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Notes -
Like many arguments about the liberal bias of college graduates, this is doing immense work of denying those college graduates agency in their own process of academic discovery. But, I guess this is like the "nature" vs. "nurture" debate, except "reality has a liberal bias" vs. "higher education is liberal brainwashing". Maybe somewhere, someone is begging that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Every political dialogue I had in college, often frequently with people who I had very little to agree with, was emphatically more informed and nuanced than any YouTube gotcha shitpost (Charlie Kirk) that tries to paint college students as some misinformed monolith. It was a period of rapid opinion changing for me, and I only took one or two "woke" courses. I guess maybe my foreign language classes could be considered woke, as the literature we focused on was mostly from the times of massive political upheaval in those nations thanks to radical reactionary politics (I didn't study Russian or Chinese)...
Most of my opinion changes came from the fact that I went from a town where we could see the stars because there wasn't enough light pollution to drown them out, where people still used the word "Jew" as a derogatory verb, to a college campus where I met (and even dated) a Jewish person for the first time, and realized that I actually wasn't 10% as smart as I thought I was even though I was at the top of my class. Humility and worldliness liberalized me, personally. If I had stayed home I would've continued to be one of the smartest assholes in my hometown, and probably would've made a good chunk of money doing some regional white collar work. I didn't, though.
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