The Closing of the Campus Mind
"I can’t have you participate in class anymore.”
I was on my way out of class when my social welfare and policy professor casually called me over to tell me this. The friendliness of her tone did not match her words, and I attempted a shocked, confused apology. It was my first semester at the Hunter College School of Social Work, and I was as yet unfamiliar with the consistent, underlying threat that characterized much of the school’s policy and atmosphere. This professor was simply more open and direct than most.
I asked if I had said or done anything inappropriate or disrespectful, and she was quick to assure me that it was not my behavior that was the problem. No: It was my opinions. Or, as she put it, “I have to give over this information as is.”
I spent the rest of that semester mostly quiet, frustrated, and missing my undergraduate days, when my professors encouraged intellectual diversity and give-and-take. I attempted to take my case to a higher-up at school, an extremely nice, fair professor who insisted that it was in my own best interest not to rock the boat. I was doing well in his class, and I believed him when he told me he wanted me to continue doing well. He explained to me that people who were viewed as too conservative had had problems graduating in the past, and he didn’t want that to happen to me. I thought he was joking . . . until I realized he wasn’t.
It was laughable in its own way, though. My school was ostensibly all about freedom of expression. In our mandatory 5-hour diversity awareness training, we were each asked what pronouns we prefer to use when describing ourselves. We could dress and identify sexually virtually any way we wanted, though some fashion choices and sexual identities were more celebrated than others. We talked about how to approach clients whose gender identities were difficult to pinpoint. There was a special gender-neutral bathroom on the fourth floor that seemed rarely used. We were allowed to differ; we could not disagree.
That was the great and strange paradox about Hunter College. Our identities and opinions existed in two separate, unequal planes. Identities were required—the more unconventional and downtrodden the better. During diversity training, we were told to stand up whenever a category that applied to us was read by our presiding teacher. (I stood when the category “working class” was called out, naïvely not realizing that there were nonworking classes in America. I realized my mistake when most people stood up for the “middle class” category. I was impressed by the few “upper classers.”) The categories included a seemingly endless variety of religions, ethnicities, races, nationalities, and educational backgrounds. In that same training, we were also asked to indicate how things like weight, skin color, and a host of other criteria affected our lives by moving to one side or another of a circle (I mostly stayed in the center).
Another professor asked my class to separate by race, with one concentric circle composed of self-identifying white people and another of self-identifying “people of color.” After briefly considering declaring that I “felt black inside,” I politely refused to participate. I asked the teacher why she felt it necessary to reinstitute a practice of racial sorting that had been abolished decades ago. She gave no concrete answer, though she dropped the idea when other students protested as well.
These and other “identity exercises” were run-of-the-mill at school, the reasons behind them always vague and flavored with sugary social justice. But in a separate class given by the “circles” professor, two women engaged in a respectful discussion were abruptly stopped. One, whom I shall call Tanya, objected to the idea that as a successful 22-year-old graduate student, she should be viewed as “oppressed” simply for being African American. The other woman insisted that, far from being demeaning, identifying as an oppressed minority was part of receiving one’s due for injustices done. The teacher, rather than fostering the discussion, interrupted to point out that, though we had just begun talking about race, we were “already having trouble understanding each other.”
Sadly, my teachers all seemed to take their cues from the same playbook; they were very nice people with frightening messages. In my teacher’s mind, two adults could not hold two different opinions. Any dissent was simply due to a lack of comprehension on one or both of their parts.
Sent from my iPhone
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