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Why go to college to expand your views, when you can spend four years in an echo chamber canceling all dissenters?
Sociology professor Neil Gross explores why more and more kids are choosing the latter option — and putting our democracy as we know it at risk — in his aptly titled book, “What Happened to College?: How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It” (Avid Reader Press), out today.
“The restructuring of undergraduate life along political lines is at the core of the current crisis,” he argues. “When everything becomes political, life just loses some of its value and some of its richness.”
Writing from inside the ivory tower at Colby College in Maine, Gross argues that the fundamental problem with higher ed is that politics “has become the central organizing principle of the undergraduate experience,” dictating how students choose classes, friends, clubs, partners and even majors.
But the professor told The Post that the issue starts even earlier, when students decide to “self-segregate by political affiliation” when they choose which colleges to apply to. According to his polling data, a full half of undergraduates are assessing “political fit” when looking at colleges.
Some kids, Gross found when researching the book, are seeking out schools, like Oberlin and Barnard, with a reputation for student activism, while others are looking for apolitical campuses where they can have fun. Increasingly, he’s also hearing about girls boycotting schools in states with abortion bans, too.
The colleges themselves are making the political polarization worse as they’ve “really leaned into” their reputations by marketing themselves to students of a particular political stripe.
Gross notes how colleges employ “subtle messaging” on school tours and in brochures — celebrating certain guest speakers and alumni — to convey their leanings.
More explicitly, UC Berkeley’s undergraduate admissions page celebrates its history of activism.
On the flip side, Gross has noticed an emerging trend of some schools positioning themselves as “neutral” to court kids who might be turned off by rampant campus protests like those that spread across the country post-October 7th.
Vanderbilt and the University of Chicago, he noted, have made inroads with more moderate or politically alienated kids by “marketing themselves as places where students can go for free speech.” The University of Chicago foregrounds its commitment to free speech on its website.
But the newest trend that’s sorting kids into ideological buckets as they apply to colleges is an emerging appeal by Southern schools to kids in the North turned off by campus politics, a shift The Post has reported on previously.
“[Many students] now feel that schools in the south are… a better place to go,” Gross said. “It’s also some pretty strategic marketing on the part of schools: ‘Okay, well, we’re going to be a school [where] you can go … and you can just have fun and enjoy yourself, and you don’t have to get caught up in these political controversies.’”
He worries all this political marketing is creating campus echo chambers where there should be debate: “I don’t think it’s really good for students. What really leads to the best experience is when you’ve got a mix of people with different views.”
The political polarization only gets worse once kids arrive on campus and seek out people who share their views. He reports in the book that students select roommates, choose romantic partners, pick majors, pursue friendships and even shun other students based on political affiliation.
One self-identified Democrat at an elite liberal arts college told him that conservatives on his campus were an “isolated and resentful” group that socialized among themselves, while the progressive majority were intellectually “lazy” and their “incentive [in discussing politics] isn’t toward truth” but rather “social acceptance.”
He also heard from students that romance is oriented around politics, to the extent that “some conservatives have been known to mask their identity by wearing liberal-seeming clothes, or letting their hair grow out.”
“If students can do little more than rehearse talking points they have heard in their social media bubble, they won’t learn the tools of constructive dialogue or know the thrill that comes from developing an original argument,” he warned.
Gross, a liberal Democrat, blames colleges themselves for creating this mess.
“Those institutions provided exactly what so many progressive students … were looking for: a college experience where they wouldn’t have to engage too much with conservatives or their ideas,” he writes. “Elite colleges and their faculty should have known this wouldn’t turn out well.”
Gross says there are a few simple reforms schools can readily make, like randomizing roommate selection to introduce kids who think differently, and even requiring openness to different views in admissions decisions.
He asserts that ultimately, if schools continue to produce classes of highly-educated young people who have no idea what the rest of the country thinks or believes, our social fabric will further tear.
“If you want a better democracy, you should care about what happens in higher education,” Gross said. “When people just vehemently hate those on the other side… all of the normal mechanisms of democracy begin to function less well.”
Read the full article here
