As the long stretch of summer reaches its end, so approaches the buzzing excitement of fall’s potential.
For many of you out there, this means the beginning of your first semester of college. The time has finally come to take that “next big step” that you’ve been anticipating since day one, minute one of senior year. Or, perhaps, your college career has just ended. You've dotted your I’s and crossed your t’s on your senior thesis and hopefully got to do some summer traveling. Congrats!
At whichever stage of life you’re in, whether you’ve already discovered this or still have yet to, it’s important to know that college is a bubble. The college life’s got a little taste of the real world, but no matter what — it’s just another four walls.
In college, you learn to walk and talk like an intellectual. You delve deep into scientific theories and ancient philosophical thought, and acquire so many new words that it’s like learning a different language altogether. You learn to let the brash sounds of “post-Marxism” and “statistical mechanics” fall fluidly from your tongue in everyday conversation as if you’ve been speaking this absurd language your entire life.
This is precisely what an educational institution is supposed to do for you. No other place can foster one’s intellectual growth the same way; nowhere else will you find a group of peers with whom you can converse so easily in your newly-acquired language. This is both the triumph and danger of living in the bubble — you tend to forget that the majority of the actual real world exists beyond and independent of the world of academia. Following from this, there are two things we should always keep in mind.
1. I hate to say this, but check your privilege.
Every single one of us students must remain aware of the various factors that have converged throughout our lives to make our academic accomplishments possible. You’ve worked hard, yes, but where would you have been without, say, the resources available to you high school? Or your support system, that uplifting network of parents, teachers, and role models? The social and economic environment you grew up in? Perhaps you can even say you've lived in a bubble your whole life.
Furthermore, college is damn expensive. There are people, most people out there, who could never have found a way. We were the lucky few. Also, for some, it's a perfectly reasonably choice to not pursue higher education and to forge an alternate life path instead.
Therefore, when someone says something you disagree with, it's quite frankly a little elitist to dismiss them because they didn't take a certain class that you did, or read a certain book. They are just not informed by the same things as you — this doesn't make their subjectivity any less of a valid source. And most importantly, keep in mind that many things we study in academic settings, from sociology to economics to philosophy, are things that affect everyone regardless of literacy or economic class or individual life choices. Feel free to share your knowledge, because sharing is caring, but always keep in mind the inherently privileged position you are in.
2. Don’t censor your world.
You know what’s liberating? To realize that you have matured into a freethinking person with an independent mind, capable of maintaining a critical eye in all things with the ability to choose for yourself what to believe and whom to listen to. We live in a world where a click of the “Unfollow” button is all it takes to shield ourselves from stupid opinions and intolerable bullshit. What a time to be alive. Right?
Well, some would say that openly disagreeing with a perspective to the point of outright rejecting it is not exactly healthy, especially in college.
“I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.” — Barack Obama, 2015
Unfortunately, it's too easy to just allow yourself to be surrounded by like-minded people; to only read things (articles, books, scientific studies) that reinforce our own opinions; to dismiss someone else's ideas because they're different or not as "informed" as yours. It is far too easy to fortify the comfortable bubble we live in, rather than grow up, take a deep breath, and rupture it ourselves.
Take that deep breath. Go one step further than learning to tolerate different perspectives — seek them out and allow them to confront you head on. Listen. With every person you encounter outside of and after college, practice repeating the process of unlearning everything you know and stepping into someone else's shoes, be it for a single day or a single conversation. Actively search for people with opposing political views. No need to do anything more than listen and understand, there's no participation grade at stake; it is merely the contact of two minds.
In the grand scheme of things, four years is nothing. College is just the blink of an eye. But my hope for all of us is that we can spend the rest of our lives discovering that one doesn't have to open a single book in order to learn.
