No one ever asks us what we learned in school anymore. Our parents don’t greet us when we get home from several rounds of lectures and discussion sections to find out “what we did in school today” like they used to when we still had recess. The careless response of “nothing” no longer suffices, since whatever it is we learned now has to be printed on 12 pages, with 1-inch margins, footnoted, and handed in by tomorrow morning. Yet I think our parents were on to something with their routine inquiry, which we have largely ignored as we moved on to higher institutions of learning. What did we do at Cal? What is it that we really learned?
For the class of 2007, and every graduating class thereafter, there is an expectation that they have genuinely achieved a higher education. For many, however, an education simply means parroting every fact and figure that was professed to them by the talking head behind the lectern. At our illustrious university, the facts and figures often amount to some anti-Republican, anti-America dissertation. Sadly, to many of our classmates, this is exactly what an education should be like.
If you came here and your firmest beliefs were confirmed — that our president is a fascist and America is a racist country — have you truly achieved a higher education? If you came here and your firmest beliefs were challenged, it would appear to me that you are far more deserving of your diploma than that socialist classmate who was too afraid to take any class outside the Department of Ethnic Studies.
As freshmen, our R.A.s, advisers, and other proclaimed mentors constantly told us that the college experience would slowly draw us out of our so-called “bubbles.” They were referring to that zone of comfort that was tethered to our hometowns and the values of our parents. For conservatives at Berkeley, everything that was said about the personal bubble was true. Yet for liberals who chose this university so that they could be coddled instead of challenged, college merely drew them out of one bubble and placed them into a more solid, impenetrable one.
I have always viewed the Patriot as a necessary supplement to a Berkeley degree. Those who have voluntarily picked it up on Sproul Plaza, or read it online despite their leftward leanings, have done justice to the true meaning of a higher education. The Patriot is the sharp pin continually pushing against the liberal bubble, and those students who have allowed their comfort zones to be porous and permeable are more deserving of the “rights and privileges thereto pertaining.”
UC Berkeley will expectedly push back, from the moment you arrive to the very moment you leave. This year, our university has ensured that the last memory of Cal for the class of 2007 will be a far-left diatribe from an America-hating, Hugo Chavez–loving communist. If that isn’t bad enough, did I mention he is a Hollywood actor? On Pages 20 and 21, Alex Marlow and Tommy Owens have more on Danny Glover, this year’s commencement speaker.
Meanwhile, other elements of the Bay Area’s left are offering their own versions of education. The Berkeley Unified School District thinks a true education comes from having a rainbow assortment of classmates, even if it may be against the law. On Page 8, Michael Klein reports on the BUSD’s questionable efforts to achieve perfect “diversity.” Students can now look forward to learning the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, and race.
Then there is the incorrigible group of bicyclists known as Critical Mass, who will educate you — by force if necessary — about the various political causes for which they cycle. On Page 26, Alisa Farenzena fills us in on some of the unwitting students that Critical Mass has violently educated, one of them being an 11-year-old girl.
As you may heave learned from your experience at Cal, there is a whole other world outside your own — one that is strange, often irrational, but oddly enlightening. It is enlightening in the sense that we have a better understanding of what things would be like if we didn’t try to confront what was beyond our bubbles. The left has taught us that racial profiling is bad, unless it is used in college admissions; that war is wrong, but acts of terror are justifiable; that the jihadist threat is exaggerated, while global warming is the most important issue of our time; and that no one can limit your free speech, as long as you speak in politically correct terms.
By being exposed to this different world, conservative students at Berkeley have truly learned more than the average Cal Bear. As for our liberal classmates, they still have much to learn, but the Patriot will always be glad to provide them with another lesson.
Your compatriot,
Andrew Quinio
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