Don’t dwell on grievances, but remember your rights, conservative Princeton legal scholar and Professor Robert George advised religious and right-of-center students returning to colleges and universities.
Such students’ beliefs “will place them in the minority, and perhaps make them feel like ‘outsiders,'” George (pictured) wrote last week on Mirror of Justice, a Catholic legal theory blog affiliated with Notre Dame Law School.
“You will encounter double standards” and “experience prejudice,” George said, speaking to students directly.
His advice includes speaking up, finding faculty friendly to intellectual diversity and avoiding a victimization mindset:
Do not, however, confuse being challenged or criticized with being discriminated against or victimized. Insist, as we, your friends on the faculty, will insist, on your right to free speech, but remember that other people have that right too. They can use it to challenge and criticize your beliefs–even your deepest, most cherished, identify-forming beliefs. They do you no harm in doing that, just as you do them no harm in challenging their progressive or secularist beliefs.
In fact, we do each other a service in challenging each other’s convictions.
Remember, as a college or university student you are one of the luckiest–most privileged–people on planet earth. Do not think of yourself as a victim. Do not build an identity for yourself around grievances, despite the double standards, and even if you experience some injustices. You can and should work to set things right without descending into grievance identitarianism.
George also advised students to resist “groupthink” and professors attempting indoctrination.
“Do business in the proper currency of intellectual discourse–a currency consisting of reasons, evidence, and arguments,” he wrote.
Even more, “thinking is not something that can be outsourced,” George stated. “You have to do it for yourself.”
IMAGE: Princeton University
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