This week, students will return to campuses across the country. And the rest of the nation will be watching. With a presidential election looming and a destructive war waged by one of the country’s closest foreign allies ongoing, much attention will be paid this fall to college campuses, to protest encampments and campus speakers, to the excesses and enthusiasms of college sophomores. Which raises the question of why? Why the obsession with what goes on at a handful of college campuses, often framed in terms of “campus culture wars”?
The terms of our fixation are peculiar. Is there really one culture that characterizes several thousand campuses—community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research universities, for-profit universities, and so on—or even just a significant swath of them? The historian Samuel Catlin put it even more bluntly in an essay earlier this year: “the campus” he claimed, “does not exist.”
Now less than ever. The campus of our news cycles is overwhelmingly imagined as an elite institution—even though old stereotypes of leafy quads and ivy-covered buildings increasingly apply to only a subset of these institutions, one that is very small, getting smaller. Yet the attention paid to these schools, and the certainty about what goes on there, has only increased. Whatever it is, this imagined “college”—its students as much as its administrators—has run amok. We’re told that it used to be something—take your pick: a laboratory for ideas, a place of genuine debate—and it is now no longer that.
Perhaps then the problem isn’t that America’s colleges and the country’s population have grown apart. Perhaps it’s the opposite: Americans think they understand college too well. Many journalists, pundits and politicians seem fascinated with a fictionalized version of “the campus,” one that resembles a college they themselves attended. This narrowly imagined “campus” provides fodder for a reactionary politics. It also diminishes our broader political debates and rehearses them largely as recycled campus panics.