“Help! My college student is being radicalized!”: 3 Tips from a Former College Radical

Perhaps by now your kid has come home from college for the holidays and will go back soon, or is already back, and while in your presence for the first extended period of time in months, you may have noticed that they have some new and uncomfortable ideas. Maybe they’ve been doing anti-war protests, or maybe they joined an organization with the word “socialist” in the name. Maybe they called your brother a racist. This isn’t the kid you dropped off at school only back in August, so what happened? And what do you do about it?

Well, take it from me: I went to college in the fall of 2009, and was on track to join something called the United Council, which brought together reps from student governments across the state. It was a real resume booster, and it have made my mom proud to see what a good student citizen I had become. But when I was doing some work for them one night I came across a chalked outline of a raised fist with the words “Students for a Democratic Society” next to it. I went to the informational meeting they advertised, and I never looked back. I spent the next four years planning protests, hanging out at an occupation on campus, bringing leftist speakers to campus, protesting right wing speakers, and once I was almost stepped on by a police horse at an anti-Nazi rally. I’ve done the college radical thing, and I have wisdom to impart for parents.

Consider If Your Student is Really Radical

A lot of liberals I talk to, old and young, are surprised when I talk about how conservative America really is. There are a lot of reasons for this conservatism, from folk explanations (here in Minnesota, there’s a joke that the reason Scandinavia is so liberal while American Scandinavians are so conservative is because all the conservatives came here), to the reality that we have a two party system that is constantly in the process of trying to undermine the other party, and for whatever reason, that has resulted in a gentle rightward pull.

We should consider the fact that single payer health care is still considered a deeply controversial topic in the U.S., even among democrats. Meanwhile, under Obama, there were record deportations and more countries bombed than there were under Bush. Progressive gains have been hard to come by, but they seem to be undone by the right easily enough.

So the question to ask is, is your student really radical in the grand scheme of things, or are they simply more liberal than you are? If they are passionate about student loan forgiveness or universal healthcare, they are still firmly within the big tent of the democratic party, even if they’re in a different part of the tent than you are. If you are conservative, maybe you think that your student being a liberal is the worst thing you can think of, but you know down in your heart that they just have a different view than you. The values that you’ve taught them: respect, compassion, and hard work, are still there. Liberals and democrats are often still proud Americans, they just have a different idea of what route to take to make the country they love great.

Not to mention that exposure to and experimentation with new ideas does not make your student the next Che Guevera, which brings us to our next point.

Let Your Student Explore

Contrary to a lot of the hand-wringing that is going on about freedom of speech, safe spaces, and trigger warnings, college students are not hostile to new ideas: they are being inundated with them constantly. College students are being asked to read texts and authors that provide a different perspective than they are used to, they are meeting people from around the country and world with different experiences than them, and they are still trying to figure themselves out. In college classrooms, I read Marx, Mill, Lenin, Keynes, Burke, and a variety of political thinkers from across the ages. I took a course on the Great Depression in my first semester and was in a discussion group led by an anti-authoritarian socialist, and contained liberals, conservatives, social democrats, and one Anarcho-Capitalist (if you don’t know what this is, imagine if you left a libertarian in the back of the fridge for too long). I was forced to stake a claim on what I believed about economics, history, and society, and to defend that claim when it was challenged by those who disagreed with me. We all had to adjust our beliefs when we were proven wrong (well, except for the AnCap). But there’s a big difference in disagreeing whether or not it’s worthwhile for McDonald’s to include less cheese on a burger to increase their wages (an actual debate had in that class), and arguing whether or not Black people are human, which is often the argument we are being asked to consider.

Your student is not just gaining new ideas, but learning to defend them, and in defending them, learning whether or not they really, truly agree with those ideas. This process takes years. I’m still doing it. And that means sometimes you stake your claim on a bad idea, the ideological equivalent of me trying to make fedoras work in my freshman year. You reflect, adjust, and move on. But that also means you learn to challenge certain ideas, and some people don’t like to be challenged. Oftentimes when a relative has accused me of being close-minded, what they mean is that I didn’t sit and listen to them spout a bunch of racist, sexist, or transphobic slurs and then just accept it. I pushed back, I staked a claim and said that they were wrong. I used skills and knowledge I had gained from being in a setting where I was exposed to new ideas on a daily basis. Once a student gets to college, parents are no longer the primary ideological source for them, if they even were before that. I began to distance myself from my mother’s beliefs in high school, but college only accelerated that process.

College students are discovering new music, new people, and new ideas. They aren’t lazy, they’re wiped from constant new exposure. This idea that college students isolate themselves in a bubble and laze around all day is unfair. The amount of mental and emotional labor they do is astounding, and that’s why people tend to grow and change so much in their first year. If your student claims to be a socialist and you are trying to explain that socialism will never work and is objectively bad, trust that their exploration will lead them to the same conclusion. If any intelligent person will eventually agree that socialism is bad, and your student is an intelligent person, let them arrive at the same understanding you did. But also, think about our next point.

Consider That Your Student Might Be Right About Some Things

This is the hardest one, I’m sure. We all have beliefs that we hold dear. We all have values that are important to us and inform how we view our place in the world. It is natural to raise a child with those same beliefs and values, whether you want to or not. Your worldview will obviously impact how you raise a child. So if you raised your kid to be a decent Democrat or a proud Republican, and they come back to you as an Anarchist, you might be jarred, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that they’re immediately wrong because they have different ideas than you do.

Baby Boomers are routinely shocked when they find out how much I owe in student loans. I didn’t work a full time job while I was in school, but I did work a lot of that time, and I still had to take out massive loans. Those who were more financially diligent than I was aren’t much better off. Many people I met in seminary were encouraged to go to Lutheran liberal arts colleges which have given them even greater amounts of debt than I racked up at a state school. Most of my laons were taken out in the two and a half years I attended seminary.

Most young people I know consider a medical emergency to be a one way trip to bankruptcy, and only a few of the people we know approaching their thirties are anywhere near home ownership. We have a lot of highly educated folks who are working at coffee shops because they can’t find jobs in their fields, and believe it or not, that doesn't only extend to liberal arts majors. Our lives were shaped by the Cold War, like our parent’s were. Our lives have been shaped by economic catastrophe, an atrophying job market, and seemingly endless war in the middle east. Things are a lot bleaker for millennials than many older folks want to admit, but things are still rough. So to many of us, a more “radical” solution seems like the answer. We lack patience with the system because it feels like we’re being crushed under the weight of that system while it does nothing to help us. The election of Trump has only thrown those feelings into overdrive.

I said in the title of this essay that I was a former college radical. What I mean is that I was formerly in college. I am still considered a radical in my beliefs. But I was subjected to a lot of people saying I would grow out of it, or that the more I learned, the more I would realize that the way things have been done is the way they ought to be done. But I have not become a democrat. I have continued to hone my beliefs. I have read the classics of leftist thought: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kropotkin. I have read more recent additions to the canon, Klein, Roy, Sankara, and onward. I have a subscription to Jacobin that I often fervently disagree with for being not left enough. My leftism has matured, but I have not “grown out of it” because the further I wade into adulthood, the more I feel my analysis has been correct. Imperialist war is bad. Student loans are a racket. Single payer health care is a desperate need. Capitalism is cruel. From where I stand, these things are obvious, just as from where you stand, they may seem absurd. Consider that your student is a different person than you because they have had different experiences and grown in ways you cannot predict. Maybe they will realize that their beliefs are actually quite close to yours in the end. Maybe you can learn something from them if you just keep an open mind. We all grow together when we learn to listen, but your kid has been listening to you their whole life. Before they go to college, they develop ideas that might be new and interesting, take the time to listen, earnestly.

Unless your kid is becoming a fascist or a member of the Alt-Right, in which case, kick them to the curb.