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Has anyone seen last year’s promising freshmen?

August 15, 2014

Dear College Sophomore, A lot can change in a year, right? At this time last year, you were a wary and excited freshman. Moving into the residence hall brought both the thrill of newfound independence and nervous dislocation from home and family. But you soon settled in and focused on why you were here: to learn. Sometimes going to those first-year classes felt like drinking from a fire hose. But you couldn't get enough of the new worlds that your instructors invited you into: Homer's Greece, Augustine's Rome, John Locke's England, C.S. Lewis's Oxford, Toni Morrison's Kentucky. And trust me, we noticed. You are the student that teachers dream about, the one we talk about in the faculty dining room, the one who "gets it." You didn't just treat your freshman classes as an inconvenience, the price of admission to cheap football tickets and fraternity parties. You signed up for the adventure of intellectual exploration that college is meant to be. Yet I couldn't help but notice a change in you already last spring. And now that classes are starting up again, I see a familiar shift in your stance toward the world. If the past is any guide (and it is), I worry that this is the sophomore you might become: It's not just that you're a year wiser; you carry the air of the newly enlightened. Your curiosity has hardened into a misplaced confidence; your desire to learn has turned into a penchant to pronounce, as if wisdom were a race to being the quickest debunker. You used to wonder about the social vision behind Philip Larkin's poetry, or whether Thomas Aquinas's notion of natural law could really work in a secular age, but now you seem more intent on unmasking "micro-aggressions" and detecting colonial prejudice in a canon that you increasingly disdain. I've seen it before—I see it every year. And I know where it is coming from. I know those colleagues who confuse teaching with advocacy—those colleagues who think they are broadening your horizons and opening up your world and disabusing you of your former narrowness. Teachers who delight in debunking "traditional" values that your parents espouse, teachers for whom cultural criticism consists of scoffing at anything "conservative." They were my teachers, too. I know how it feels to be invited into this exclusive club. I understand the joy ride of liberal enlightenment. But what if they're asking you to trade one sort of narrowness for another? It might feel like they're making your world more expansive, but they're actually closing it off. Dangling the badge of maturity and knowingness, they subtly replace teaching with indoctrination. Sharing the ironic distance that shores up this self-perception, they swap laughs with you in the morning about the latest takedown by Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert (wink, wink, we are the ones who know how things really work!). Unlike during those first few months of freshman year, your thinking on almost any subject now is becoming easy to predict. The causes you're passionate about, while not without merit, are almost clichéd. You seem less interested in mining the complexity of problems and more interested in making a hasty display of moral outrage and coming down on the correct side of any debate—because of course there's only one right way to think. That didn't used to be the case. Last fall I could see the wheels turning for you. I could almost sense when your mind was swirling with discovery, entertaining unfamiliar ideas, forging a sense of yourself and your commitments—questioning some prior beliefs, to be sure, but with a sense of maturing conviction that didn't shut itself off from reality. You were coming to appreciate both the complexity of the world and the range of wisdom available to us from our forebears. That's a laudable posture, not just for college but for life. So don't buy the story that the really smart people on campus are the ones who parrot the platforms of progressives. Bring a little suspicion to those who delight in their hermeneutics of suspicion. Punch through the posturing and self-congratulation and ask the questions you were asking last fall—the ones that forced me to consider my own thinking anew. You're too smart to settle for ideology, and it's too soon to stop learning. We're just getting started.