Stop With the Rural-Bashing on Campuses

“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.

As professors at metropolitan universities, we hear the most damning stereotypes of rural folks asserted as established fact. We hear that rural folks are racist, sexist homophobes who aren’t smart enough to vote in their own best interests. We’re told that small towns are homogeneous, backward places with regressive politics—places that exist only to be escaped.

But rural people and places are much more diverse, dynamic and surprising than stereotypes suggest. Rural students who end up at metropolitan universities no doubt reflect that diversity, and they bring their rural backgrounds with them into the classroom as an important part of their identity and self-concept. This makes it all the more painful and alienating when that rural identity is denigrated.

As professors who study rural America—and who grew up in rural places ourselves—we are concerned that our blue-state, urban campuses might once again foment rural antipathy, thus marginalizing and even shaming students who hail from the broad swath of America that many now think of simply as “Trump country.”

Where we teach, relatively few of the students who turn up in our classes are from rural places or have much firsthand exposure to them. Nationally, rural students are underrepresented in higher education, particularly at prestigious and urban institutions, and their college completion rates lag behind those of their metropolitan counterparts. This means it is critically important to be aware of how broad, negative attitudes about rural people and places can alienate students who identify as rural.

To that end, we should view election 2024 as a series of teachable moments in which we challenge students to sharpen their critical thinking skills and practice empathy toward a group increasingly marginalized among the educated class. We can teach important lessons on implicit bias and stereotyping—and even a bit about the appropriate use of statistics. Perhaps most importantly, we can model the inclusion and belonging to which higher education pays so much lip service. 

As it happens, two recent books provide contrasting models for how to think about rural folks and how to talk with our students about them. The first book provides lessons on what not to do. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s book White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (Penguin Random House), like a previous generation of books purporting to explain rural America to an urban audience, traffics in familiar stereotypes. Its centerpiece, as suggested by the title, is a one-dimensional caricature of rural people—specifically rural white people—as so consumed by rage that they present a unique threat to the nation. The problem with the book is that several of the political scientists on whose empirical work it relies have called out errors in Schaller and Waldman’s conclusions, noting their shoddy methodology.

The second book, The Rural Voter (Columbia University Press), published a few months before White Rural Rage, presented vast quantities of detailed and nuanced data on rural attitudes. In that book, political scientists Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea reveal rural residents to be little different from their urban counterparts in their attitudes about a range of cultural issues. Where rural people do differ is in their sense that their fates are linked to others in their community, in their loyalty and attachment to place, and in their identity as rural.

Jacobs and others argue that Schaller and Waldman seem to have come up with a provocative thesis and then gone looking for evidence to substantiate it. Jacobs and the political scientist B. Kal Munis recount a large body of rigorous scholarship, including their own, showing that rural identity is not reducible to racism, xenophobia, conspiracism and antidemocratic beliefs. Indeed, as they point out, these attitudes “are vastly more numerous outside rural communities than within them.”

This dialogue between scholars like Jacobs and Shea, on the one hand, and Schaller and Waldman on the other, gives us an opportunity to talk to our students about confirmation bias, inaccurate interpretations of data that confirm existing beliefs. We should also address with our students the growing tendency to stereotype people based on geography. Just as we would not let our students get away with stereotyping urban residents—likely read as Black—we should not let them get away with stereotyping rural folks. Jacobs and Shea’s myth-busting book equips us with hard empirical data to dispute those stereotypes, move beyond the temptation of anecdata and see the complexity of rural people and places. 

One of the most pervasive stereotypes—starkly articulated by Emelie’s Bay Area student—is that everyone in rural America supports Donald Trump. That’s obviously, demonstrably untrue. Undoubtedly, some of our students—both rural and urban—will be Trump supporters, and we need to make room for them and their opinions. But we should not assume rural students support Trump, nor should we perpetuate the myth that rural America is overrepresented in U.S. electoral politics, and therefore responsible for his victory. Instead, we should inquire into the geographic dynamics of American elections, asking why many rural residents embrace Trump.

As rurality becomes an increasingly salient axis of identity—including for the growing number of rural residents of color—it is more important than ever to respect that identity as we do any other. After all, if we alienate rural students, we will fuel rural folks’ skepticism of higher education, even antipathy to it.

And if rural people turn their backs on higher education, our institutions and our students will suffer a profound loss—as will the nation. Like other groups of students who may find themselves in the minority in a classroom, rural students bring unique and valuable perspectives that their urban peers need to hear. Many have firsthand experience with some of the biggest structural issues facing our country: the green energy transition, equitable access to health care, water shortages and natural resource depletion, and how to create sustainable food systems. These are dinner table conversations for rural students who have front-row seats to many pressing social and political challenges. These challenges may be mere abstractions to urban students, who enjoy the energy that powers their lights and the water that pours from their taps, with no awareness of the battles being waged in the rural communities that provide those resources. 

Instead of carelessly expressing dismissal and disdain for livelihoods and lifestyles unfamiliar to them, urban students and faculty should engage rural students with humility and empathy. It’s time to replace an us-versus-them mentality that declares rural folks the enemy with a deeper understanding of the interdependence of rural and urban communities. 

Welcoming rural voices is a matter of diversity, equity and inclusion that cannot be overlooked. If we continue to peddle inaccurate and pejorative myths about rural America in our classrooms—or if we let our students or colleagues go unchallenged when they do so—we play right into the hands of the anti-university rhetoric of JD Vance. Worse still, we abdicate our responsibility to create a campus culture that truly includes all students.