Following the results of the historic 2024 election, students and faculty have taken different approaches to discussing the election in classrooms. While some addressed the election results in class, other professors canceled classes altogether. Other institutions of higher education in the area, such as Harvard University, have also had professors cancel classes in the wake of the election outcome.
For one political science course, POL1 210: Campaigns and Elections, taught by Professor Maneesh Arora, the 2024 election was a direct part of the course curriculum.
The course description for POL1 210 notes that the course addresses issues relating to the election and its long campaign cycle including “the impact of voter apathy, civic education, and the interplay of national and local politics on the health of American democracy.”
Students in the class had assignments related to the 2024 election.
“We’ve been looking at voter behavior and how it’s influenced by personal factors like personal identities and political factors like socioeconomic/political conditions,” said Eliza Karim ’27, a student enrolled in the course.
Semester readings have included academic studies alongside articles that delve into various factors of the 2024 election and each major candidate’s campaign tactics. Students in POL1 210 also participated in a nationwide competition called Election Madness in which players compete to accurately predict the winners of the 23 closest local elections and the 2024 presidential race. Students were assigned one of those local races to research in-depth and present to the class, and all researched the presidential race. Classmates’ findings were used to submit picks for the winners on the website. Finally, students submitted two research papers by election day — one for each race they looked at.
On Thursday, Nov. 7, the course met for the first time since the election was called.
“The class was pretty obviously dejected post-election.” said Karim. “We just discussed how we felt about everything for about the first half of class. The conversation was pretty casual and it was just good to get some of those thoughts off our chests.”
Other political science professors also prepared to cover the 2024 election. Professor Jennifer Chudy is teaching both POL1 337: Seminar: Race and American Politics and POL1 200: American Politics this semester.
“I had a lot of election readings early in the semester, so that by the time the election came around, students would have some political science tools to be able to understand the results,” said Chudy.
Professor Christopher Candland teaches POL 123: Logic and Rhetoric for Political Analysis and POL2 204: Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment.
“I asked that we think about ways to help protect one another from harm,” Candland said in an email statement to the News.
In the English department, Professor Kelly Rich started ENG 334: Law in Literature on Wednesday, Nov. 7 with an activity where words were written on the board to represent peoples’ feelings about the election. Students were released for 20 minutes to write a journal entry about their feelings about the election.
Professor Rich tied conversation about When the Emperor was Divine, a book about Asian American internment during WWII, back to the election and how everyday actions can be seen as a form of resistance. Professor Rich ended class by sharing the internet browser extension called “Make America Kittens Again,” which replaces Trump’s face with a picture of a kitten for all news sources and online websites.
On Friday, Professor Smitha Radhakrishan asked her SOC 108: Thinking Global: An Introduction to Sociology class the question, “What is the world that we want to build?”
While initially reluctant to share, her students shared about the grief they were feeling, particularly in regards to how the election would influence their home states.
As professors across Wellesley create spaces for students to process the reasons for the election results, Chudy offers some advice as a political scientist.
“There’s so many efforts to try to understand what happened and pointing to all these different factors with the candidates in the campaigns, but … you know, don’t miss the forest for the trees. Kind of keep your eye on these macro conditions,” Chudy said. “And that seemed to be salient to many students as they tried to reason through the results.”
Contact the editors responsible for this story: Sazma Sarwar, Galeta Sandercock, and Ruby Barenberg
