One day stands out in my many memories of feeling like an outcast at UC Berkeley. I was a sophomore, and I was in a discussion section for a sociology course. The GSI asked my peers and me to stand on one side of the room if we agreed with a statement and the other side if we disagreed (an exercise that I have grown to dislike, as I always end up alone). His first assertion was: corporations are bad for society. I remember how my peers quickly scurried to one corner of the room, demonstrating they agreed, and I slowly stepped to the opposite side, showing my disagreement. My GSI asked why I stood there alone, the one person in the class who did not think corporations are in fact bad for society. I gave him my answer. I said that while I do recognize how corporations inflict a variety of negative social and environmental externalities for which they should be held accountable, the benefits they have created far outweigh those costs, and so they are actually more good than bad for society. He asked me no further questions. He simply smirked with scorn, looked at my wide-eyed, curious peers, and before I could open my mouth again to explain what those benefits included, he said we should move on to the next statement. In that moment, I knew just how silenced conservatives can be by the educators on this campus. Our views are simply not heard, nor are they welcome. We get outcasted.

But I haven’t felt like an outcast among my peers. I have engaged in a variety of fruitful discussions and lively debates with students who were intrigued by my conservative opinions, wanting to understand where they came from. Rarely, if ever, do conservative students such as myself get ignored by other students. We are much too intellectually curious to be so dismissive. But often, our voice becomes silenced by our teachers. This goes against everything our campus has been founded upon; UC Berkeley was once a campus where free speech was championed. Nowadays, it can unfortunately be crushed.

As a political science major, I constantly hear my professors and GSIs condemning conservatism and celebrating liberalism. Over the course of my political science career, I have frequently listened to my instructors criticize Republicans in Congress, blaming them for gridlock and failing to acknowledge that Democrats contribute to such divisiveness. They continue to blame President George W. Bush for our nation’s economic problems eight years after he left office. Lately, my GSIs have especially enjoyed lambasting the GOP’s candidates, but they do not denounce the Democratic frontrunner for currently being investigated by the FBI after lying to the American people about her actions as Secretary of State. Rarely is such one-sided rhetoric challenged.

My peers, more often than not, want to engage with individuals like me to discuss the conservative side to such issues and perhaps gain new insights, but I have found that they are afraid of doing so publicly. There have been many times when I had a great discussion about politics with people sitting next to me before class began, but there have been few when they engaged with the rest of the class in a discussion about conservative ideas. This has oftentimes frustrated me, but I now realize that their quietude on the subject is not entirely their fault. I do not blame them for failing to consider conservatism’s efficacy; they have never truly learned the its foundation.

Though UC Berkeley students largely identify themselves as liberal, the education they are receiving is not truly liberal. Liberal arts are intended to inspire critical thought. If UC Berkeley were liberal, our instructors would teach us how to think critically about important issues facing our nation and world. They would provide us the information necessary to freely form our own opinions, without telling us what we are supposed to conclude. But this does not always occur in our classrooms. Instead, professors and GSIs all too often tell us what they think — that Republicans and their policies are erroneous, or something to that effect — and leave it at that. In doing so, they prevent us from considering a perspective different from the leftist principles that have come to dominate the discourse on this campus.

I cannot speak to the experiences of students in other majors, but as far as the social sciences go, I believe my peers and I are not learning how to critically think about important issues anymore. Learning from instructors who denounce conservative ideas and glorify liberalism, I wonder if they fear considering issues from the alternative perspective. Maybe UC Berkeley students want to understand conservatism, but they do not ask questions about it because they are afraid of feeling outcasted like I did last year. I can only hope this to be true. More importantly, I hope that our campus, and other universities across the country, will soon realize the true meaning of a liberal education, and they will not stop casting out students for their political beliefs. Once students graduate and are cast outside of the liberal university system, they will find that those beliefs resonate with a lot more people than they have been taught to think. Maybe then they’ll start asking questions about them.

Madeline Dyer writes the Thursday blog on providing an alternative to UC Berkeley liberalism. Contact her at [email protected].