The end of summer can be a dizzying experience for incoming college freshmen, with emotional goodbyes to childhood friends and last-minute reading assignments to complete. The time goes by in a blur for parents as well, who have gone from dropping their recent high school graduates off on campus to having to adjust to a newly vacant seat at the family dinner table. I will never forget the bittersweet ritual of seeing my own three daughters off to college. As much as we try to prepare them for the university experience and adult world, the actual farewell as you drive away from campus is always a difficult one for parent and student alike.
Compounding the emotional impact of this time is the realization that college signals the possibility of profound change for many young people. I distinctly recall parent orientation when I took my oldest off the college. Speaker after speaker cautioned parents that we would no longer recognize our children in four years, because by graduation they would become totally different people. That was hardly reassuring to my wife and me. We liked our daughter just the way she was: well-mannered, with strong moral principles, and a terrific work ethic. She shared the values that our family considered fundamental: an appreciation for a free and peaceful society, plus a commitment to personal responsibility, self-reliance, and individual liberty.
I talk to many parents who share stories of their sons and daughters going to college full of conviction and self-assurance in their upbringing, but coming home muddled and doubting everything their parents taught them. I hear it frequently enough that I have half-jokingly suggested organizing a “re-education camp” that could undo the closed-minded groupthink that too often substitutes for the search for truth on college campuses.
In the new book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt encourage parents and prospective college students to insert a new step into their college research. Comparing prospective colleges on tuition levels and credit transfers has always been important, but these days students (and their parents) should also gauge how committed a college or university is to bedrock principles of academic freedom and free inquiry.
After all, college is meant to be a place where ideas are debated and held to close scrutiny. That’s the promise of education: to improve understanding through self-examination and exposure to new ideas. And while I have my own political beliefs, I respect those of others when they are honestly arrived at in good faith.
Unfortunately, many universities have abandoned the search for truth and replaced it with a social justice agenda that is enforced on students. Identity politics rules the campus, with controversial (read: conservative) speakers being shouted down and made unwelcome on campus in the name of political correctness.
In fact, according to Lukianoff and Haidt, many colleges now structure new student orientation programs so students are taught to spot “microaggressions” and engage in “intersectional thinking.” These sessions encourage young people to focus on privilege, oppression, racism, sexism, and many other -isms.
These trends lead to an unfortunate “us vs. them” manner of thinking and creates what the book describes as a “call-out culture.” In such a culture, the search for truth and knowledge is easily buried beneath the fear of saying something that might upset the orthodox establishment. This is a tremendous loss for our shared culture, but most of all for students themselves. College has always been, and must continue to be, a time when young people are free to explore whichever paths of inquiry their minds may take them.
As young people are now settling into the college experience, I would encourage you to think about what kind of experience is right for your own high-schooler. Sit down as a family and have a discussion about the moral principles that shaped their upbringing and your hopes for their future. They’ll thank you for it one day.
Roger Ream is the president of the Fund for American Studies. He has put three daughters through college.
