There seems to be this idea that sending kids off to college – particularly liberal arts college – makes them turn uncontrollably to the political left and that it must, somehow, be the fault of the professors. Part of this might just be because the phrase “liberal arts college” has “liberal” in it, but I don’t think it’s entirely correct, and I wanted to talk about why.

I’m a young person who is pretty left and liberal, politically speaking. Like most Mainers, I dislike rapid change (or change in general) but I can grit my teeth and get through it because I have important end goals like making sure everyone has access to health care and that rich people start paying more in taxes so we can invest in our public schools. You know, crazy socialism stuff.

I went to Smith College, which is a women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s academically rigorous, has a track record of producing accomplished women (myself excluded, of course), and is located in a town that I would describe as the West End of Portland, but no other parts of Portland, plunked down in the middle of rural Massachusetts. I was what most people would call “socially liberal” before I got there, of course – I’m a member of the LGBTQ community and a supporter of access to birth control and abortion. Always have been and always will be. So maybe I was lost to the conservatives before I was even old enough to vote. But I didn’t pay much attention to fiscal politics – health care, taxes, stuff like that. I just didn’t.

I didn’t take many classes in politics or economics – I was an English major. A surprise, I know. In fact, I spent most of my Gov 101 class sitting in the back writing short stories. (It seems to have worked out all right in the end.) The thing about going to a college, particularly one that draws students from many different places, is that it isn’t the professors you learn the most from. It’s your fellow students. The people you sit with at the dining hall, the people you live with, the people you meet at parties (which of course I never went to), those are the people you learn from.

When I was at Smith, I met women whose parents could casually fly them out to Greece for spring break, and I met a woman whose mother had lied about her age to get her into preschool a year early because she couldn’t afford day care. There were students like me who had work-study jobs in campus as part of their financial aid package, and there were students who had never worried about money and never would. I met Muslim students and Jewish students, international students and first-generation Americans.

The thing is, it’s hard to say that you don’t want immigrants or Muslims or queer people in your community once you’ve met some of them.

A college education – even one at a women’s college with a well-earned reputation for a lot of feminist troublemaking – isn’t what turned my political leanings to the left. My life experiences did that, and chances are if a young person in your life has gone suddenly blue-wave, it was the same for them. You don’t need to blame higher education.

I had a friend who got into a bike crash last weekend and didn’t want to go to the emergency room, despite having symptoms of a concussion and a knee the size of a grapefruit, because she didn’t have health insurance and was afraid of the cost. I loaned her $200 so she could go to a quick care so we could at least make sure her brain wasn’t broken (she’s beat up but on the mend).

On the other hand, another friend of mine lived in Scotland for several years, and when she had to have major hip surgery – a labral removal – they had to remove most of the cartilage in her hip and it just didn’t cost her anything. The medications and physical therapy were free, too. And so young people like me look at these two experiences and think well, gee, if Scotland can do that, why can’t we?

I used to ask her what it was like living in a socialist hellhole. She said that other than the weather, it was pretty great; and we can’t really blame Scotland’s climate on their health care policy.

Victoria Hugo-Vidal is a Maine millennial. She can be contacted at:

themainemillennial@gmail.com

Twitter: mainemillennial

 

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