Trump’s election hit Beverly especially hard. The day after he won, Beverly showed the movie Born on the Fourth of July, in which Tom Cruise depicts a paralyzed man, for a class about disability. Toward the end, she found herself crying uncontrollably in front of the class. It was nothing, she told them—the movie just reminded her of a friend who was a veteran and had recently died. It was months before she could go out to lunch with a friend who had voted for Trump. It upsets me too much, that you would watch Fox News and believe all that bullshit and vote for that vile man, she thought.

It has at times been difficult to recruit other professors to Wichita Falls. One professor, a gay man whose partner worked in Washington, D.C., turned down the university after flying out for an interview. She tried to sell him on the possibility of driving to Dallas every weekend for the food and the gay scene, but Beverly admitted to me, “There’s gonna be nothing for him here.”

Beverly still has students who do things like quote the Book of Ephesians to her: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” But having students who disagree with her, she thinks, has made her the kind of professor who is willing to make her students uncomfortable—a limb not everyone in academia is still willing to go out on.

Over time, society has grown more “woke,” for lack of a better word, on gender issues, and it has made Beverly’s job easier. The majority of her students, for example, started out a recent semester knowing what the “glass ceiling” referred to. She no longer hears the rumor that she’s a lesbian, or that students won’t take her class because she’s a feminist.

She also sees small signs that she, herself, is making a difference. About twelve years ago, when one of Beverly’s students proclaimed that her parents had raised her exactly the same as her brothers, and thus she hadn’t experienced gender inequality, another swiveled in her seat and said, “You’re wearing makeup. Do your brothers wear makeup?” The girl was so offended she dropped the class—but Beverly believes the exchange itself was a sign of progress. A retired engineer audited Beverly’s gender class out of interest and liked it so much he donated scholarship money to the department. At the beginning of each semester, she asks everyone to raise their hands if they consider themselves a feminist. Maybe three people out of forty will. She asks the same question at the end of the semester. One year recently, all but three people raised their hands. “That works for me!” Beverly said.