Why I’m Assigning “Hillbilly Elegy”

This fall, I’m assigning J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis in my politics and geography class on a deeply liberal and historically activist campus. I can already anticipate the reaction. Some students will object before they’ve read a page, convinced that reading the memoir means endorsing Vance’s politics or personal worldview—or being “brainwashed” into the GOP.

They’re wrong.

We’re reading Hillbilly Elegy because it’s one of the most politically consequential memoirs of the past two decades—and because its author is now Vice President of the United States. The book didn’t just make Vance famous; it helped propel him into national politics. That trajectory, from bestselling author to one of the most powerful elected officials in the country, makes this a text that students cannot ignore if they want to understand how personal narratives shape political power.

Since its publication in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy has been both a cultural phenomenon and a political flashpoint. It’s a portrait of instability, economic hardship, and family turmoil in a working-class, Appalachian-rooted community—and an argument about why those communities have declined. Supporters view it as a bracing account of resilience; critics, however, accuse it of reinforcing stereotypes and downplaying structural economic forces. Those tensions are exactly why it belongs in the classroom: not to be embraced uncritically, but to be thoroughly examined and interrogated.

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But here’s the larger point: if students only ever encounter authors they agree with, they graduate unprepared for the intellectual and civic demands of adulthood. A healthy college education demands exposure to worldviews that challenge our assumptions. It teaches us to ask better questions, to separate evidence from rhetoric, and to discern between strong and weak arguments—especially from those we oppose politically. Avoiding politically uncomfortable books doesn’t protect students; it leaves them vulnerable to caricature and unearned certainty.

That’s why we should read contested authors and a wide range of voices—from progressive activists to conservative policymakers, from urban organizers to rural pastors. The goal isn’t to produce agreement; it’s to foster the capacity to engage ideas on their own terms. A citizenry educated on only one side of the spectrum will lack the ability to understand, let alone persuade, those on the other side.

In a left-leaning classroom, it’s too easy to dismiss Hillbilly Elegy as “conservative propaganda” without ever examining its arguments. That reflex is dangerous and deeply illiberal. If students can’t engage with the narrative of the sitting Vice President, they’re missing an opportunity to understand the worldview of a man who is shaping national policy.

We’ll also examine how the book’s political life evolved. In the years since its release, Hillbilly Elegy has been repeatedly invoked by journalists, politicians, and pundits to explain rural and Rust Belt disaffection. Its themes became central to Vance’s political brand, helping carry him into the Senate and now, the vice presidency. His trajectory shows how a personal story can become a political credential and a governing philosophy.

Some of my students will still resist. They’ll say Vance is not “objective” and that reading his work risks validating his politics. To which I respond: precisely. We read contested authors to sharpen our ability to dissect arguments, identify gaps, and evaluate evidence. That is how serious thinkers engage with ideas they disagree with—and how they avoid retreating into intellectual echo chambers.

A campus where books are avoided because they’re politically inconvenient is a school that has forgotten the purpose of education. Hillbilly Elegy is not a flawless work, but it is a rare example of a memoir that became a political force in its own right. Students should learn how to engage with that kind of text, because the real world will not spare them from it.

And this is where the stakes go beyond a single class or a single book. Suppose we graduate students who have only engaged with thinkers they already agree with. In that case, we are sending them into a pluralistic democracy with a distorted sense of how the world works. They will mistake moral certainty for intellectual mastery. They will confuse silencing with winning an argument. They will lack the skill—and sometimes the will—to listen carefully, ask hard questions, and respond with rigor rather than slogans.

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That’s not just an educational failure; it’s a civic one. A republic cannot function if its citizens can’t understand the reasoning, motivations, and lived experiences of those who vote differently than they do. A generation raised in an intellectual monoculture will struggle to negotiate, persuade, or build coalitions. In politics, that means stalemate. In communities, it means fragmentation. In daily life, it means shrinking into ever-smaller circles of agreement and mistrust.

Higher education is supposed to do the opposite. It’s supposed to widen circles, deepen understanding, and equip students to meet arguments with facts, empathy, and a capacity for complexity. That requires discomfort. It requires encountering authors who challenge core beliefs—and resisting the temptation to dismiss them without engagement.

So yes, I’m assigning Hillbilly Elegy this fall. I expect complaints. I welcome them. The friction it causes is not a bug, but a feature. It’s the kind of discomfort that forces students to think harder, read more deeply, and view the country from a vantage point they might otherwise overlook.

Because the real question isn’t whether they like J.D. Vance or agree with him, it’s whether they are willing to take on the harder work of understanding him—and by extension, understanding the millions of Americans whose votes and voices shape our shared future. If they can’t do that in a college classroom, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to do it in the public square. And that, more than any one book, is what should worry us all.

Discover what else Minding the Campus contributors are reading, reviewing, and assigning.

Image: “New Biography” by Pesky Librarians on Flickr