There's a culture war on. Because of that, there have been a few times this week, including twice today, where people have made comments to me along the lines of: "Millsaps should work to appear more conservative because the other small private colleges we compete with are."
I'm most likely going to have an opinion on that. First off, and the most obvious to me, is that this is a battle we can't possibly win. Some of these other small, private colleges are so far out on a limb with regard to their cultural doctrine that we could never hope to survive out there with them. I question not only their academic integrity on this but sometimes their sanity. That's simply not a path Millsaps can travel down.
Secondly, I don't think we should sell something we don't believe. We're not a conservative Christian college. We're just not. What we can do is get better at telling the truth about ourselves, and that truth is that we work pretty hard to present a balanced view of things to our students and then make them work like hell to develop the critical thinking skills that enable them to make their own choices. Producing students with the skills and the knowledge to make their own decisions is about the only thing I can think of that makes the effort and the money that go into a Millsaps education worthwhile.
We allow and encourage both our students and our faculty to go down whatever path they feel is the most truthful, and that sometimes means we have faculty and students who get involved in protests, and seeing Millsaps shirts at these protests means we're a bunch of communists to some, but to others, it signals that we're fighting for them, which sometimes makes a big difference. For some people, one kid with blue hair and a picket sign makes all the kids with short hair and Bibles invisible. Millsaps has always fought that perception. We may enroll purple-haired lesbian communists sometimes, but there are not that many, and they don't describe us--but most importantly, we provide them with the academic freedom to pursue their own path, so long as they do the work, and there's a lot of work.
When I was at Millsaps, there was a detente moment in the culture war, and the socialists broke bread with the Young Republicans fairly often. I myself was pretty conservative until I figured out that Reagan wasn't going to keep his promises. If you go to Millsaps today, you'll see that the Young Republicans are still active, and so are the Babes for Bernie Socialists. They live together and take classes together because we allow them to and we encourage them to. We don't make their decisions for them. As much as people accuse us of indoctrinating students, the reality is just the opposite. We provide them with a varied table of information and make them make their own choices. We refuse to indoctrinate them. We put a balanced diet on the table and force them to use critical thinking in what they choose to put on their plate.
Over the years, I've come to realize that one of our biggest allies in this effort is Ole Miss. Whatever they were in the sixties, they now work to present students with a balanced perspective. You'd be surprised how many students go from Millsaps to do graduate work at Ole Miss. It's a good fit. Ole Miss doesn't have the same reputation for liberalism that we do, probably because they fought against segregation way back when and we avoided the fight by opening our roll books without being forced to. Beyond that, we're very similar, and after college, we end up in the same law firms, the same medical offices, and the same banks as the kids who went to Ole Miss on day one, and it's a good fit.
We sometimes get the reputation for being a bunch of radical nutbags, and that isn't fair because it isn't true. We have some people on one end of the socio-political spectrum, but we have people on all the other ends too. Our best path forward might be to just get better at communicating the message that we're balanced, and we teach our students to seek their own path, and just how valuable that is compared to schools that make these choices for their students.
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