Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, November 12, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
The bad orange man is back and Ivy League institutions deployed elite teams of operatives to help traumatized students cope with the unthinkable and yet-to-be-processed consequences of a second Trump administration.
At Ivy League schools, where tuition averages upwards of 90 grand per year, classes were canceled, exams postponed, and students were "told they could color with crayons and offered milk and cookies to cope with Donald Trump's resounding victory in the presidential election," DailyMail.com reported on Nov. 7.
At Princeton, "Post-Election Listening Circles" were organized to help students cope with the results. The circles offered virtual and in-person "safe spaces" for emotional processing.
"We have been hearing about lots of anxiety from students about the election," Princeton spokesperson Jennifer Morrill told The Daily Princetonian, adding that the circles provide "a non-judgmental place to share feelings about the election."
The Ivy League institution even hosted an "Art Build" event through its Environmental Activism Coalition to help community members express their election-related emotions through coloring and other creative means.
Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, which is Trump's alma mater, told triggered students they could take the day after the election off.
At Columbia University, and its sister school, Barnard College, which became epicenters of anti-Israel protests last year, professors sent emails to students encouraging them to take it easy on Wednesday following the presidential election lest their orange man bad anxiety get the best of them.
One student told the New York Post a professor "sent out the memo around an hour before Pennsylvania was called for Trump by the Decision Desk."
In one email, Barnard professor Amelia Simone Herbert told her students in the Race, Space and Urban Schools class that she hopes they are "taking care."
"I recognize that processing the results of a national election can be heavy and having space to breathe and go a bit slower is vital," the professor wrote as she announced class would be cut short.
Still, she offered to "remain in the room for anyone who wants to use it as a workspace or a space to reflect with others."
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Adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University Michelle Greene - whose bio says she served on the Obama administration's White House Council on Women and Girls - announced she was canceling class.
"The current events would make it difficult to concentrate on factorial ANOVA, and although I had planned a tentative lecture on modern polling methods and their blind spots, it feels a bit tone-deaf to deliver it today," she wrote in her email. "Be good to yourselves, check in on your friends."
At Dartmouth College, students distraught over Kamala Harris's crushing defeat were encouraged to "be off the grid the day after the election."
Roughly 75 percent of the study body planned on voting for Harris, according to a poll by The Dartmouth, a college publication.
Event organizers at the Ivy League school encouraged students to to join them at Moosilauke Ravine Lodge for a "decompress dinner" on Wednesday evening.
"Bring a book, a craft, and a friend to the lodge," it said, according to a schedule obtained by The Daily Caller.
