Former President Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, as the Republican vice presidential nominee has put a renewed spotlight on Vance and the factors that led to his rise — including his bestselling 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.”
“Hillbilly Elegy,” which propelled Vance to national prominence, recounts Vance’s struggles growing up impoverished in the Rust Belt and Appalachia. After Trump's 2016 victory, some liberals embraced it to explain why Trump appealed to rural America, though critics argued it misrepresented Appalachia and ignored socioeconomic aspects of poverty.
That heated debate drew University of Wisconsin-Madison officials to select the memoir as the university’s 2017-18 Go Big Read book. A shared reading program, Go Big Read distributes free copies of a recommended book to first-year students and encourages professors to incorporate the book into coursework.
“Hillbilly Elegy” was included in 145 class sections’ curriculum in the 2017 fall semester, according to a university press release. Former UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank said she hoped the book would generate a “lively conversation” on the social, economic and political issues raised in the book.
Unlike some other schools, UW-Madison does not provide students with a list of books to choose from — it’s one book per year, and it’s recommended that all students read it.
At the time, some students and faculty criticized Vance for “victim blaming” Appalachians, rather than government underfunding and deindustrialization, for the region’s economic downturn.
“Vance doesn’t ignore these [factors] because he is unaware,” Jonathan Isaac, an English department graduate student, wrote in a 2017 opinion piece in The Daily Cardinal. “He does so because it fits into his particular worldview — shared by many members of our cultural and political elite — that poor people are to blame for their own poverty.”
Participants in a “Hillbilly Elegy” small discussion at the Madison Public Library denounced Vance’s depiction of the white working class, according to The Badger Herald.
“I don’t think he had a depth of knowledge, and he seemed to be making a lot of judgments based on small pools of data,” Laurel Fletcher, department administrator at UW-Madison’s Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, said during the 2017 discussion.
During an October 2017 panel in Memorial Union discussing the topics of race, class and addiction featured in the book, panelist and UW-Madison political science professor Kathy Cramer acknowledged many people turned to the book to understand how Trump was elected, though she cautioned readers in drawing conclusions.
“It’s become a little bit of a myth that the white working class is responsible for the election of Trump,” Cramer said, adding that the book does not necessarily map onto how Trump supporters felt.
Vance’s decision to not attend the panel, typically customary for the Go Big Read book’s author, drew criticism. Five days prior to Vance’s planned visit, campus community members were informed Vance would not attend the event due to “unforeseen scheduling difficulties,” according to a UW-Madison statement.
“By that time, Vance was cozying up to billionaires in Silicon Valley and thinking about a career in politics,” Russ Castronovo, a UW-Madison English professor whose class used “Hillbilly Elegy” in 2017, wrote in the Wisconsin State Journal on Saturday.
Though Vance’s memoir sparked passionate debate, Castronovo said, it offered few justifications for its assertions that problems like opioid addiction or poverty are attributable to “personal agency.”
A representative for Vance was not immediately available for comment.
Gavin Escott is the campus news editor for the Daily Cardinal. He has covered protests, breaking news and written in-depth on Wisconsin politics and higher education. He is the former producer of the Cardinal Call podcast. Follow him on X at @gav_escott.
