By Maggie Martin
We all have a basic assumption of what a college campus will look like.
Mine is a mixture between the depiction of Harvard from “Legally Blonde” and Yale from “Gilmore Girls.” Massive brick buildings, ancient oak trees, overly caffeinated and overly opinionated adolescents.
I imagine some of the jittery students, from all walks of life, all with different ideas. Really crunchy granola kids who protest absolutely everything. Really wealthy legacy kids who only ramble about the state of our economy.
I also picture the majority of us at Branford High School, who fall somewhere in between. I assume there is a person to challenge each one of my beliefs. But what if these people aren’t there anymore? What if nobody challenges anyone’s ideas because they all think the same.
This is exactly what I feared when stepping onto Vassar College’s campus over April vacation. I went on a tour of the school and walked through more buildings than I could count on all my fingers and toes. I saw the athletic facilities, the dining halls, the dorm rooms, the upperclassmen housing, the libraries, the nondenominational church, the brand new science building, the history and literature buildings, the arts centers, the language buildings, the President of the college’s house, and I walked through several of the quads.
But in each of these different areas of campus, the people seemed the same. They all seemed like fairly liberal people. There were Democratic pins on all the bags, liberal stickers on all the water bottles and laptops, there were even a few tattoos to gave away a leftist ideology. I left campus, and I immediately crossed Vassar off of my list.
I couldn’t stand the idea of going to a school which seemed so obviously politically skewed. I didn’t think I would find anyone who could challenge my ideas. I feared we were all too similar, or I was even too centrist to fit in. I was worried I wouldn’t get enough out of my college experience. People always say our generation is jetting off to college at an exciting time. They say the conversations on campus must be so riveting and enthralling. We all must be so ripe with new opinions and ideas, and we’re all still young enough to believe we’re right.
But what if it’s a lie? What if colleges have stripped those conversations from us? I left Vassar hoping this college was an anomaly. Since it was prestigious, and so small, and an hour away from the nearest civilization, it must only attract a very small portion of the population. But what if that isn’t the case?
A lack of viewpoint diversity among colleges and universities is becoming a larger issue nowadays, and it’s even more staggering in New England. The article, “New England’s Hallowed Halls, Crumbling” published by Brian Snyder in The National Review details how the prestigious colleges and universities New England prides itself on, have been ranked some of the worst in the country in terms of viewpoint diversity. “The ranking has revealed that New England is by far the worst region of the country, especially for liberal-arts colleges, when it comes to campuses that support and maintain viewpoint diversity. With Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Tufts on the university side and Williams, Wesleyan, Smith, Amherst, and Mount Holyoke on the liberal-arts college side.”
Snyder then describes how schools in the South and Midwest ranked the highest in terms of political diversity. The findings of this list, show a clear regional difference in the willingness of colleges and universities to entertain different ideals. It also proves Vassar wasn’t the only school experiencing ideological uniformity, but it’s a problem on a much larger scale.
Another article, “‘Viewpoint Diversity’ is About Much More than Politics” written by Musa Al-Gharbi, and published by the Heterodox Academy, details how a political majority can steamroll over racial and socioeconomic minorities, and villainize other political minorities. “our continued social capital is in many ways contingent on playing a certain role here. Students from underrepresented backgrounds often describe how they are expected both to speak on behalf of their entire minority group – and also conform to a very particular set of expectations about what they are supposed to believe, or what their interests are supposed to be, on the basis of their group identity.” Here, Al-Gharbi explains how ethnic and socioeconomic minorities are used as pawns for the leftist majority to wield in order to further its agenda.
Al-Gharbi then explains how liberal programs at a school can make right leaning groups seem radical, and how minor grievances get blown into mass uproars. “schools where programming around things like microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces is most aggressively implemented — and these are among the universities the most restrictive speech codes, etc. Excesses at these schools are then distorted and blown out of proportion by a right-aligned outrage industry – and held up as typical of the academy overall.” Schools have their reputations tainted every time someone disagrees with the dominant political party on campus. This pressures schools into lessening the diversity, rather than tackling the real issue.
The place we choose to attend college will shape us for the rest of our lives. We plan the beginnings of our adult lives when we’re at college. We choose what type of person we want to be, and how we want to impact the world. But how much can we really be learning if nobody dares to tell us our ideas are wrong? How can we justify spending a quarter of a million dollars, if we don’t have our core belief system challenged at least once? What do we really know about ourselves if we don’t learn why we have our morals?
The way I see it, the more work we have to do to get in to a college, the less they seem to challenge us once we’ve arrived. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to get accepted into the prestigious schools. It just means we have to be the brave few to ruffle some feathers, and challenge everyone else’s core beliefs – and our own.
If you don’t feel like being brave, go to school down South, or out in the Midwest. But for those of us who stay closer to home, we can’t just let everyone enter the world thinking people are all Democrats. We should play devil’s advocate until people forget their first names. We should be informed, and discuss with facts, not just our hearts. We need to understand our country is diverse, and each college and university owes us a fair representation of the country. Or else they haven’t taught us anything we can really use in the real world.
So until each institution is a more fair overview of the population, it’s up to use to make it that way.
What are your thoughts about the college environment ahead of us after Branford? Leave a comment to share your thinking?
