Introduction
Multiculturalism
Feminism
Alcohol
Conclusion
Bibliography
I graduated from one of the top four liberal arts colleges in the country, volunteered as a recruiter for the Admissions department, enjoyed a wonderfully active social life, and was elected president of the committee for campus-wide social activities during my senior year.
However, despite my myriad extracurricular activities at Wellesley, I can’t say that my experience at the school was particularly pleasant, or even that any great portion of it was. Even though I regarded myself a liberal from the blue dot in the middle of Texas when I left for college, I quickly found myself becoming conservative as I faced coursework and instruction that was extremely narrow-minded, intolerant, and skewed largely to the fringe of radical liberalism. I found Wellesley College to be unaccommodating to the needs of many of its students, and hypocritical in its claims of “multiculturalism,” “tolerance,” and “empowerment.”
“College is half academic and half social,” my brother advised, “if you have too much of either one, you’ll just be hurting yourself.”
It was because of this that I felt compelled to write this book. I left for Wellesley College in August 2001, but soon felt that I could not get out of there fast enough. As is the problem with many of the top-tier schools today, there was no balance. In the college world, we would joke that we “worked hard, partied hard,” but my experience at Wellesley went much further than that.
Extremism was most noticeable in campus social life – from some students studying all night – every night – with no breaks to others who drank themselves into oblivion and slept with anything that had legs. The latter were the ones who led me into confrontation with the school administration just months before my graduation.
In February 2004, I organized a project called the Dyke Ball Awareness Campaign. This was in response to an annual event called “Dyke Ball,” held every year at the beginning of Les-Bi-Trans Week. The event started in 1993 as a formal evening of dinner and dancing for lesbian couples who did not feel comfortable taking their girlfriends to prom. The proceeds from the event benefited breast cancer and AIDs research.
Beginning in 1996, the event became more distasteful. This past year, attendees (numbering approximately 1800 persons) wore costumes often consisting only of lingerie, body paint, saran wrap, or strategically-placed yellow caution tape. Men and women of all sexual preferences were in attendance, the majority of whom – even though many were not of legal drinking age – were severely impaired by alcohol and other drugs (as one would need to be to feel comfortable walking around essentially naked in public). The money raised by the event was used to pay for two drag performance troops, one of which, “The Princesses of Porn and Dukes of Dykedom,” publishes their statement of intent on their website with such comments as:
“The Princesses of Porn with their official escorts, The Dukes of Dykedom, are working towards their goals of ending Lesbian Bed Death Syndrome (LBDS); world domination through lesbian sex; and finding a nail polish that won’t chip. To this end, they have been spreading the word of the pussy through high-femme and butch drag, burlesque shows.”
I apologize for my crudeness, but you can imagine how I felt at the fact that my student activity fee dollars were being used to support such activity. I organized an awareness campaign and asked the Student Government Association and the school’s president to host a discussion for an hour to allow the students to voice their opinions on the event (in favor or against it). They responded very negatively and I received threats from many students. Over the next three months, my experience at Wellesley became more and more negative.
I write this book now, astonished at the hypocrisy found in many liberal arts schools today. The purpose of classical liberal arts education is to educate its students in the art of reasoning and inquiry, instructing them in a classical core curriculum so that they will have a solid foundation when approaching problems in their future careers and the ability to articulate their solutions. Wellesley College’s stated goal is to provide a curriculum that gives its students “the ability to speak and write clearly, the knowledge to manage quantitative data with ease, the confidence to approach new material, and the capacity to make critical judgments.” I argue that many of Wellesley’s efforts to be politically correct and move forward a socio-political agenda have undermined its capacity to graduate women with these capabilities. I question whether Wellesley College is still able to deliver on its promise to “provide an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world.”
The fact that the administration would not even allow a discussion because they were afraid they would be seen as homophobic highlights a tremendous problem faced by our country. There are many barriers to tradition in today’s schools that undermine the intention of liberal arts education and prevent the worldview of our forefathers (and no, Wellesley girls, I’m not going to say “foremothers.” That simply is not historically accurate) from growing and continuing to shape this nation.
The problems that we see on college campuses today are not just a matter of “kids will be kids.” The problems we see are merely symptoms of a greater problem – a problem of worldviews that are coming into conflict across the country and across the globe. On one side of the conflict, we constantly hear that conservatives, Christians, white Anglo-Saxons, men, businessmen, and women who want to stay home to raise a family are all close-minded, bigoted, sexist, racist, oppressive, and cruel-hearted. From the other side, we constantly hear accusations of hypocrisy, close-mindedness, bigotry, sexism, discrimination, immorality, and stupidity. Sounds like the making of a very civilized debate, doesn’t it?
The problem that we see developing on college campuses will just make this lack of civility worse. The lack of civil discourse that we see on college campuses today is not going to remain locked on college campuses. These students graduate, and when they do, they will be bringing these thoughts, habits, ideologies, and agendas into the real world, where they will take on positions as doctors, lawyers, public servants, investors, media personalities, or other influential roles, and they will eventually raise children of their own, who will take the lack of civil discourse even further.
In this book, I look at liberalism in academia under three categories: liberalism in the classroom, liberalism in the administration, and liberalism in the social environment. At the end, I will propose steps that can be taken to bring back a fair and balanced view, renew the interaction of a plethora of ideas within liberal arts academies, and the restoration of a safer and more thriving environment on our college campuses.
By highlighting my experiences at Wellesley College and similar experiences at other schools, bringing attention to the policies that schools have tried to implement, and suggesting policies that might be more effective in the future, I hope to influence this generation by bringing them closer to the values of the Founders – faith, family, and freedom.
Special thanks to the people who gave me the courage to become active on my campus, those who gave me the courage to write this, and those who served as resources to me over the years both spiritually and intellectually so that I would not become just another college student to accept every statistic thrown my way.
