Me, College Professors, and Hope

In case any of you don’t know,  I am currently a student at Montana State University studying mechanical engineering. I have just begun my second semester, and considering the political and cultural significance of universities, I thought that some of my fellow members might be interested in a status report of sorts detailing my experiences behind enemy lines.

Let me start off by saying that I have had no trouble finding conservative friends. I had the blessing of finding a solid church in Bozeman that has a thriving college ministry, and I have already made many close friends within it. By nature of being committed evangelical Christians, they’re all conservative people. If there are any leftists within the church, I certainly haven’t seen them.

Aside from my church friends, I have made many others through marching band, through classes, and from within my dorm community. Some of them are politically conservative, others are not, and some I honestly couldn’t tell either way.

I’ve met a lot of great people, including a few true ladies and gentlemen of rancher stock. However, it is those of my friends who would fall on the other side of the aisle with whom I shall concern myself in this writing.

I have talked politics with my genuinely left-wing college friends, and when we have, they have been perfectly respectful to me and reasonable in their arguments, even if I disagree with them in the end. I would not say that they have treated me any differently for knowing I am a conservative, nor has that caused any strain whatsoever in our friendship.

Indeed, I find that my peers rarely talk about politics, and when they do, they often do so in a lighthearted way. They treat the whole thing as a bit of a joke that’s just fun to talk about but in which they have no personal stake, which I do not believe necessarily means they do not have strong convictions privately.

Last semester I took an honors seminar class utilizing the Socratic teaching method, in which we read texts curated by a board of honors college professors and then discussed them during class. I believe that my experiences in this class are the most politically interesting of all my classes.

First: the reading material. The reading list was undoubtedly skewed soundly to the leftist/atheist point of view as a whole, but not entirely. We had to read stuff like “We Should All Be Feminists” and “The Origin of Species,” but also some gems. We read “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” and, get this, a chapter from George Will’s “The Conservative Sensibility.”

I think it’s significant that George Will could even get on a reading list likely chosen by all leftists. I think it shows us a bit of hope, that there are still leftists who genuinely desire hearing other voices and promoting civil dialogue.

It’s worth noting that we were not expected to agree with the texts, but to debate their merits and deficiencies as we saw them. My professor for that class, also a member of the aforementioned board of professors, is a great example. He is a left wing atheist, but he spoke highly of George Will’s chapter. He participated in the discussions on equal ground as the students, and he never tried to push his point of view on us, even as he argued for it. He treated me and my ideas with the utmost respect.

We had to write a 10-page thesis paper at the end of the semester on a topic of our choosing and using the texts we read, either as support or as counter evidence. I chose to explore when killing another human being is morally acceptable. I used Bible verses as the basis of my argument, since every moral argument depends on a moral code, and my professor complimented me personally on the paper and gave me a 97% on it, despite disagreeing with the foundation of my argument and at least some of my conclusions. I very much like and respect him, and I bring him up because I wanted to show that there are still respectable left-wing college professors who I would not wish to see entirely absent from universities, only balanced out with equally outspoken conservative professors.

Among the other six professors I had last semester, two of them I suspect might be conservatives, one of them was definitely a Marxist, and two others I honestly could not tell either way. The Marxist taught a Japanese culture and civilization class, a class I actually enjoyed, and which satisfied the administration-mandated “diversity credit” requirement. He occasionally made comments in class that I found very inappropriate, such as calling the West homophobic, taking a cheap shot at Trump, and suggesting that America dropped the atomic bombs as a science experiment at the expense of the Japanese.

On one occasion, he talked extensively about Marx’s criticisms of capitalism in relation to the Japanese society in the post war era. On that occasion, I really understood for the first time the genius of critical theory, which Bill has mentioned many times. He never advocated communism, so I couldn’t accuse him of pushing a political agenda or point out how bad communism is, but he did criticize capitalism, and some of them were reasonable criticisms that would be hard to argue against. By thoroughly pointing out the flaws of capitalism, he no doubt made students less inclined to like capitalism, and therefore, without even mentioning the name, he has made communism more appealing relative to capitalism.

In contrast to individual professors, the administration does not have any redeeming qualities that I can see. You’ve got the ridiculous “Women in STEM” movement, of course, among other indecencies. The honors college, of which I am a member, is particularly bad. It intends to give students a liberal arts education, which I do not oppose in and of itself, but here it has become steeped in Leftist philosophy. They put on tons of events, and the majority of them are inconspicuously and unapologetically Leftist. Most are about climate change, although those aren’t the worst.

A week ago, they emailed out a flyer inviting students to watch a pro choice documentary in celebration of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade!

So what’s my point with all this? Well, I can confirm that some parts of what you would expect of a modern university are just as bad as you would expect. However, I see hope as well, and hope that I don’t see many conservatives talking about.

The first place I see it is in people like my honors seminar professor, the second is in all of my conservative friends, and the last is in the left wing students themselves. I see a lot of fundamental respect, along with some of those principals which we need so desperately for a civil society. I do not expect this is the case at every university, or even at most, but it is the case here in Montana. I’m sure that is not a coincidence, considering the culture of the state; even those who fall squarely on the left seem more “conservative” to me than leftists elsewhere.

Let me know if any of you have other questions or comments about my experiences at university. For the next four years I can be your inside man. I can also post my thesis paper if anyone is interested.

Last of all, I’d like to thank Bill, Scott, and Steve for equipping me to face some of these common Leftist arguments with a few arguments of my own. Keep fighting the good fight gentlemen, and enjoy your cruise.