Never said it was such though considering OP’s own stated perception of D growing up in their area of the south, I’m taking his/her word for it that it’s heavily conservative and that D DOESN’T WANT MORE OF THE SAME as was the case with many southern and some midwest classmates from similarly conservative areas.
Mao is famous for this initiative which elevated the un/undereducated and condemned the intellectuals to the countryside…ironically they were later joined by many of the very same “Red Guards” who initially facilitated the persecution of the former group when Mao felt the Revolution was becoming “too excessive” even for him.
However, the Khmer Rouge carried it to its terrifyingly logical extremes by forcibly completely depopulating Cambodian cities and summarily executing anyone who seemed intellectual…such as anyone who wore glasses or found to have worn them in the past. In a very dark sick sense…un/undereducated dim jocks* having their complete way with the “nerds”.
Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot was a failed student who flunked out of a French higher vocational institute**(forced to return to Cambodia after flunking required exams 3 times in a row) and likely had serious resentment against those who were better students than he was.
Especially considering he was part of the leadership which mandated the use of salt on farmed fields because they actually believed it would facilitate agricultural productivity rather than the opposite as shown in Dr. Haing S. Ngor’s(MD) “The Cambodian Odyssey” which I read and did a book report about in 5th grade.
** While the EFR is currently considered an Engineering university, it wasn’t certified as such back when Pol Pot was a student/flunked out. He also was placed on the higher vocational institute track after flunking out of the academic college-prep track HS back in Cambodia.
Your S’s experience at Tufts is similar…though not nearly as extreme as many HS classmates who were outspoken Ayn Rand libertarian/conservatives and sometimes pulled Alex P. Keatons on their former hippie parents because of their parental/prior educational influences.
Many have since changed back…including a younger HS classmate who was a vehement conservative throughout HS, into undergrad at a SUNY/NYU(3/4 scholarship), and law school. The last was very dramatic as that younger classmate went from being a staunch conservative/Ayn Randist to now being so progressively left he’d now fit in BETTER at the Oberlin of my era (mid-late '90s) than I ever did.
More closer to your S’ experience is that of another younger HS classmate who was a right-leaning centrist in HS with some Ayn Rand tendencies, dropped out of college to enlist in the US Army as an infantry soldier after 9/11, and became an active staunch SJW after his experiences in OIF. .
LOL, she’s got a good set of suggestions I think. I think now it’s a question of what she cares most about in terms of location or size or whatever so she can narrow her choices.
Antioch College(The original LAC in Ohio, not the Antioch University campuses).
Yes, it closed down for some years in the '00s, but it’s open again.
Unless the campus culture/leadership of the alumni/faculty/admin supporters which facilitated the reopening changed dramatically and moreso…changed dramatically since I was an undergrad in the late '90s, they are at least up there in the SJW cred as Oberlin…if not more so.
I’m totally surprised in 5 pages no one has posted to the OP about Kalamazoo College which has the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership. But sometimes it feels like the “coasts” only know about Macalester, Oberlin and Carleton in the midwest :-). and St. Olaf by default because it’s in the same town as Carleton…
The Arcus Center also has a very good scholarship available:
The ACSJL offers one incoming first-year student a $20,000 merit-based scholarship, the Social Justice Leadership Award. Qualified candidates for this scholarship will exhibit a commitment to social justice and human rights work and have the passion and commitment to pursue this work as ACSJL Scholars throughout their time at Kalamazoo College.
Very interesting post everyone. @momofthreeboys , wow, amazing scholarship at Kalamazoo. But don’t forget Kenyon, even if it’s not a hotbed of social justice activity. People on the coasts know it for sure.
People can change so much from their youth to their fully-fledged adult years. I am a raving looney liberal now, but am the black sheep of the family politically. Where I went to college isn’t what affected me. My world view changed when I did study-abroad. The OP’s D should go to whatever college she feels comfortable at, because at the end of the day she needs to live there for a long time and like the people she spends time with. Campus protests, etc… will constitute a small amount of time at college in comparison to classes, studying, eating, etc… She doesn’t necessarily need to find the MOST socially active campus out there, but a few kindred spirits would be nice.
Not sure about your financial need, but she would be very competitive for merit aid at Earlham College. They have a Peace & Global Studies major and a new president who is/was a Peace Corps administrator. They have a very politically engaged (and international) student body. The town isn’t quite midsized, but you might check it out–at least as a safety.
I don’t know about now, but back when I was an undergrad, Kenyon would have been considered a “SJW unfriendly” campus due to a much more conservative preppy campus culture back then.
Back when I was an undergrad/HS(1990’s) everyone I knew who applied to schools like what OP’s D reportedly desires would have avoided Kenyon.
The younger former hardcore campus conservative/Ayn-Randist HS classmate who maintained his conservatism through law school radically changed once he spent a few years working on the corporate employer side of Employment law and saw the seedy side of how many of his clients operated.
The level of umbrage was such he switched to working on the employee side of employment law and radically switched from being a hardcore activist conservartive to being a hardcore progressive activist.
In short, he’s one example of someone who didn’t change because of the “liberal campuses” he attended(SUNY/NYU undergrad, Catholic U for JD).
Honestly, almost any college outside the South in a mid-size or large city will have a largely liberal student body. You would have to work hard to find a secular school outside the South with a largely conservative student body.
Washington and Lee can also go on a relatively conservative list - though the student body is more conservative than the profs. I actually think there are relatively few selective colleges where you can’t find a pretty large contingent of SJW types.
Not necessarily as there are plenty of conservative Buddhists in the US and around the world…just look at Thailand’s current govt as a case in point.
Burma/Myanmar was until recently another example. And even then…some still question whether they’ve really moved beyond the decades-long dominance of the military in that society.
Also, many Imperial Japanese military officers had no conflicts between their anti-social justicy views* and being observant Buddhists on some level. General Iwane Matsui who presided over the Rape of Nanking in 1937 was a Buddhist. .
The Imperial Japanese militarist government happily used the widely abused "Peace Preservation Law" to arrest, imprison, torture, and murder anyone whom they viewed as ideologically antithetical to their state....including anyone even being suspected of being "social-justicy".
There are also a number of liberal colleges in the south, should she reconsider her geographical range. I hear good things about New College in FL, for example.
