woman who was killed a few weeks ago in Baltimore. She was the eighth trans person murdered in 2017 in the United States.
“We have to talk about how trans people are disproportionately targeted for violence, and trans women of color in particular,” he said.
History graduate student Allon Brann led a presentation examining Trump and racism. He argued that although it is clear that Trump and his supporters are racist, it is not enough to simply point it out.
“I’m very sympathetic to the intentions to label most individuals like Trump racist and publicly shame them for their attitudes and expressions,” he said. “Still, I fear that too often those efforts to identify individual racists distract us from contesting inequality itself. I’m concerned that our search for racists sometimes impedes our ability to unmask and attack the operation of racism.”
He recalled how politician Paul Ryan was praised after condemning Trump’s racist attack of the Hispanic judge who presided over the lawsuit against Trump University. Brann said that this is an example of people ignoring Ryan’s own racist remarks once he criticized Trump.
Sophomore Vrshank Ravi emphasized how fields in the social sciences were conducive to debate which benefited the discussion.
“You can challenge professors. This is the social science in the sense that nothing is clear cut and... it’s definitely possible to have a dialogue,” he said. “Imagine this [is] a physics seminar. Do you think the students would have a hope of talking to a professor and challenging him on his thesis? No f*cking way. But here you can.”
Sophomore AJ Tsang echoed the importance of being able to freely discuss these issues with professors.
“In the past you either have faculty seminars or students talking about it online or in classrooms but never really a combination of the two together — sharing ideas about how to really fight Trump and make sure that we really make gains in the progressive movement,” he said.
On the other hand, junior India Reiss questioned the way that the discussion was organized.
“It was long, though. [A]t the end it was interesting, but I was exhausted,” she said. “I thought that the discussions were a little disorganized. If you attempt to have a discussion with more than 10 people, I think that tends to happen.”
Overall, students like graduate student Vikram Chandrashekhar enjoyed the opportunity to engage with professors’ opinions of politics in a way that is not normally not discussed in the classroom.
“I didn’t know that there were this many professors on campus who were very vocally anti-Trump, and it was kind of exciting to see that there are people in the Hopkins administration that are willing to stick their necks out for not only Hopkins students, but also marginalized people,” Chandrashekhar said.
Tsang agreed on the importance of being able to listen to professors’ opinions.
“Really I’m just glad to see so many professors coming out to help support that collaboration because we as students sometimes worry, are there other professors willing to support collaborative dialogue, but you know, I think that tonight we saw that there was a lot of it,” he said.
Claire Fox contributed to reporting.
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