How Some Faculty Plan to Handle Class on Election Day

At least 86 colleges and universities have canceled classes Tuesday, according to Day on Democracy, an organization that helps students advocate for their institutions to give them Election Day off. At other institutions, individual professors are deciding whether to hold classes, cancel them or perhaps take a third option, like making attendance on Tuesday not mandatory.

Catherine Hillman, a lecturer at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, said she has chosen to make class optional on every Election Day since she began teaching in 2011. This year will be no exception. She also always assigns an extra credit project in her marketing course, asking students to use a particular sales principle to either develop their own voting plan or persuade a family member or friend to vote. (There is an alternative prompt for those who can’t or don’t plan to vote, which is what she offers during nonelection years.)

Though she never asks her students to confirm whether they actually voted, she has heard from students in the past that the assignment was successful; she said one reported nudging their entire group of roommates to cast ballots.

“I do want to encourage them to vote,” she said. “I don’t want them to feel like this is an assignment making them vote. That’s why I always give the other alternatives.”

College students turn out to vote at higher rates than young people over all, but advocates warn that barriers to voting access can have an outsize impact on students, who often have busy schedules and may lack reliable transportation to the polls. Giving students time off from class to vote can afford them the extra time they may need to commute to the polls and, if necessary, wait in line to vote.

In an Inside Higher Ed/Generation Lab flash survey conducted in late September, a plurality of students, 45 percent, said that the best way their university could help them vote is by canceling classes on Election Day; that number was also high among students who said they are not planning to vote (35 percent) and those who said they did not know how they planned to vote (43 percent).

Marina Castro-Meirelles, who founded Day on Democracy as a student at the University of Mary Washington in 2018, said the biggest reason for institutions to cancel classes on Election Day is that it could be the deciding factor for students who are on the fence about voting.

“You’re always going to have students who are very dedicated and make the time [to vote], but acknowledging that there are real barriers is important,” she said.

She also noted it can be “unfair” to leave the decision up to professors, as they might feel pressured by students, administrators or colleagues to make a certain decision; if no other professor is canceling class on Election Day, for example, they may not feel comfortable doing so.

Ashley Carpenter, an assistant professor of higher education at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, plans to cancel her class, although not specifically to allow students to vote. She teaches a night class on Tuesdays, and worries that her students, who hold a wide range of political views, might be inclined to discuss the election while results are rolling in.

Though she welcomes political debate in her class, which focuses on history and law in higher education, she has reservations about conducting a discussion at a time when many students’ feelings—as well as her own—might still be raw.

“We would’ve been kind of finding out as class is happening,” she said. “I did not want to be in a space where I was trying to manage those emotions while also managing mine.”

Online Classes and Teach-Ins

As an alternative to canceling classes, Alex Flinsch, who teaches in Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, has moved his Tuesday information visualization class online this week to facilitate student voting. Though the polls close only a half hour after his 7:30 p.m. class starts, about half of his students are commuters, he said, and he wants to make sure that they don’t feel the need to forgo voting or step out of line early just to get to campus.

Attendance in the online class, which will go over various election-related charts and graphs, will also be optional.

“We’re going to make it a very, very topical class that day,” Flinsch said. “I want to show how political graphs and charts can be related to this class. I thought it would be a good diversion from the normal class plan.”

Meanwhile, at Bard College, a private college in upstate New York, a group of professors are opening their classes to community members for discussions “about the importance of democracy and elections.”

These gatherings will be hosted by professors not only of politics and history but also French, economics and meteorology. Afterward, in many cases, attendees will be invited to join their professors in a walk to Bard’s hard-won campus poll site.

“Many faculty members see a fundamental link between higher education and democracy, that it’s a fundamental pillar of liberal education in the United States,” said Jonathan Becker, the director of Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement and a political studies professor who is leading a discussion. “What more important act for an educator is [there than] to speak about the most fundamental democratic rights, which is the right to vote? I think there’s a number of faculty who are not formally doing a teach-in but who will be talking about that on that day.”

Becker hopes the teach-ins will have a lasting impact on how students view civic engagement.

“I shouldn’t say this, but … who really remembers any lecture they attended in college?” Becker said. “They’re much more likely to remember this special Election Day thing than they are my 19th lecture on Russian history.”