U. of U. students recently voted themselves the second least politically active student body out of 390 four-year colleges surveyed. They answered the question, “My level of political awareness is very high, high, average, low or very low.”
It certainly is good news that BYU has been able to keep keggers out of the lives of students (“BYU again No. 1 in Princeton Review’s ‘Cancel the Keg’ rankings,” Deseret News). But that news is more than offset by the horrific admission by U. students that they don’t know, and worse, don’t care about what is going on in the world around them.
Has the radical libertarian idea of “Take care of No. 1 and forget everybody else” caught on so fully on campus that the whole nation-founding idea of community has disappeared?
Just why is it that students at Utah’s premier public university admit being “very low” in political knowledge and engagement? What is happening on the U. campus? Is it social lethargy and fear? Uninformed and under-informed faculty? Fanatic and exclusive devotion to football and gymnastics? A lack of knowledge of the requirements of democracy?
Or is the problem attributable to larger cultural vectors? For example, is it a sign that the privatized kingdom of heaven has successfully muscled out the civic kingdom of the Constitution?
To those who say college should not be about political science or any kind of activism, I would say talk to your neighbors who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam or to college students across the country today who are demonstrating against the slaughter of innocents in Gaza.
A university education is supposed to increase communitarian consciousness, not suffocate it.
I’m betting that the university, the Utah Board of Education, the Legislature, Salt Lake City, our political parties, and our culture influencers will not give this shocking finding a second thought and will do nothing. After all, that’s what everybody has been doing to get us to this point.
Kimball Shinkoskey, Woods Cross