Growing up, kids are always given a very positive impression about the academic experience of college. We were consistently told that by going to college we would have academic freedom and that we could pursue new, challenging, and controversial ideas for the good of higher learning. We were told that professors would be open-minded, or at least pretend to be for the sake of their students. We were told that we could speak our opinions and that, as long as we could defend our claims academically, we would succeed.
With this information in mind, I was excited to pursue academics with a renewed vigor. However, when I arrived at DePauw I was dismayed to learn that everything I had been told did not live up to my expectations. In my experience, professors at DePauw University appear to be closed-minded, and use their influential position to brainwash, for lack of better word, their students into a certain political belief system, typically of a liberal nature.
Maybe it has to do with the chaotic political atmosphere and the heightened animosity between political ideologies in the United States, but I find the political polarization and the outspokenness of the professors on their beliefs to be unnecessary and distracting to class. Am I saying that professors should not have an opinion? No I am not. However, these opinions should stay out of the classroom if they do not relate to class material.
Just last week I was in a psychology class, a subject that should not include political input if it does not relate to the class. However, my professor spent the entire class explaining a specific ideological view regarding global warming and climate change, and passionately stated multiple times throughout the hour that people who had opposite opinions of hers were naïve and had trouble distinguishing true information from false information. This was not the open-minded, free-thinking collegial environment that I had yearned for throughout high school, it was a lecture on a topic that was not only irrelevant to the subject at hand but politically fueled.
My professor and I have distinctly different views on the matter and this discrepancy in our thinking made my once interesting class a very uncomfortable and awkward place. When I tried to defend my opinion, I was trivialized and mocked. I am also nervous because I am confident our political differences will be reflected in my grade, regardless of my merit as a psychology student.
I say this to all DePauw professors: please do not exclude students from the discussions in your classes by failing to acknowledge that politics is reserved for certain aspects. If you want to tell your students about your political opinions that are not relevant to course topics, there are plenty of outlets of communication outside the classroom. I care deeply about my DePauw education and I am willing to cast aside my ideology to grow academically. My only wish is that my professors do the same.