From the Student Perspective

Beyond considering the politics of staff, faculty and guest speakers on campuses across the country, it's important to explore how the political composition of college students will one day affect the future of academia. The following link (http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/09/12/wang-what-we-cant-afford) leads to an interesting article in the Yale Daily News on the socioeconomic divides that are particularly apparent on elite college campuses. Wang highlights that " People speak with a cultural capital I’ve never acquired — whether that be the vocabulary of the traditional old boys’ club or the social currency of 'woke' activist jargon often foreign to the very communities for which Yalies 'advocate'". In a time when colleges are commonly thought of as mass gatherings of liberal students and professors, it's interesting to note that these politically liberal students paradoxically benefit from immense traditional class privilege and champion theories of social equity for groups of people that their degree of education inherently separate them from. Rather ironically, the nature of an elite college degree perpetuates the very social inequality condemned within these institutions. It makes one question whether the future of academia will be populated by people with little first hand experience with the complex divisions that exist in our current political environment.

*Extra reading on this topic

See this diagram in the New York Times that visualizes the schools where the wealthiest top 1% and poorest bottom 20% of American students receive their degree: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/18/upshot/some-colleges-have-more-students-from-the-top-1-percent-than-the-bottom-60.html?mcubz=0