The young students looked dazed, more than a little confused and, yes, tremendously excited.
Twice within the space of a week, I was on a college campus when incoming first-year students began moving into their new homes, the dormitories that will house them until spring begins to shift to summer. The first was in Missouri at Saint Louis University, the second here in Indiana at the school where I teach, Franklin College.
At both campuses, teenagers who were in high school just a few weeks ago and their parents unloaded cars, SUVs and minivans stuffed to capacity with clothes, wall art, computer game consoles and all the other accoutrements of late adolescent life in America and carted it all into the dorms.
The parents took breaks and wandered over to the campus bookstore. They emerged, smiles on their faces, carrying or wearing T-shirts and ballcaps in the college’s colors.
At Saint Louis U, I stopped and waited at a crosswalk for the light to change. A middle-aged couple, their car empty, was saying goodbye to their daughter.
As the young woman walked toward her new life, tears started to stream down the father’s face.
His wife asked him if he was all right.
“I’m just so damn proud of her,” he said and rubbed his hand over his eyes.
This is the part of the college experience that President Donald Trump and his minions don’t seem to ever grasp.
Maybe that’s because they don’t want to grasp it. They nurse imaginary grievances as if those complaints were newborn babies.
That allows them to avoid any sense of self-examination and self-responsibility or to acknowledge that some of their actions don’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny.
Trump, for example, has blasted the humanities departments at America’s elite universities for being centers of “wokeism,” whatever that is. His solution is to cut funding not to the humanities, but to the sciences—as if having the United States fall behind in the race to make new technological breakthroughs will teach those folks in the philosophy department a lesson.
Here in Indiana, State Attorney General Todd Rokita has accused Notre Dame, Butler and DePauw — three of the Hoosier state’s finest schools — of discriminating against straight white guys because those three universities try not to discriminate in favor of straight white guys.
Rokita says with a straight face that he is a culture warrior determined to wipe out discrimination wherever he sees it.
Yet his gaze never seems to fall upon his alma mater, Wabash College, which doesn’t admit women. Nor does his eye ever focus on any other independent colleges or universities that deny admission on grounds of religious faith.
“Wokeism” may lack a concrete definition, but hypocrisy clearly has a face.
That of Todd Rokita.
What Trump and Rokita don’t see is what college means to so many Americans and so many Hoosiers. For those Americans and those Hoosiers, a college education is an aspiration, a threshold, a milestone — a sign that not just an individual child has accomplished something, but that a family has arrived.
A college education alters many destinies.
My father was the first in his line to earn a college degree. Like so many other Americans of the World War II generation, he attended on the GI Bill.
His father — my grandfather — was a day laborer.
Dad’s children became the CEO of a nonprofit foundation, a lawyer, a journalist and, yes, a college professor. His grandchildren include a doctor, a software designer, an engineer, an educational consultant and a marketing professional.
On Mom’s side of the family, my grandfather was the first to get a college degree. He pursued his education with a pioneer’s determination, studying for a semester, then working for a semester to save for his next stint at college.
His daughters became educators, his grandchildren business executives, ministers, medical professionals, lawyers, nonprofit leaders, journalists and, yes, college professors.
I didn’t know that father in St. Louis.
But I know exactly how he felt.
My children are out of college now and making their way in the world, but I remember helping each of them move into their new dorms.
Their new lives.
When I drove away, I shed tears.
I cried because I felt what every parent who has ever dropped a child off at college feels.
Pride.
Intense pride.
That’s the part the Trumps and Rokitas don’t get.