Bro, I'm Just Trying Not to Slip In My Gross-Ass Shower Shoes
What it's like going to college in the era of the "debate me" conservative, for the rest of us, a polemic
I wanted to finish this essay in time for it to be topical enough to respond to that New York Times essay about the conservative UVA student that has trouble finding people to debate her in one of the bastions of Southern old money. Then I realized that I didn’t need to rush because chances are the Times or some other supposedly liberal outlet would come out with a piece about cancel culture and oppressed conservatives on liberal arts campuses no matter when I published this thing anyway.
It feels like the easiest way to get your name in a newspaper if you’re under 25 and have enough money to go to a private university is to claim you’re oppressed for stanning principled conservative George W. Bush, but nobody really bothers to ask what it’s like to go to school with those people. So that’s what I wanted to write about in this essay because I went to school with those people and it fucking sucked.
I went to Middlebury College, a good liberal arts college in Vermont, the state of Ben & Jerry’s, Bernie Sanders, and white people that think they’re a lot further left than they actually are. I bargained for a decent education in exchange for my isolation, but I didn’t realize that an isolated campus would only amplify rancorous discord within the student body until it consumed your entire life. To be fair, when I entered Middlebury in the fall of 2015 nobody predicted what would come next. My sophomore year we became a bit of a national cause celebre for campus free speech when we invited Charles Murray to campus and an ensuing protest succeeded in shutting down that talk and reviving his career and the egos of conservatives that want to think they’re not racist everywhere, but I don’t want to talk about that because I’m tired of talking about that (we then repeated the process again with Ryszard Legutko, an obscure Polish conservative, and I might talk about that because I was more directly involved in that and that was even weirder).
The truth is that there were people complaining about how Middlebury students were mean to conservatives the second that I got there. Almost every month there was a discussion in a political science class or in the school newspaper about how conservatives were being censored on campus. We were told about how the liberals were a majority on our campus and we had to be nice to our oppressed conservative brethren that had to listen to us talk about gay rights without being able to express their Bible-thumping views or something.
The ironic thing about that is that I bet I did a lot more self-censorship on that campus than the average member of the College Republicans did. Like many Fox News viewers, I got fooled by the “liberal” in liberal arts college, expecting a place where I could engage politically, only to show up and realize that leftists weren’t particularly welcome. I once sat on my analysis of Marx to avoid a conservative professor tanking my grade because at that point, I just wanted to graduate (said professor claimed in class that corporate lawyers are the modern oppressed class because they work weekends and construction workers don’t. I wish I was joking). I saw very quickly the strange looks I got in class when I talked about communism in any way that wasn’t outright negative (the arch disclaimers that I was sharing my family’s lived experiences under communism didn’t help). Things got worse after the Charles Murray incident when every single sentence I would utter about how I didn’t think the college should have invited a eugenicist to campus had to be prefaced with “of course I’m for free speech” because otherwise I was Stalin reincarnated in a petite, angry Croatian body. I got to trip over my disclaimers again when the college political science department invited a Polish homophobic politician to campus and I had to explain over and over again why this invitation had ripple effects for queer people on campus and back in Poland, but nobody was listening to what I said. They were only listening to make sure that I was sufficiently obedient to the principle of free speech above all and I think my actual point tripped over all the disclaimers and fell into the wings somewhere.
If the American mind is coddled in any way, it is not because it is not exposed to enough conservatism, something I heard often during my college tenure which coincided with Republican control over all three branches of government. It is coddled because it is unable to step outside of its American lens. Any attempts at channeling the myth of America as a benevolent force were met with disdain by my fellow students and most professors, except for a chosen few. I remember when a professor mentioned that his research was about how the only way the U.S. compensates people in deindustrializing areas is with increased army recruitment, unlike other countries that increase welfare, and the whole class tried to argue that it was a good thing that poor kids join the army because they have no options. The same discussion group tried to tell me I had no idea about what the white working class went through because I’m not a Trump supporter, even though I’m white and was there on a scholarship, but I’m not holding a grudge or anything.
But this is not just an essay about how annoying it is to be a leftist on American college campuses (although it absolutely is and I am looking for other leftists to commiserate with me. Please). It is an essay about how the “debate me” crowd held up their own education and that of everyone else. I shudder at the class time wasted coddling some conservative’s feelings as she talked for 15 minutes about how nobody respects her. We could have read some more actual intellectuals instead, or dug deeper into the history of the Cold War, or ended class early and gone to see if the sun had bothered to come out in Vermont today. If the foundation of a liberal arts education was accepting basic facts, we could have done deeper into meatier topics instead of having to explain to Clay for the fifth time why poor people can’t just work harder to stop being poor and why asking that question for the fifth time is no longer productive but intellectually derailing, but no, we have to stop and address it because to ignore an obviously bad faith question would land the professor in the New York Times opinion pages within a week.
For all of their posturing about respecting intellectualism and the power of free speech, my main interactions with the “debate me” conservatives were profoundly intellectually lazy. They were never interested in actually hearing what I wanted to say, in talking about facts or sharing book recommendations or histories. They were never interested in actual intellectual exploration, they were just fantasizing about being on a Ben Shapiro video about owning libs with facts and logic. In their heads, the interaction was already over, I was just a sounding board that happened to be there. For all of the media pearl-clutching about leftists ending intellectual exploration as we know it, conservative refusal to accept facts and other perspectives is the real blocker (except these people aren’t just annoying to have in class, they get to decide policy for the rest of us).
A debate is never about true intellectual exchange anyway. It’s not about learning or exchanging views, it’s about trying to win. I wonder if the people that complain about how nobody wanting to debate them is impacting their education will try one of the many forms of learning available to them, such as reading, attending lectures, or actually—and stay with me here—listening to other people and trying to figure out why so many people are avoiding them. But I’m not holding my breath.
At the beginning of my college career, maybe I did avoid those “debate me” conservatives out of emotional sensitivity. I don’t think that makes me fragile, I just wasn’t in a place in my life where I wanted to have my rights as a woman and as a queer person treated as a joke. But towards the end, I just got bored. I had more important things to focus on, such as engaging with people that actually stimulated me intellectually on campus, such as other leftists, planning my exit route from a depressing undergraduate existence, and not slipping in the shower shoes that we all had to wear to avoid getting foot fungi from the dorm showers. Because for all of our intellectual posturing, ultimately most of us students were just lobsters fighting in an empty tank while the administration fished money out of our pockets and had us live in hastily-built houses whose windows didn’t close properly in Vermont winters.