HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF BIGOTRY EDITION: What’s Wrong With Being From the South? Just Ask an Academic in the North.

That kind of crass regionalism creates well-earned suspicion of ivory-tower elites. The stereotyping works in both directions. Each sustains the other, leading to electoral results that help neither the professors up north nor the pig farmers where I grew up. Regionalism creates openings for populists to exploit and worsen these divides. These attitudes pit rural against urban, college-educated against non-college-educated. If those of us in academe are truly so smart, we ought to be the ones taking the first step toward bridging this divide.

Unfortunately, the opposite is occurring. In the age of Trump, anti-Southern attitudes seem to have crystallized and worsened throughout higher education. Any Trump-voting area, in fact, seems to be fair game for ridicule. These attitudes undercut the efforts of those seeking to advance the rights of marginalized groups in regions of the country where evidence-based scholarship might be needed the most. . . .

It is strange to me that so many academics cannot see when they show prejudice against the rural, the religious, and the less formally educated. We are trained to recognize systematic bias in terms of race and gender — but we remain too often unaware of our geographic prejudices. . . .

Intellectual laziness is on the rise with disturbing results. After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, I spoke with a student who was bothered that she felt no sympathy at first for the victims. As we talked, she began to realize the rash of assumptions she had made about them: If they were attending a country-music concert, they must have voted for Trump, which meant they loved guns and thus deserved death. It’s an extreme example of our discourse of dehumanization — a vivid one in my memory. But it isn’t rare for me to hear similar assumptions expressed by students or faculty members, often without the critical self-reflection.

Looking down on the flyover people, and the unearned feeling of moral superiority it brings, is the coin with which the left pays its foot soldiers. Without that, many of them would be gone.

UPDATE: From the comments: “What’s most laughable is that the fans believe they are part of the team.”