Can I leave my Trump-leaning alma mater off my résumé?

Karla: It’s not taboo to omit outdated or irrelevant information from a résumé, but some details may be made more conspicuous by their absence.

“Your résumé should answer questions, not create them,” says Lauren Milligan, the founder and chief executive of ResuMayDay. When a hiring manager sees you have two advanced degrees, the natural assumption is that you must have earned a bachelor’s degree first; by leaving off that basic information, Milligan says, “you’re shining a really bright bat-signal on the thing you want left in the shadows.”

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Milligan also points out that omitting that one detail could have repercussions beyond your résumé. Recruiters compare candidates’ résumés against their LinkedIn profiles, she notes, so you would need to scrub your old school from LinkedIn and other online accounts as well, which could affect your broader job search: “If you leave [that] school off your LinkedIn profile, that could prevent you from building your network with fellow alumni, and could prevent you from taking part in LinkedIn groups exclusive to the school’s graduates,” Milligan explains. “You’ve now made this a Thing To Manage.” For all those reasons, Milligan recommends keeping your undergrad school on your résumé and preparing to answer any questions about it in a way that shifts the focus to your current skills and experience.

For example, if you’re asked about your undergraduate years, you can describe how your studies in a particular class or under a particular professor sparked the interest that led you to pursue your master’s and law degrees. If the hiring manager starts prodding for your opinion of your undergrad institution’s current political affiliations, Milligan suggests this response: “I can honestly say that when I went there, it was a school that encouraged respect for all ideologies, and prioritized academics over politics.” You would not be the first graduate to suggest that, school pride notwithstanding, standards of academic rigor at your alma mater aren’t what they were back in your day. Or you can stay true to your school by acknowledging how it prepared you intellectually to define, defend and adhere to your values in everything you do.

In that vein: Educational, religious, political and social institutions are always evolving­. Today’s Democratic and Republican parties espouse vastly different platforms from they did in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Especially in the past decade, many people have found cause to distance themselves from groups and labels they once embraced out of nostalgia or tradition. The ones who acknowledge their history and address their reasons for changing, whether you agree with them or not, come across as more honest and thoughtful than the ones who try to sweep away all their tracks. It’s the coverup that catches the eye.

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And, as always, the most successful job searches are ones in which the résumé is a formality at the end of the process, not your first contact with the employer. Through networking, recruiters and informal connections, you can give hiring managers a good sense of your current talents, achievements and reputation — making them less likely to judge you by a choice you made more than 20 years ago as a different person in a different environment.

Reader query: How have the contentious midterm elections affected interactions in your workplace? Were political tensions better or worse than in previous years? Let me know at karla.miller@washpost.com.