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The Unlikely Disciple
On a tip from Naomi Kritzer's Twitter feed, I just read Kevin Roose's book The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University.
It's by and about a Brown University student who decides to try a semester at Liberty University, an evangelical Christian place very outside his comfort zone. As Kritzer noted, he chafed at a lot, but he found that (surprisingly) there were things he liked, like the close togetherness and the conversation-centric dating. And (as Durkheim put it) the collective effervescence. A quick read, entertaining and a little thought-provoking (for me), but be warned that he sees and reports a lot of homophobia along with some sexism and racism.
I came out of it thinking a few things. One thing I reflected on: as Nonprofit AF puts it, "progressive funders are less effective than conservative ones." As much as conservatives think that universities in the US are bastions of liberalism, we don't have (as far as I know) liberal funders setting up and funding these kinds of institutions anywhere on the scale conservatives are, to build identities, communities, networks, careers all bound to specifically left ideologies.
And: so many people are so hungry for real, supportive friends and mentors, and grow those relationships like vines on any trellis provided, and it will be very hard to give up those trellises upon later finding out something awful. And every person and organization who strategically sets up something they call "community," but centered on a product they want to sell, takes advantage of that.
It's by and about a Brown University student who decides to try a semester at Liberty University, an evangelical Christian place very outside his comfort zone. As Kritzer noted, he chafed at a lot, but he found that (surprisingly) there were things he liked, like the close togetherness and the conversation-centric dating. And (as Durkheim put it) the collective effervescence. A quick read, entertaining and a little thought-provoking (for me), but be warned that he sees and reports a lot of homophobia along with some sexism and racism.
I came out of it thinking a few things. One thing I reflected on: as Nonprofit AF puts it, "progressive funders are less effective than conservative ones." As much as conservatives think that universities in the US are bastions of liberalism, we don't have (as far as I know) liberal funders setting up and funding these kinds of institutions anywhere on the scale conservatives are, to build identities, communities, networks, careers all bound to specifically left ideologies.
And: so many people are so hungry for real, supportive friends and mentors, and grow those relationships like vines on any trellis provided, and it will be very hard to give up those trellises upon later finding out something awful. And every person and organization who strategically sets up something they call "community," but centered on a product they want to sell, takes advantage of that.
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The reason you don't have big liberal funders in higher education is because you do not need them. For the most part, if conservatives did not spend a lot of money to insert themselves into higher education, they would not be there. They are all out there chasing capitalism so few of them are university professors.
Our LGBTQ center at the state university that I attended had a gay man who had made his career in tech fund it. It was nice.
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The population of faculties within universities in the US probably does lean to the left, but that's not the same as having a dedicated, well-funded conveyor belt that explicitly aims at growing liberal leaders and that recruits, funds, and nurtures people at the scale that the religious right does.
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What I am seeing in political leadership pipelines though is that young white males get propped up by those systems. For example, on the right there is Ben Shapiro and James O'Keefe who should be in jail and not in leadership. On the left, we will still end up with young men who do not need money in leadership pipelines if we do not watch it. The field officers for the campaigns who go explain campaign stuff in states are usually young men who do not have to be concerned with making much money. We don't have the larger vision of "Let's kill the NRA" where Republicans did have the vision of "Let's kill ACORN."
After 2016, we got Run for Something to help Democratic leaders under 40 and Emerge (followed by the state name) designed to help women run for office.
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And: so many people are so hungry for real, supportive friends and mentors, and grow those relationships like vines on any trellis provided, and it will be very hard to give up those trellises upon later finding out something awful. And every person and organization who strategically sets up something they call "community," but centered on a product they want to sell, takes advantage of that.
This is something I've thought about some, not on the scale of universities exactly, but -- like -- I am active in a religion that skews much, much more conservative than I personally am (and yeah... homophobia, check; sexism, check; racism, check; it's getting better about these things, but it's still at least twenty years behind everyone else, probably more), and I've thought seriously more than once about leaving it. And I haven't, because that community is not something I've found in any other context, and it's important to me. (As well as, I feel pretty strongly at this point that I have an important function to help the community with this transition, but that's another thing.)
I think part of the reason it is hard to find this outside of religion is that if you believe that God is literally telling you to do the things that foster community, it... makes it much easier to get you to actually do the thing than any secular reasoning. Of course things are more complicated than that, but in my experience it makes organizational things possible on a scale that you'd have a lot more difficulty implementing on a secular level.