After two years of school at Ole Miss, I've come full circle with the fact that the city of Oxford and the University of Mississippi are places that innately resist change.
Among the less serious of these examples of resistance to change, and rules yet to change, include the fact that until last year, we couldn't buy cold beer at gas stations. More ludicrously, we can carry handles of liquor into the Grove on game days, but if we are caught with a case of beer at our tents, we best pour it all out.
But national publications and news sources do not criticize the University for resisting these changes. Larger media sources focus on the student body's comparatively slow transition to the acceptance of the LGBTQ community and mistreatment of the African-American community. However exhausting these stories are, they're based in truth.
It was a conversation with a few friends who attend schools across the eastern seaboard that sparked conversation about these problems. To sum up the conversation, they thought Ole Miss' student body was ignorant and immoral. These misguided opinions are forgivable.
The only "facts" they have to go on are hearsay, biased and borderline-misrepresented news reports, and the James Meredith statue incident. On the other hand, their justification of why the extremely progressive nature of their university's student body suited them for the "real world" was wrong.
Attending school in a progressive city with an extremely liberal and humanitarian student body doesn't make a person worldly. Detesting the "ignorant nature" of life in the Bible Belt is as equally ignorant as someone who claims they could never live in the Northeast because it's too liberal.
If you come to Ole Miss with the right intentions, you can leave here with an endless list of experiences and people you have encountered that will make you just as, if not more, humanitarian than anyone who spends four years in progressive cities like New York, Seattle, Portland, New Haven, or Providence. Students there are surrounded by people who are seemingly free to live without prejudice or criticism; but as an Ole Miss student you attend class on a daily basis with classmates and an administration that are actively working to promote an equal opportunity and fair treatment environment.
I challenge anybody that criticizes the moral compass of the Ole Miss student body to consider first whether they call themselves a "liberal humanitarian" because they've read about it in a text book and have a diverse group of friends, or because they are actively working somewhere in order to contribute to a more equal America.
"To lead people, walk beside them..." -Lao Tzu
