I agree with Ciorba that nobody should be blaming or scapegoating marginalized communities for the outcome of the 2024 election; that’s shameful. However, let’s not start playing the victim or making excuses, either.

Those of us whose relationships to power are more contingent, more conditional should wield those tools at our own risk or, perhaps, not at all. Instead, we should model for our students what it looks like to destabilize the truth claims made by those in positions of power — with deep respect, but rigorously.

Their underlying message is clear: “Vote for us, because we are better than you. We know what is best for you. We know you better than you know yourself.”

WashU, like most other majority-liberal universities, is a bubble; however, Missouri is not. Some of the communities most impacted by this year’s election results are just outside the gates of WashU, and stepping out of the campus ecosystem is a crucial step in enacting real change.

What’s more fun than a Political Party? A political party. Despite their attempts to appear to voters as bastions of civility and decorum, American presidents have been known to “rally.” Here are a few stories of them at their most devious, in roughly chronological order.

Do we as Americans really want to see a nation where everyone from all points on the political spectrum can come together and join hands, or do we just want our political enemies not to attack us? It seems to me that it’s the latter.

Roan does not need to endorse a candidate. But if her goal is for voters to “think critically” about the election, she must equip the young people who listen to her with some basic political realities. Blue states protect queer and trans rights; red states do not.

On Oct. 23, WashU’s Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging came together for their first-ever intergenerational conversation with the goal of fostering meaningful conversation between age groups in the midst of a tense election season, growing political polarization, and widespread social-media misinformation. Students sat in groups of three and four in round tables across the classroom, directly across elderly residents of St. Louis and WashU teaching faculty.

No election you are eligible to vote in is too small or too unimportant.

“We have collective responsibility….to pass on a political system to future generations of Americans that is workable and usable, maybe not perfect, but can be clutched into something that works,” […]