My Introduction to Higher Education

Editor’s note: Alyn Berry, a 2007 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lives in Kernersville, NC.

Like most prospective college students, I expected to “find myself” in college. I didn’t have a clear idea of what that meant at the time, but having been politically active in high school, I wanted college to challenge my principles and make me defend them. I hoped I would take classes with professors who would make me reexamine my perspective on the world.

I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Although UNC is highly respected in this state and others, many native North Carolinians jokingly insist that Chapel Hill is not a part of our state. Some call it the “People’s Republic of Chapel Hill,” poking fun at this college town’s liberal reputation. Despite this, I packed my bags and moved my life just an hour down the road — but a world away.

I was able to accept my liberal roommate from San Francisco, the protests in “the Pit,” and the homeless men on Franklin Street. What bothered me was what was happening in the classroom. My ideas were not being “challenged” as I had imagined; instead, they were being attacked head-on.

My first semester at UNC, I took a history course in which I was asked to write weekly short papers comparing our readings with current events and sometimes offering policy suggestions. Week after week, I was discouraged when I would get back my grades: C, C+, D+, and so they went. I always did my readings and worked hard on my papers, and I couldn’t figure out why I was earning such poor grades. As a mere freshman, I concluded that college must have been more difficult than I’d imagined and that I was simply not working hard enough.

One day after class, a fellow classmate approached me in the elevator; she said, as I recall it, “From our class discussions, I get the feeling that we have some of the same ideas. You know, conservative ideas. How are your grades on these papers? Mine are terrible. Do you think our low grades have something to do with being a conservative?” I hadn’t ever considered that I was being punished for my conservatism because up until that point in my life, everyone had always encouraged me to freely explore ideas and come to my own conclusions.

My classmate had sparked my curiosity, so I went home and looked over my papers. To my amazement, nearly every even remotely conservative statement I had made in my papers was covered in red. My ideas about free markets, deregulation, and individualism had all been crossed out, circled, or struck through. These marks were rarely accompanied by words, but occasionally my graduate student instructor would scribble “that’s not really true” on my paper. It didn’t bother me that my instructor disagreed with me – he’s certainly entitled to his own beliefs – but it did bother me that my grades reflected our ideological disagreements.

I knew better than to go to office hours and accuse my instructor of ideological discrimination. Instead, I experimented. My papers in the next few weeks were bad, but the grades were good. Instead of offering serious solutions to problems like poverty, education, and the environment, I personally attacked the President and bashed the “greedy conservatives” in Congress. My shift from analytical (yet conservative) papers to rash and political ones earned me B’s and even a couple of A’s, instead of the C’s I had been getting. This change was both shocking and disheartening. I realized that college, which is often thought to be a place of free inquiry, was going to be much more restrictive than I had thought.

That history course was the most extreme example of classroom bias that I experienced in my three years at Carolina (I graduated a year early), but there were countless essays, papers, and exams where my conservative ideas were under severe scrutiny. A noticeably higher standard was applied to conservative ideas than to liberal ones. In academia, conservative ideas are presumed to be untrue until you prove them, while liberal ideas are presumed to be true until disproven. In most cases, the grade differences would be small, maybe a B+ instead of an A-. You can’t reasonably argue with a professor for such a small difference in grades, and most students don’t. This difference may seem insignificant, but these slightly lower grades accumulate over the course of a semester, or even a college career.

It is still entirely possible for a student with conservative views to do well at UNC, but it is definitely more difficult to have your ideas graded on their merits, not on the opinion of the professor. While I truly believe most professors have no agenda, their personal beliefs do affect the difference between that B+ and an A-. By no means do I blame every bad grade I got at UNC on liberal professors. Admittedly, most of them were my fault – but some of them were not.

This article was published in the Chapel Hill Herald on August 21, 2007