Student opinion at elite schools is showing 'diversity.' The faculty is another matter.

Ruth Wisse:

Four years ago at the beginning of Harvard's school term, I was going over an assignment with a freshman when she confessed that she was feeling guilty--because she was working for the Obama campaign. I assumed she meant that her campaign work was taking too much time from her studies, but she corrected me: She was feeling guilty because she supported John McCain.

So why, I asked, was she working for his opponent? She answered: "Because I wanted so badly to get along with my roommates and with everyone else."

Few of us survive adolescence without some conflict of the kind experienced by this freshman and dramatized by Tom Wolfe in his novel "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (2004): the conflict between the demands of new surroundings and the moral beliefs and values one brings from home. Every environment dispenses its conventional wisdom, and swimming against the current is always hard. But our freshman's predicament was driven by an exaggerated impression of "everyone else."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 29, 2012 2:41 AM
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