Does attending college make students more liberal

This argument has been raging forever. There is a perception that colleges are a hotbed of liberalism and any student who attends will be brainwashed from all sides to be liberal too. Although a popular perception, it’s one that isn’t true, although it has some caveats.

One caveat is that, on average, liberal professors outnumber moderate and conservative professors by 5 to 1 at colleges across America and any particular student is 9.2 percent likely to increase their liberal views from freshman year to senior year. The reason, however, is not indoctrination.

Throughout the history of this country, young people have always been more liberal than older people. It’s when they’re most ideological and when they honestly feel they can change society for the better. As mentioned in this column last week, Nike focused an ad campaign on Colin Kaepernick because they knew most young people in America would support that campaign rather than oppose it. Young people are optimistic dreamers who see every problem as having a solution and a burning desire to fix it.

It’s been said in this column many times that we are what we learn. If you come from a liberal family, you’re likely to be liberal and if you come from a conservative family, you’re likely to be conservative. This is a predictable outcome and not a designed one by parents. Generally speaking, young people look up to their parents, often to the point of wanting to be like them. The parents don’t hold classes with their children to teach them a political perspective. That perspective is learned by seeing and hearing it demonstrated by parents every single day.

I have two boys who are both hard-core Democrats in a heavily Republican-dominated state. The tendency on the part of all of us is to go along to get along but when an idea was germinated in your mind when small and that idea took on a life of its own, it won’t be denied by the owner. Norms and values learned and internalized at a young age are far more likely to last in a person that norms and values learned later in life. My boys and I never had a single political discussion when they were growing up. Not a one. I didn’t talk specifically about my politics and never told them what political party to join or how to vote. But they saw my politics daily in what I believed, how I acted and how I treated others. And because they wanted to be like me, they internalized that behavior as their own.

When we go to college, many students for the first time are exposed to a reality they aren’t accustomed to and that’s the reality of a different point of view. Now you’re not exposed to just your parents anymore, you’re exposed to beliefs and behaviors from learned college professors that you haven’t heard discussed in a positive view before. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the same process works for college professors as it does your parents. If you admire and respect one or more of your college professors, you will also admire and respect their political beliefs among other characteristics they have and some of those beliefs will be internalized by the student.

College professors don’t indoctrinate or brainwash their students any more than parents brainwash their kids. They simply act, speak and believe their politics and that attitude and behavior is adopted by students who admire their professors.

A few years ago, there was a young man taking classes at MCC who was supposedly a very good student. I always enjoyed teaching good students and I used the word supposedly because he never took a class from me. During his final year here, we had the opportunity to interact once during a meeting and I asked him why he had never enrolled in any of my classes. He replied in a rather embarrassed tone of voice that his parents wouldn’t let him. They were right-wing Republicans and because they read my newspaper column, they knew I was just the opposite and they didn’t want their son being exposed to political views that might change him.

I’m not sure they understood how the socialization process works but they did know what they had raised him to believe and they didn’t want anyone proposing a different way of looking at the world to him. They were conservative and they wanted him to be conservative too. In that respect, they won while he was a student here.

So the bottom line is that liberal professors don’t actively indoctrinate and brainwash their students any more than parents do. They live their lives and their beliefs for all to see, knowing it will turn some students on and others off. And because college students are still young enough to believe that anything is possible, more lean left than right during their college careers.