Stop Using Hagiographic Language Towards People Who Hate You
I don’t mean to pick on a poor college student, especially one who is at least nominally on my side….but articles like this really annoy me.
A Conservative Student’s Experience at UNC-Chapel Hill
What particularly annoys me is the very first line:
“I am so grateful for and blessed by my time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.”
Why does she feel the need to speak this way? About an institution who officially, and nearly all of whose members unofficially, hate and despise her, comparing her to the worst villains in human history, solely because of her (relatively popular among America at large) beliefs. "Yeah sure, I spent four years wandering around a campus where I knew that everyone around me hated my guts and would commit physical violence against me if they had the chance, but hey, the dorms were nice... and the degree helps me get a good job, so that's great!"
This sort of worship and hagiography of the ivory tower of universities seems to be the default state, such that you're just expected to speak this way of “your” college. And maybe if “your” college is full of like-minded people who welcome you and assist in your personal and professional development, while respecting your beliefs and valuing you as a person, that could be justified.
But man, I dunno. If you're obviously an enemy of theirs, why not just treat this as a business transaction? You would never say that you were "grateful and blessed" for being able to purchase a can of beans at Wal-Mart. "The quality of the education I received seems comparable to that offered by the numerous competing institutions, and it did accomplish my goal of obtaining employment in X industry" would be a much more reasonable interpretation here.
Progressives probably shouldn't be using religious language to describe universities either, but hell man, conservatives should really know better. "Grateful and blessed to have gone there" is the heading of a five star review. Nobody changes when you give them five star reviews.
So long as her ultimate takeaway is that she was still "blessed" to go there, they have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to do anything differently. The left organizes boycotts over offenses that are orders of magnitude less serious than this. Conservatives still can't stop blindly worshipping the institutions who hate them. Sad! Many such cases!