It's definitely not that Madison is some melting pot of fabulous diversity, unless it's changed a LOT since 1991.
To throw out a theory that occurred to me as I was reading this: I think in some cases college actually increases people's intellectual defensiveness. Being wrong is "punished" in college (with bad grades) so being told "you're wrong" feels like a big deal. Meanwhile, at college you learn all sorts of shiny tricks to prove how not-wrong you are, which you can whip out in an attempt to intimidate people into admitting that actually you're right, and if you've do this a few times and it works (for values of "works" that may in fact include the other person throwing up their hands and walking away from you), that's positive reinforcement and so you keep doing it.
In theory, college should teach you to respond to intellectual discomfort by examining your assumptions, but in practice, that probably doesn't happen all that often.
FWIW, college did give me the opportunity to interact with people who were not just like me, take classes about people who were not just like me, etc. My most educational experiences in terms of diversity (again, FWIW; I'm not going to hold myself up as a paragon of righteous virtue here) have involved living abroad -- when I was 13 and spent a year living in London with my family, and when I was 21 and spent a semester in Nepal. Those were some of the most intensely educational experiences of my life, period. My mom has taken this to heart and as a professor she leads a trip abroad pretty much every year. And the stories she tells about just how narrow a comfort zone some kids construct are ... really mind-boggling (like, she had a kid complain about the weird exotic foreign food he was being forced to eat when the group had dinner at a restaurant that specialized in pot pie. POT PIE. EXOTIC AND FOREIGN. WTF??!??)
Sorry for the rambly post; I need to go finish making a birthday cake but I will ponder this some more.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-09-18 07:13 pm (UTC)To throw out a theory that occurred to me as I was reading this: I think in some cases college actually increases people's intellectual defensiveness. Being wrong is "punished" in college (with bad grades) so being told "you're wrong" feels like a big deal. Meanwhile, at college you learn all sorts of shiny tricks to prove how not-wrong you are, which you can whip out in an attempt to intimidate people into admitting that actually you're right, and if you've do this a few times and it works (for values of "works" that may in fact include the other person throwing up their hands and walking away from you), that's positive reinforcement and so you keep doing it.
In theory, college should teach you to respond to intellectual discomfort by examining your assumptions, but in practice, that probably doesn't happen all that often.
FWIW, college did give me the opportunity to interact with people who were not just like me, take classes about people who were not just like me, etc. My most educational experiences in terms of diversity (again, FWIW; I'm not going to hold myself up as a paragon of righteous virtue here) have involved living abroad -- when I was 13 and spent a year living in London with my family, and when I was 21 and spent a semester in Nepal. Those were some of the most intensely educational experiences of my life, period. My mom has taken this to heart and as a professor she leads a trip abroad pretty much every year. And the stories she tells about just how narrow a comfort zone some kids construct are ... really mind-boggling (like, she had a kid complain about the weird exotic foreign food he was being forced to eat when the group had dinner at a restaurant that specialized in pot pie. POT PIE. EXOTIC AND FOREIGN. WTF??!??)
Sorry for the rambly post; I need to go finish making a birthday cake but I will ponder this some more.