Jose Vega – Contributor
Colleges and universities should be a place that exposes students to new ideas to them become well-rounded professionals. Living in a campus bubble of any kind is a hindrance to that very goal.
While SCSU in no way actively silences or diminishes students’ voices across campus, it does foster this political bubble set towards a more left-leaning political agenda.
In many different courses on campus, topics of conversation or discussion tend to have some sort of relation to social justice. This relationship is not bad, it teaches youth about important issues that are facing our more underprivileged communities.
However, you don’t know you’re living within a political or cultural bubble until you step out of it. This is because students have like-minded trains of thought and those opinions are bounced off the walls of the bubble and back at the students solidifying it, creating a place where the majority opinion outweighs the opinion of someone who might think differently.
Mainly because inherently politics is filled with some of the most controversial and emotionally charged issues of our generation.
This social justice bubble Southern lives in makes it uncomfortable and sometimes scary for students to share their political opinions. Especially if they are anything outside what would be considered a liberal Democrat.
The 2020 survey called Student Voice conducted by Inside Higher Ed and Colle Pulse revealed that while 67% of college students surveyed said they feel fully or somewhat comfortable sharing their opinions in class, it is more true for left-leaning students than right-leaning students.
The report stated: “More than two-thirds of students either strongly (28 percent) or somewhat (39 percent) agree that they feel comfortable sharing opinions in their classes. That’s more true for liberal students than for right-leaning ones, with 74 percent of those identifying as “strong Democrats” and 53 percent of “strong Republicans” agreeing.
In a predominantly left-leaning campus such as Southern, this type of shielding from a difference of opinion or outside perspective can have a negative impact on students after college.
It is especially dangerous if this happens on a college campus where we are meant to be exposed to different values in order to become active yet responsible professionals moving forward.
Fostering a certain level of ignorance towards certain political opinions is not only detrimental to students’ critical thinking skills, but it also hampers their ability to compromise and we end up with more of what we already have.
Men and women too stuck in their tunnel vision way of thinking are more worried about toeing party lines instead of pushing our country forward as a whole.
