Driving through my neighborhood on the outskirts of Evans, Georgia in 2022, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the Republican primary for the upcoming gubernatorial election was fast approaching. Competing yard signs littered the streets and, for once, the political landscape of my deeply conservative suburb appeared divided. Everyone, of course, knew of the incumbent candidate, gun-toting Republican Brian Kemp, who had openly defied President Trump’s request that he overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results in his favor. Trump had retaliated by endorsing loyalist and former Senator David Perdue in a bid to unseat Kemp in the Republican primary. Everywhere you looked, it was Kemp. Perdue. Kemp. Perdue. Perdue. Perdue. Perdue. Unsurprisingly, a sizable population of my pro-Trump hometown was rallying to endorse Perdue. Yet, increasingly, another name was littered among the signs: Kandiss Taylor. Who was Kandiss Taylor? Confused, I decided to look her up.
Kandiss Taylor, it turned out, was a white Christian nationalist running in the Republican primary under the slogan: “Jesus, Guns and Babies.” Such was the political climate of my hometown that members of our community would actively campaign for an ideologically outrageous, reactionary, and theocratic candidate. I began to notice her signs boldly placed everywhere on my morning drives to high school, my dismay slowly building all the while.
Accordingly, at my high school, to be conservative was to be cool. To be liberal was to be a snowflake and any other derogatory, feminizing label you can think of. Owing to my mother’s own staunch, largely left-of-center political views, as well as my growing understanding of my own identity, I found myself constantly at ideological odds with both the adults and other kids surrounding me. Growing up, anger was perhaps the number one emotion I felt toward other students in middle and high school, though I seldom spoke up about it, resigned to the fact that my quiet, solo voice would be of little power against the strong, unified chorus that was usually around me. The few times I did express my viewpoints in opposition to a peer, this inkling proved to be right, and I would slink away from the interaction (which largely consisted of hurling partisan buzzwords at each other) not only angrier, but embarrassed. Political arguments in general, I concluded, were pointless.
When I got into Brown, my friends told my English teacher. She turned to me and said, “Isn’t that a liberal school?” I feigned ignorance. “I don’t know,” I responded. “Have you visited?” she pressed. “Yes.” I nodded. “Did it feel liberal?” she retorted. Exasperated, and also trying not to laugh at the ridiculous question, I told her I did not know what “liberal” felt like.
In truth, I did not apply to Brown because it was “liberal.” In fact, I was not even aware of Brown’s reputation as a particularly notable left-wing school until I arrived here. I figured that my teacher’s references were based on impressions of the Ivy League or New England as a whole.
Today, four years later and on the cusp of receiving my bachelor’s degree in political science, one might be shocked to hear my conclusion that my time at Brown, if anything, has made me more open to engaging with diverse and opposing political viewpoints. How can this be so? Haven’t I been living in the leftist echo chamber of College Hill, Providence, Rhode Island, for four years and counting?
To be clear, I would consider myself quite left on the political spectrum, and yes, the Brown community is mostly (but not entirely) a leftist echo chamber. Yet the culprit of my newfound “openness” is not really the Brown community or student body, but rather Brown’s humanities curriculum. I don’t even think the experiences that have led me to this epiphany are necessarily unique to Brown, and I feel confident that I could have reached a similar conclusion had I attended another school with strong humanities programs.
If you talk to anyone, especially a consumer of conservative media, my thesis would appear absurd. Elite schools are institutes of liberal indoctrination, so they say. Ivy Leagues, Brown chief among them all, are the calculated perpetrators of the woke agenda. Conservative students on campus are persecuted or remain silent, lest the leftist mob chase them down with pitchforks. For a Brown student to graduate and feel happy to engage in respectful conversations with the politically un-likeminded runs contrary to these claims.
Graciously, the Brown curriculum constantly engaged me in the practice of critical thinking, but more importantly, it taught me how to assess and craft sound arguments. Crucially, Brown taught me that this exercise is one driven by intellectual curiosity, rather than emotion and information regurgitation. No longer are my internal political musings and arguments just a repetition of a TikTok take I saw, for example, without fully understanding its meaning and basis; now, I am practiced in developing my own original arguments by reasoning through and testing my contentions against their logical counterclaims. Altogether, my classes in political science, English, philosophy, public health, history, and several other humanities departments have instilled these abilities in me.
Funnily enough, I realized this newfound change in my cognition at a bar in Atlanta with another friend from Brown over winter break. We had spent the entire day together, just us, so I joked that we should try to make a friend as we entered the bar. As we looked around, no one there seemed open to chatting with strangers. Then, really joking, I told my friend we should dial random numbers and try to make new friends that way. Ever one to commit to the bit, my friend pulled out his phone and actually started doing it.
“Hi! We’re dialing random numbers, and we were wondering if you would want to be our friend.” My friend prompted each phone call with frankness, while I tried to silence my laughter in the background at the ridiculousness of what we were doing. We called three numbers, and on the fourth call, a man picked up and, to our shock, answered our question with a cheeky “sure.”
We turned and stared at each other in silence, mouths agape, unsure where to go from there. After a moment, we began sharing some very general details about our lives (stranger danger) and asked him about his. He told us he was working from home and, clearly amused by us, put us on speaker so we could also chat with his wife.
You would think I’m making this up when I say that we ended up talking to this couple for two hours about everything under the sun. They were from California—around Los Angeles—and we learned all about their hobbies, how they met, what they did for work, and more. We told them we were in college, and when we said we were studying international affairs and political science, respectively, the wife asked us what we thought about Charlie Kirk. Oh boy.
I answered honestly and told them that I had been fiercely opposed to his politics while he was alive, as I viewed them to be predominantly supported by hatred and prejudice. The wife told me she agreed with me, but that her husband was more sympathetic to him. I asked the husband why, and slowly, we began to debate wedge political issues, moving from Kirk to gun control. Generally, the husband leaned more conservative on these issues, and I would ask him why he thought what he thought, and he did the same for me. We talked about how our backgrounds had informed our views, and we challenged each other’s arguments with counterarguments. While the debate was heated at times, it was in no way disrespectful, and I actually found it fun. The husband did too; when we were saying our goodbyes, he told me to call him anytime to debate more politics and that he had enjoyed it.
Today, productive arguments like these feel like a lost art. Yet, their notable absence from our conversations with each other should come as no surprise, given that most of us engage with political echo chambers of our own algorithmic design on a daily basis, or with the editorialized news outlets of our choice. By design, these systems work to override any inclination we might have to debate based on our own rationalizations and reconciliations of our moral and political principles. But what is the solution? Our technology and news media outlets, at least for the foreseeable future, do not appear likely to change much on this front.
While that is, of course, a huge question that cannot have just one answer, my education at Brown has shown me that one piece of that puzzle is higher education, especially strong humanities programs. I write this article to challenge the ongoing narrative that higher education, particularly elite higher education, invariably indoctrinates and creates close-minded young adults. For me, someone who went from living in a far-right community to a far-left community, the singular experience I can point to that encouraged me to engage critically, thoughtfully, and open-mindedly in political discourse with those of different opinions from me was college. By political discourse, I mean strictly thoughtful political arguments on either side of the aisle—not prejudices or hatred that are driven solely by emotion.
At the end of the day, admittedly, my political stances from high school have not changed much. Yet, that discovery has only been reached through careful excavation of each of my opinions’ meaning and basis throughout my time learning to write and argue at Brown. Brown and its peer programs of higher education are invaluable in upholding the free-thinking discourse necessary to our democracy and essential in combating the forces behind the rise of polarization.
