<p>No, I really wasn’t being demeaning to my kid – who I think is terrific. </p>
<p>Maybe it’s a southern thing that we still use the term ‘artsy-fartsy’ – he goes to an arts high school so it seems to apply. Never thought that ‘crunchy’ was a negative term either. </p>
<p>From my perspective, this weekend was the first time that my child got college brochures in the mail and came in waving one at me and saying “Look, this one seems like it might be for me.” (It was Bennington and we both laughed at the slogan “Where would you be if you were at the center of everything?” He made some joke about how he’s narcissistic and self-involved and so this is clearly the school for him, though the thought of one thousand narcissistic, self-involved people coming together in the woods in Vermont was a bit overwhelming – but honestly I think what he’s reacting to is the idea that there are schools where you can go and figure out who you are, rather than having a school claiming to mold you or shape you or turn you into someone who cheers for a particular football team. We’ve been getting mail from southern schools that send you baseball caps and tell you that you really should come down and watch the game – and we are probably the least athletic family on the face of the earth, so we were honestly quite thrilled to hear from a few schools which have a radically different approach. I chose the term ‘crunchy LAC’ to describe places like that – Hampshire, Bennington and Bard came to mind. Oberlin. Reed if we could afford it, which we can’t. Places like that.) As far as the statistics about gay people there, I was just curious about where that perception came from – I grew up in upstate New York and hadn’t thought of it as a particularly openminded liberal place. I found it surprising, that’s all, and wondered if it was true or if it was just one of those weird stereotypes. (I went to a women’s college and there are lots of weird stereotypes about women’s colleges that aren’t true, for example).</p>