The elites.

The know-it-alls.

The pointy-headed people.

The safe-spacers and the trigger-warners.

The politically correct.

Named and unnamed, these became the targets of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, whose victory over Hillary Clinton gobsmacked the very establishment he had railed against. For a candidate who offered so few specific higher-education proposals, Mr. Trump ran an effective right-flank offensive against many of the values academics hold dear. In nearly 17 months of rallies, cheered on by numerous supporters without college degrees, the Republican nominee rode a rising wave of resentment toward the elitism and insularity that higher education is often thought to represent.

Mr. Trump’s call to “Make America Great Again” was just vague enough to invite interpretation. But many scholars heard it as a summons to turn back the clock to a time before their ideas about diversity and inclusivity were cemented into the policies and strategic plans of universities across the nation.

“It’s a nostalgic call for 1960s America before the social movements changed the nation,” says Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University and author of A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (University of Chicago Press, 2015). “More than anywhere else, the university is where those values were institutionalized. Those values — cosmopolitan, multicultural, feminist, a much more critical attitude toward the history of the United States, especially its wars — a lot of that is what Richard Nixon ran against, that’s what Reagan ran against, and Trump more than any of the others ran against those values.”

From the start, Mr. Trump positioned himself as blissfully emancipated from the constraints of linguistic nuance and precision embraced by much of the professoriate. His blistering descriptions of Mexican immigrants as rapists, while deeply offensive to many, amounted to a raised middle finger to the word police. The candidate, while often an imperfect messenger, identified a pocket of the electorate exhausted by the hypercautious language that pervades discussions of race and ethnicity in higher education and beyond.Mr. Trump’s message resonated with Daniel A. Bonevac, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Bonevac sees political correctness as a paralyzing force on college campuses. He is so leery of backlash, he says, that he is reluctant to resume teaching a course he once offered on moral problems, including abortion and capital punishment.

“Today it wouldn’t be worth the risk,” says Mr. Bonevac, who was among a group of scholars and writers to sign a letter in support of Mr. Trump.

“The Trump campaign sensed that and realized people were feeling that. You have to walk on eggshells, and there’s a sense that people are unhappy about that. Immigration has become one of those issues. These days you get called a racist if you think certain levels of immigration are too high.”

In the grand scheme of academe, Mr. Bonevac is an outlier. Higher education is known for a liberal tilt, and Mr. Trump was particularly unpopular among professors. Compared with the two previous Republican nominees, Mr. Trump raised a tiny fraction of what his predecessors did from higher-education professionals, a Chronicle analysis found.

Academe, as it turns out, has been a very safe space for loathing Donald Trump.

During a victory speech after the Nevada caucuses, Mr. Trump pledged his affection for “the poorly educated.”

The feeling was mutual. On election night, Mr. Trump took two-thirds of the non-college-educated white vote, the largest margin seen in exit polls since 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. Over all, college graduates favored Mrs. Clinton by a 9-point margin, while 52 percent of those without college degrees supported Mr. Trump. This is by far the widest gap in voting by this measure in more than three decades, Pew reported.

In higher education, results like this could offer quiet comfort: If Trump voters were only better educated, they would have known better than to support him. It’s that kind of thinking that concerns Katherine J. Cramer, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.”I don’t think that frankly gets us anywhere,” she says. “That’s the attitude that makes people who are not very warm toward higher education even less warm, because we are actually very elitist and not concerned about people from a different walk of life.”

In researching her book, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Ms. Cramer talked, in diners and gas stations, with the same older, white, working-class men who helped give Mr. Trump a surprising win in her state. In their stories, she says, she heard the recurring suggestion that professors like her were part of the problem, not the solution.

“I heard that so often: People at the university are elitist and arrogant and have no respect for ordinary Wisconsinites, and are lazy, all these things that are often ways of characterizing elites,” Ms. Cramer says. “That sense of distance is really key for me in understanding that kind of resentment: I’m ignored by them, I’m disrespected by them, and I just don’t get my fair share.”

For a Trump voter in an economically depressed area, the relative prosperity of a nearby public university may only serve to underscore broader frustrations with financial disparity and skepticism about the use of taxpayer dollars. Jerry L. Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University and an evangelical surrogate for Mr. Trump, says people in the rural areas of Virginia where he grew up look with skepticism at affluence in public-college towns.”Those cities are much more prosperous than the rest of the state,” says Mr. Falwell, whose late father, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., founded the coalition of evangelical conservatives known as the Moral Majority. “People are tired of seeing their tax dollars and their hard work go to people who happen to be in the right clubs and the right position to benefit from the public trough, either through the academy or government — those at the other end of the scale who benefit from other people’s taxes. That’s what the average citizen is sick and tired of.”

If accurate, Mr. Falwell’s observations point toward an intrinsic tension unlikely to dissipate. Public universities are at pains to portray themselves as economic engines of their communities and states. If universities are successful in this endeavor, Mr. Falwell’s argument seems to follow, those institutions risk being perceived as luxuriating in government largess.

From the very start, one clarion call of Mr. Trump’s presidential bid was for the construction of a border wall to block undocumented immigrants from Mexico. He described immigration as a threat to national security and sovereignty, and he stoked concerns among some Americans about immigrants freeloading on taxpayer resources.

Studies show that undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes, but in interviews with news media, Mr. Trump questioned those findings.

The rhetoric from the Trump campaign differs starkly from what one generally hears from higher-education administrators, many of whom support tuition benefits for young people brought illegally by their parents to the United States. College leaders commonly describe the changing demographics of the nation as an opportunity to enhance cross-cultural understanding, and Latinos are projected to be among the fastest-growing populations of traditional college-age students.

Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, says the immigration issue naturally puts Trump supporters at odds with higher education.

“America’s colleges and universities are quite diverse places, and children of immigrants are very present and valued,” she says. “In some ways that’s the lived experience that’s the exact opposite between Trump voters and university people.”

Ms. Skocpol, co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism(Oxford University Press, 2012), says professors have trouble understanding the way many of Mr. Trump’s supporters view the world and choose their leaders.

“A big problem is that most university people believe in expertise and think elections are about policy,” Ms. Skocpol says. “That’s not what a lot of ordinary citizens give primacy to. A lot of ordinary citizens give primacy to whether a candidate seems like a good person or reflects who they are.”

Ms. Skocpol, who describes herself as a “New Deal liberal Democrat,” will occasionally hear from conservatives who want to take her to task about her political views. When she gets a vitriolic email, she says, she is “polite but firm” in her response. Invariably, she says, civil discourse follows, which is something professors should invite.”The issue for many Trump voters is they feel America is changing in ways that are passing them by,” Ms. Skocpol says. “That’s what they are saying. Much of that is grounded in resentment about racial change; that can’t be catered to. But it is possible to listen to people. Respectful listening is important, even when people are yelling.”

At several points during the campaign, the travails of Mr. Trump’s candidacy conspicuously overlapped with thorny issues playing out on campuses. This was particularly true when he faced allegations of sexual assault, a problem of heightened concern at colleges.

In an environment where college administrators are ever more specific in defining for students the parameters of sexual consent, revelations from Mr. Trump’s past suggested that his views on the subject were terribly anachronistic or outright predatory. A hot-mike recording from 2005, in which Mr. Trump said he could grab women by their genitals, brought to mind for some in higher education the assailants that women all too often encounter on campuses. Soon a number of women came forward with claims that Mr. Trump had touched or kissed them inappropriately, allegations the candidate vehemently denied.

“You have one candidate who is a woman and another who has bragged about sexual assault in a way that reminds people of a stereotypical frat brother,” says Mr. Hartman, the historian from Illinois State. “The connection is pretty striking.”

Uncomfortably and unfailingly, Mr. Trump’s candidacy poked at academe’s own anxieties about sexual violence, race relations, ethnic diversity, and religious tolerance. Few of the issues that keep administrators sleepless at night failed to find their way into the campaign.

“For higher ed, as with our whole nation, this election has brought to the fore parts of us that we would prefer to suppress but we clearly need to deal with,” says Ms. Cramer, of Wisconsin.

Concerns about racial justice, which perpetually undergirded the campaign, have been an animating force for student activists in recent years. Nowhere was this more true than at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where, a year ago, Mizzou football players staged a boycott in solidarity with a student who was on a hunger strike to protest campus racism.Berkley Hudson, chairman of Mizzou’s Faculty Council Committee on Race Relations and an associate professor of journalism, had hoped the presidential campaign would facilitate a broader national dialogue about race. Instead, he says, the Trump campaign set back the conversation.

Members of Mizzou’s race-relations committee spent months talking about their varied experiences and delved into research about implicit bias, the notion that people harbor subconscious prejudices of which they may not be aware. Given that experience, Mr. Hudson says, he was disheartened to hear Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s running mate, seeming to dismiss the idea of implicit bias during the vice-presidential debate.

It felt like a rebuke of the concerted effort the university had made to bridge racial divides.

“I knew what Mike Pence was saying was a problem,” Mr. Hudson says. “It starts to block people’s ability to listen when you say that sort of thing.”

On several college campuses, the mere appearance of Donald Trump’s name written in chalk fueled unrest along racial lines.

One such chalking appeared last April at Delta State University, which this month became the last of the state’s public universities to stop flying the state flag because the Confederate battle emblem is considered offensive to many.

Students told administrators that the chalked graffiti, which paired Mr. Trump’s name with a vulgar dismissal of anyone it offended, amounted to intimidation. These complaints, which were similar to those expressed by students at Emory University and other colleges, prompted plentiful public criticism about thin-skinned students being coddled by college leaders.But William (Bill) N. LaForge, president of Delta State, says there is no question that the campaign made some of his students fearful.

“African-American students on my campus will tell us straight up the Trump campaign stands for racism,” he says. “That is the image it projects to them.”

The visceral nature of Mr. Trump’s campaign stirred in scholars, including some not known for activism, a desire to publicly condemn the candidate. A series of Facebook videos, curated by the historian David McCullough and the filmmaker Ken Burns, described Mr. Trump as a dangerous demagogue. Historians Against Trump, a group that included professors and graduate students, called the candidate’s campaign “an attack on our profession, our values, and the communities we serve.”

In many respects, Mr. Trump’s presidential run became a referendum on the broadly shared ideals of higher education. His populist movement was predicated on the notion that globalism has come at the expense of the common man, a message in tension with the international ambition and multiculturalism that are hallmarks of academic life.

In his victory speech, delivered in the wee hours of November 9, Mr. Trump struck a conciliatory tone, suggesting it was “time for America to bind the wounds of division.” Unclear, however, is where higher education fits within the great America he has promised to restore.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at [email protected].