For the last two weeks, I have given advice for incoming UF students to use as they acclimate themselves to university life. This week, however, I write to lend a word of advice to all university students. Whatever grade, alma mater, or status as a student, listen up: Don’t drink from the punch bowl.
I consider myself a conservative. To me, politics is a matter of opinion and personal preference. In my world, you can believe what you want, and we can still have a decent and respectful conversation. Fortunately, this is the mindset of the typical, reasonable citizen and a tenet of American political philosophy that allows our nation to flourish and prosper.
On the college campus, however, it becomes a different story. There is often only one tint to the worldview lens, and that is generally on the red end of the spectrum.
The best advice I can offer, to both new students and institutionalized academics, is to make up your own mind about your political persuasions.
I have come to understand that a college campus can be a tough place to be a conservative. For one thing, a lot of professors have lived for so long in an ideological world of paper-applicable theory that they have lost touch with the realities of the rest of society. I am not speaking about all UF professors — but some.
Often, professors will not only teach from a leftist standpoint, they will demonize in-class disagreement. This is not free and open intellectual curiosity. It is rigid dogmatism, and I have encountered it all too often on our campus.
We are all bound to run into this situation at some point in our college careers. Political science classes can be the most depressing when the professor’s only purpose is to indoctrinate. The syllabus reaches no further than The New York Times editorials, and in-class movies are shown to stir emotions and lay guilt on the student for having been successful enough to be in college.
The worst ingredient of the bunch, however, is the rubber stamp, overtly outspoken liberal student who sits in the back of the classroom egging on the professor, preying on timid rebellions from independent-minded moderates, and lavishing a practiced vocabulary like it is an entitlement to speak endlessly.
It all creates a recipe for complacency and stifles opposition to the college political machine.
Even out of the classroom, we are forced to think in only one direction. Protests and demonstrations from “liberated” campus thinkers make every issue black and white, right and wrong, and leave no room for interpretation. You enter college and are told by the indoctrinated masses to be tolerant of intolerance.
Don’t back down. You are not close-minded for having a political persuasion that opposes your professor or the guy or girl shaving his or her head on Turlington Plaza. I value both my Republican and Democrat friends and the reasonable civic activist.
Learn the facts, and listen to the issues. If you find yourself on either side of the political spectrum of your own accord and decision, congratulations. Welcome to the adult world.
There are political extremists on both sides of the aisle. Professors of either persuasion can sometimes be drawn into molding adolescent minds to their political liking. More commonly, however, we find faculty willing to push students to the left.
You are about your opinion. Stick by it, it makes you the person you are.
Bryan Griffin is a first-year law student.
