SANTARELLI: The liberal art education

The title is not a typo, just an observation. I’ve gone numb, or at least have been from the start of college. Every day I leave my place in the morning’ – forget living on campus – pass by a bunch of naive pacifist flyers outside Sleeper Hall, get attacked by the Brobama cult in the GSU Link, pick up a FreeP praising an unoriginal and misquoted ex-military international relations professor, see some broccoli-huggers in front of Marsh Chapel tell me I’ve killed Mother Earth, all before I finally make it class. I sit back, close my eyes and drown out some neo-Marxist with a Che Guevara key chain as he rants on the evil globalization leviathan that is the United States. Every day.
While almost everyone else who will write in this paper call for the legalization of marijuana ‘-‘- which will never happen ‘-‘- or babble about an election as drawn out and annoying as a boy band CD with a scratch on it, I call out to a different audience.
I know the majority of you reading this have already lost focus in a haze of fury and just burned your tongue on some four dollar cup of coffee you buy every day that tastes like hot dirt. You’ll interrupt your friends’ conversation about the most recent The Office episode to show them your discovery in disgust. The three of you will rush to your MacBooks back in StuVi to write in to the editor misquoting my work and taking lines out of context in an attempt to one-up me for a good story over hookah and in between two hours of video games and an overrated indie flick at your friend’s place this Friday night. For that audience, I say stop reading now. You already have the rest of the paper, every other paper in Boston, your professors, and the naive and self-praising mob in classroom debate. This goes out to the BU student who knows how much Bill O’Reilly must have loathed this place. The non-liberal college student in America has gone through a lot. With the majority of politically right-wing scholars typically moving on to the fields of business and engineering, where they find the most success and some degree of control in the world, academia is historically infested with unregulated, self-worshipping lefties who feel underappreciated. Because of this, generations of college students have spent their university years being taught by-and-large with a liberal bias. Unfortunately, not much will change due to the natural tendencies of both sides. While you’ll undoubtedly see a few conservative-types working at a Starbucks or an Apple Store every once in a while, and maybe a few liberal-types working on Wall Street, college professors will always be liberal. Its something you just have to accept, like no trays in the dining hall anymore or Sarah Palin. When a Liberal education is true in more ways than one what can the conservative college student take back from the experience? Well, quite frankly, more then the liberal one. What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger. For example, let’s say I went to Notre Dame or Brigham Young University – any school viewed as historically conservative. In a classroom full of kids who agree with me, there would be few opposing views to my ideology, and I would have no drive to fight liberalism.
I would gain nothing. Going to BU, where my political ideology is part of a small minority that is frequently challenged and attacked, I’ve learned the other side’s viewpoints. There’s no greater weapon in war than understanding the way your enemy thinks. To the chagrin of liberal student body, it is in an environment of constant conflict and irritation between conservatives and liberals like this that will produce the strongest and most versatile conservative minds. Hence Bill O’Reilly or Jay Severin – both BU alumni. While all signs point to 2008 being a tough year for righties, don’t loose faith when you inevitably get an earful from the other side. At BU, you’ll constantly find yourself on the opposite side of the mob, but it will only make you stronger.