posted by SportsAndLady
This, too.
My parents raised me to be whoever I want to be (even though they’re pretty damn conservative). Went to college (OU), super liberal professors, and not liberal at all. Weird!
As someone who also went to OU, I think the "going to college makes you catch teh lib'rulism" deal might be one of the more stupid anti-education concepts out there.
First, if a college has a super-liberal reputation, it usually isn't some huge secret, so anyone who is worried their uber-conservative gene pool might get corrupted can, I don't know, not go to that particular place. Second, if you're finding yourself up in arms over all the liberalism and you didn't blunder into a super-liberal campus, odds are you're the sort of over-the-top asshole conservative who gets upset and bitchy whenever other viewpoints are given respect, so you're in full-on confrontation mode whenever someone has an opinion you disagree with. Third, if you're upset because your kid went to college and came back with different viewpoints, that seems like a "you" problem and not one with them.
The purpose of things like "going to college" and "getting a job" and "growing up" are to determine your path in the world. If that leads to you changing your views on certain things, cool. If later on in life, you come back to the conclusion that those old views that got changed may have been right after all, cool. That's what life is about. But there's just something pathetic about a "I don't want them to go to one of those colleges because they'll wind up getting 'corrupted' by opinions that aren't mine!!!!" viewpoint.