Sensationalized Ed. 

            I grew up in a household that watched a lot of Fox News. Our home was usually filled with the sounds of heavy breathing and shouting coming from the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. As a child I hated this. Not because I was a passionate young democrat or anything like that. I hadn’t yet developed even the slightest semblance of a political thought. Honestly, I just wanted to watch Nickelodeon. But at some point, during my teenage years, I started feeling obligated to pay attention to the world around me, so I started watching the news. Obviously, I began watching what was easily accessible and already in front of me. The stories that I found the most relevance and relatability were the ones that were covering the liberal brain washing pandemic that was occurring in higher education. According to Fox News, this form of influence was plaguing every major college in the United States. This concerned me greatly because I really wanted to go to college, but I was scared to death of becoming a communist. (That’s the kind of reality that partisan based news sources create for impressionable young minds, just in case you were wondering). But little did I know, it would be several years before I would have to worry about my ideologies being challenged inside the walls of a university. Because the first time I saw how much a single semester of college would cost, I nearly shit my pants. So, I did what a great deal of young Americans do when they see the price tag associated with higher education. I went and joined the Army. And after a few years of falling out of airplanes for Uncle Sam, I decided to hang up my uniform, and finally embark on the journey of a lifetime. Becoming a twenty-six-year-old college freshman.  

    

Somewhere between my teenage years and where I am now, my political views had shifted from a hard-nosed right-winger into more of a, “fuck-em-all” kind of standpoint. As a result, I was growing increasingly more apprehensive as the first day of school was slowly creeping in. Not only was I in full Billy Madison mode, being afraid of the age gap that was going to exist between my classmates and me. I was also convinced that I would be out of touch with my classmates. I felt as though my ideals were not going to coincide with what I  had thought the atmosphere of higher learning was. However, my anxieties were stemming from completely external sources. I had subjected myself to reading into the medias over-blown stories about the current state of the college experience. I was creating my own biases about something I had yet to experience in even the slightest sense.   

On one hand, I saw the right-wing news sources still just beating the hell out of a very dead horse. I was reading the same stories that I had read in high school. Stories covering the rampant persecution of defenseless conservative students at the hands of their maniacal liberal professors. The same professors that seem to be hell bent on furthering the “snowflake” agenda because of a deep-rooted hatred for the United States. And even before I found that pretense to be almost entirely false, that’s not what I was really afraid of. What really frightened me was the way the left was reporting on these institutions. From what I was reading about various schools, I just assumed I was going to be labeled as a, “white-privileged, alt-righter, guilty of using hate speech”. See, I’m a white male that unironically wears The North Face, thinks Bernie Sanders is a socialist tool bag, and finds it just downright weird to concern yourself with anyone else’s gender or sexuality. So, I was certain that I was going to be burned at the stake like a colonial-era witch because of my classmate’s “hypersensitivities”. The left leaning sources of the media are just as guilty as the right for their misrepresentations of the exclusivity and irrational progressivism occurring at most schools. Luckily, all of my fears and apprehensions fell by the wayside as I was slowly disarmed by my own college experience.   

What has been incorrectly presented as an intellectual battlefield between conservatives and liberals, is really nothing of the sort. College is not some dystopian wasteland full of students and their professors plotting against the conservative establishment from the depths of their, “safe-spaces.” It’s also not a place where the overtly conservative students bully their liberal counterparts into the previously mentioned, “safe spaces”. It’s just a place that the majority of students attend in an effort to better themselves. Admittedly, the stereotypes of the pretentious ideologues certainly do exist, but they are not the majority. Not every university is being ran like UCLA or CU Boulder. Not by a fucking longshot.   

The more time I spend in college, the more evident it becomes that even something as important as higher education is susceptible to the sensational grasps of the mainstream media. But rest assured, as I can report back to you from the frontlines of academia that there is nothing to be afraid of. College is wonderful if you allow yourself to enter it with an open mind and utilize it for what it is, a place to grow, both analytically and emotionally. And never forget, the same reporters and news sources that created a false sense of hysteria around higher education, are the same groups of people that have made the entire world deathly afraid of a virus that carries a two-percent fatality rate. Challenge everything and discover the truth for yourself.   

Disclaimer:

This article is not here to discredit anyone that has been truly and unfairly persecuted in the name of pursuing an education. This article is to discredit the sensationalism from the media that further drives the wedge of disharmony into our society.