Probably, the best think piece/op-ed I’ve read in forty years:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/my-liberal-university-cemented-my-vote-for-trump.html
Why do people always confuse a liberal arts education with a liberal political philosophy?
The word, “liberal” has so many connotations, ranging from “free-thinking” to the amount of seasoning in a sauce. The author of the article exploits all those ambiguities quite skillfully, IMO.
Many universities long ago renamed their “College of Liberal Arts” the “College of Arts and Sciences”. Northeastern University and Boston University to name two.
Not all areas of the “liberal arts” are radically liberal. For instance, most economics departments and some poli-sci departments even at supposedly “liberal universities/colleges”* tend to be on the conservative or centrist-right side of the political spectrum. STEM fields within the liberal arts tend to be apolitical or right-leaning with the notable exception of CS**.
- I.e. Columbia U. A reason why several older college classmates who did grad school in those two departments felt a huge shock as the econ/poli-sci departments there were much more conservative than what they've experienced at our LAC(Oberlin) in the early-late '90s. And some felt it was much more conservative than what they've experienced in European or other American universities when they went for a taught Masters in related fields.
** CS majors/graduates IME tend more towards the political extremes. Either staunchly libertarian-right or staunchly radical progressive left. This made for extremely interesting lunchtime discussions outside the office in the IS/IT department of one corporate firm I worked in…and my relatively centrist positioning combined with my attempts to get along with everyone regardless of politics meant they unanimously selected me as the “moderator” for those discussions. This was similar to my experience with engineering majors on campuses and moreso post college.
Not to mention the connotations here in the US currently is very different from one in other countries or here in the US a century or more ago as “liberal” originally meant someone who espoused free-market principles and minimal government interference.
And it was a radical departure back in the 18th and early 19th centuries as it went against more conservative closed protectionist economic policies meant to protect the interests of European aristocratic landowners as shown in the contentious “Corn Laws” debates in early 19th century Britain. . .
One illustration of this is how many students/colleagues from foreign nations explained that parties with “Liberal” in their name are considered the right/far right-wing parties espousing policies resembling free-market principles in their respective countries. One good example is the Australian “liberal party”.
@TomSrOfBoston Do you know why NEU and BU changed from CLA to CAS? As a science grad of BU’s CLA, I like that it gives more balance to science. Did they do it to get rid of “liberal”?
You all realize you are completely missing the point of the article, right?
Nothing about the classic liberal arts curriculum, per se, is particularly hostile to American conservatism.
William F. Buckley, Alan Bloom, and George Will were all schooled in it.
I’m not sure I understand the Bryan Stascavage argument, though, especially the part about the economics department. Did he miss the lessons that covered comparative advantage in trade or the consequences of protective tariffs? Maybe Wesleyan University doesn’t cover that. If its econ courses take a leftist slant on the plight of American workers, then yes his argument (or political evolution?) might make sense. The President-elect’s positions on trade and protectionism seem to be closer to Bernie Sanders than to Milton Friedman. So would B.S. have voted for Bernie over Jeb Bush?
Be sure to read the reader comments section in this NYT article.
The writer says his “liberal university,” not the liberal arts. He does talk about how academics affected his thinking, but I don’t think his argument is about the liberal arts per se. The article traffics in all types of simplifications and confuses terminology. I doubt that the type of change discussed in Af Am classes is the same as the type of change promised by Trump. The article invokes principles of academic inquiry to offer a very shallow take on the alt-right. This is clearly an ideologically driven piece that attempts to use the contradiction of a right-wing perspective on a liberal campus to offer a rather simplistic view of Wesleyan and the political movement he defends.
In other words, the top comment in the comments section was right: Stay in school. You have a lot more to learn.
I loved the part where he said he (simplifyng) voted for trump because there wouldn’t be cronyism. Har.! Well, he’s young Not political comment!!! Young comment!!
He’s definitely playing with the words and if there is any ambiguity between the concept of “academics” and “the liberal arts per se” then, it’s an ambiguity which the academy (or, is it, academe?) has only itself to blame. Post-Harvard Red Book developments in the classroom have tended to efface the concept of a rigid canon of liberal arts courses in favor of a process or perhaps, even an attitude, toward learning itself.
It almost doesn’t matter whether anyone agrees with his conclusions. The question has for a long time been whether this process is still relevant in today’s world, particularly at the non-STEM level. Bryan Stascavage demonstrates that it still can be.
I zoomed through the article. I do not think the author should be treated as very knowledgeable because he does not offer reasons why Trump will improve the discrepancies he refers to. It seems to me he got the message about change but has not done his homework about what will come (given the changing promises I don’t think even Trump knows what he plans).
Anyone can write anything and get it to the public. This student still has a lot to learn before I would pay attention to him. However, he shows how the American public in general hears things they like without thoroughly investigating the whole picture.
And, at least two of them (I can’t speak for George Will) famously collected a lot of royalties by attacking the modern evolution of liberal arts teaching.
The writer may be a junior at Wes but he isn’t a kid after spending 6 years with the military. He makes some interesting points but he is dead wrong in characterizing the alt-right as aspiring technocrats just wanting to advance on their own merits.
Before ~1968 it would have been easier for a conservative to argue unemotionally on any college campus against, say, affirmative action. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” changed that by drawing overt bigots into the Republican party. The evidence of their bigotry was plain on the evening news coverage of angry white mobs protesting school busing in Chicago and Boston as well as the deep South. Once conservative elites allied with those voters, their policies and core concepts became increasingly suspect - even un-debatable, really - among liberal intellectual elites. It’s hard to have a rational conversation about NAFTA, NATO, immigration, charter schools, taxes, or government regulation if one side believes the other side is speaking in code words to a racist, misogynist voter base (or if the other side believes you’re speaking in code words for a socialist New World Order).
Bryan Stascavage voted Republican in 2008 and 2012. He may have learned a thing or two at Wesleyan about the plight of the American worker that made it easier to justify the vote he would have cast anyway, but it seems disingenuous to argue that a Wesleyan University education had anything to do with that vote. There’s another thread about a student whose political views did fundamentally change at New College of Florida (http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1928694-would-you-pay-top-dollar-to-have-your-kids-college-bleed-your-values-out-of-your-child-p1.html). I suspect that kind of campus conversion is fairly rare.
I’d be careful about ascribing a lack of sincerity to an Iraq veteran. I’ve been dipping into some of his other articles for the Wesleyan student newspaper, ever since the one on BLM which famously got him into hot water. I never got the feeling that he was disingenuous so much as naive and a little tone deaf. But, re-reading it in light of Trump’s victory, I have to admit there was something there that I did not see at the time: white fear of an incipient racial conflagration:
http://wesleyanargus.com/2015/09/14/of-race-and-sex/
Rare, but it does happen.
Several HS classmates who were staunch and exceedingly outspoken young Republicans/Ayn Rand libertarians back in our HS days have now become exceedingly outspoken progressive Democrats or even socialists after college/grad/professional school, military service with some, and being in the workforce for nearly 2 decades.
Funny part was most of them didn’t start their conversions until years after their last day attending college for undergrad and/or grad/professional school.
You can’t predict how people will change. Attending Texas A&M made me much more liberal, because I’d never been exposed to those kind of conservatives before. (That was in the '80s.)
To mess with the echo chamber here, I’ve seen several SJWs leave school and turn more conservative (e.g. “what happened to my paycheck???”).