I remember first learning I wasn’t white my second year of college.
Well, not really white. By that I mean that I encountered other white people—men from small towns south of northern Virginia—who considered my heritage (Irish and Italian immigrants) and my faith (Catholic) made me less than. To them, the pope and Vatican II were suspect. Their Jesus wasn’t one I recognized or understood.
It was my first confrontation with cultural dissonance. Until then, I hadn’t thought much about my own perspective, other than knowing it wasn’t superior. I grew up with a version of patriotism—espoused even by conservative sources—that held E pluribus unum sacrosanct: many cultures contributing to a single, imperfect but improvable democracy.
The promise, also called the American Dream was simple but powerful: in the United States, the children of immigrants and outsiders could rise through hard work, education, and agreement—whatever god one believed in or if one didn’t believe at all—we all endeavored to create something bigger and better than the sum of its many parts. College dealt with facts and formulas, but more often it was a proving ground, a place where curiosity would push you beyond the safe and narrow boundaries of tribe and ideology.
As a tumultuous century came to an end, universities had widened the gates, admitting more women and minorities. We never called this progressive; enough of us concurred we were simply making progress. It was not considered radical to imagine how this spirit of inclusivity made America bigger and better, increasingly aligned with the ideals the founding fathers wrote so eloquently about. Those who resisted this momentum invariably looked backward, called themselves reactionaries. This always seemed silly to Gen X kids brought up enjoying movies where Nazis were the bad guys.
How quaint. How naïve.
Today, both MAGA populists and the most recalcitrantly “woke” progressives miss something crucial: America has always been both better and worse than we imagine. This tension is precisely what gives our melting pot its flavor, what allows democracy to endure. A certain party is fond of repeating the mantra that freedom isn’t free. True. Progress and collective power require holding contradictory truths: many who came before us worked harder under less savory circumstances, and their stories oblige us to keep striving, holding doors open instead of slamming them shut.
This is what I learned in college. You were challenged—inside and outside the classroom—and left changed; not just smarter, but with more empathy, better equipped to wrestle with competing narratives. Education has never been about indoctrination. It’s about engagement.
This is why I’m discouraged by so much of what I’m seeing play out at colleges across America. Instead of promoting deliberation and compromise, too many people see disagreement as threatening, ideas themselves acts of hostility. An era of people being “canceled” for speaking their mind has been met with a pitiful resurgence of censorship, book bans, and outright activism in place of professional administration.
This fear—instigated by cynics to gain or maintain power—corrodes not only academia, but our institutions, and democracy itself.
The irony is that this country’s successes—the civil rights movement, immigration reform, scientific breakthroughs—came directly because of respectful debate, because assumptions were tested, because we let young people ask difficult questions. In ways that made social and economic sense, outdated narratives were confronted and then replaced by better ones. Collectively, we prospered (in every sense) from this.
In a perverse if predictable development, we now see an administration seeking to hijack narrative altogether. To those who support the heavy-handed acts of intimidation and erasure in our colleges and museums, being a “real American” means never questioning a very simple, very white story, never evaluating the continuum of world history, and whether we’re moving forward or irretrievably backward. Some, despite ample evidence that can’t be denied, scoff or deny that people now invoke Hitler without shame—and worse. Guardrails only hold if successive generations understand and appreciate why they were built.
Which is why I come back to that first lesson from my freshman year: that encountering difference, even discomfort, and navigating it was the entire point. And it’s this spirit of exploration and expansion that defined how well educated one was. The solution is not to double down on fear or retreat into carefully curated echo chambers. We need to do what America has always done: offer better narratives, stories that remind us who we’ve been, who we became, and what we still strive to be.
Because America, like each of us, is a work in progress.
And that’s what academia is for—not to indoctrinate, but to equip us for all the inevitable, necessary work of engagement.
