A STUDY released earlier this week by the University of California-Los Angeles indicates that the attitudes and political affiliations of incoming freshmen increasingly are liberal. Politically, I'm pleased, but other indications and survey responses are cause for concern.
For most students, college life is more liberal than life at home, both in terms of freedom and of thought. Likewise, college often is seen as a more diverse atmosphere than many students experience in high school. This is a necessary result of being forced to live and learn with people who come from a wide variety of places and is an overwhelmingly positive aspect of "going away" to college.
Diversity of people and ideas is important to education, but even more important is learning how to think critically and independently. The UCLA study does not indicate that students are acquiring these skills.
Identifying with a category such as "liberal" or "far left," the categories in which 29.9 percent of students surveyed place themselves, is not the same as actively supporting the ideas those categories represent. Although the students surveyed reported less support for the death penalty and increased support for liberal causes such as same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana, coverage of the study's findings suggests other reasons for the popularity of the liberal label.
Commenting on the survey, University of Wisconsin Interim Dean Roger Howard calls being liberal part of the "student experience" (Badger Herald, "Students Leaning Left, Study Says," Jan. 29). This comment implies that college students are not more liberal because they have considered thoroughly their political beliefs, but because being liberal, like all-nighters and dining hall food, is just what one does in college.
Coverage of the survey by the Daily Bruin, UCLA's student newspaper, also suggests that the increase in "liberal" students owes more to rhetoric than to a true shift in ideology. The survey's founding director, Alexander Astin, points to the attack on the word "liberal" in the late 1980s as a reason fewer students identify themselves as such than might otherwise be expected. "The word fell out of favor and most young people are less likely to use it," he says ("UCLA Study Shows Liberalism Increasing Among Incoming Freshmen," Jan. 29). Again, the implication is that liberalism simply is a fad.
Astin adds, "My guess is UCLA students would come out more liberal because it is very selective, and students with high SATs and GPAs are usually more liberal to begin with." This association of liberalism with intelligence suggests that "conservative" now is the term under attack. The growing popularity of liberalism appears to have more to do with the rhetoric surrounding political identifiers than with discussion of the issues involved with a liberal agenda.
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One of the most difficult things to learn, but also one of the most important, is how to think critically and independently. The number of liberal students should be increasing because those students have looked at what it means to be liberal, not because everyone else is liberal too.
College students not only should learn how to write code or where the Spanish American War took place, but also how to problem solve and reach reasonable conclusions. This education relies on professors to expect more than regurgitation of facts from their students and students' willingness to engage the subjects they study. The UCLA study indicates that students do not come to college prepared to do that.
If students hope to get anything important in exchange for their ever-increasing tuition bills, they have to change their habits. It's true that professors need to challenge their students and teach them how, rather than what, to think. Students, however, are the ones who are responsible for attending class and learning what is being taught.
Until college students decide to think actively rather than accept whatever is most prevalent, titles like "liberal" will be little more than rhetorical fads.
(Megan Moyer's column appears Fridays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at mmoyer@cavalierdaily.com.)
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