When I started university a few years ago, I was very much on the left, having grown up as one of the only black kids in a mostly white, very Protestant/Lutheran peer group. My immediate family is Pentecostal, so I had a double helping of conservative values crammed down my throat. I saw the social and moral hypocrisy of stereotypical "White, Christian America" firsthand.
What I encountered in college felt like another side of the same coin. During my junior year, I did an internship as part of an interdepartmental project to promote diversity on campus. It was a whole semester of argumentative in-fighting about the issues, and we barely had anything to show for the money that was granted to us by the end of it, save for some hastily edited YouTube videos that recited statistics on race, gender, pay gaps, etc. and photos of trips we took to some museums. We could barely hold discussions about anything--even a logo design or an addition to our web page--without someone shrieking at the other party to shut up.
There were other experiences I had, like a female boss in the English department who was dumbfounded by the idea that one of the female students I'd done some peer tutoring with had started stalking me around campus while also bombarding me with session requests at work. And, despite the decidedly liberal atmosphere, I encountered a lot of
hipster racism.
It's important to critically evaluate the society you live in. However, I think that some professors today try to actively proselytize rather than show students how to think and evaluate things on their own--and oftentimes, it is for the progressive viewpoint, though I did also have one conservative Catholic prof who attempted to use a literature course as a subtle means of attempting to debunk atheism and postmodernism.
I've gone back and read some of the same books, plays, and philosophy texts I was assigned to read in college without any due dates for reports or having some authority figure tell me their spiel about the dynamics of power and oppression, and I've found it to be a much richer experience. However, it makes me question the value of paying exorbitant sums of money to be preached at when, in retrospect, I could have just downloaded a list of the most important texts of the Western canon and gotten them from the local library for free. The people who define the meaning of "privilege" have a great deal of privilege themselves, just due to the fact that what they say gets taken more seriously than someone who might be a real life example of the statistics they enjoy citing. For instance, does a white female tenured women's studies professor with a mortgage, working partner, luxury sedan, and two kids have to worry as much about the day-to-day struggles of life as the overworked, underpaid black single mother of two who gets her Pumpkin Spice lattes for her every morning at the campus Starbucks?
IMHO, polarization on American campuses is just one symptom of a larger problem with education in the country as a whole. Is it overvalued? If so, for what reasons? With this mentality that
everyone needs to go to college, despite skyrocketing costs, are we placing the value in sitting in a classroom to pass the tests and get a degree rather than struggling with weighty concepts to formulate your own views?
Maybe some of these kids cling to their polarized views because they become the only tangible thing they can hang on to. When you and all your friends realize you'll graduate with crippling debt and sh*tty job prospects, and you see how f*cked social mobility really is in American society, it would seem easy to want to fall back on those narratives you were taught in school. They've effectively replaced religion for certain groups of people, and they help give context to the uncertainty of the economic state we are currently in.
