First Dance

"The First Dance," Mark Oppenheimer's NYT Magazine piece on the first dance at a conservative Christian college, is a smart, surprisingly gentle piece that fairly accurately portrays a milieu I have some experience with. Ostensibly, the piece is about the relaxation of dancing restrictions at a small, conservative Christian college, but what it quickly turns into is a picture of the way those schools are changing, the surprising (to the author, and probably many NYT readers) decency of its students, and the way that these school manage to carve out a unique, separate college experience from the vast majority of what's offered in modern higher education.

I went to a similar school for part of my college career (though I finished at a state university), and the article captures the experience surprisingly well. Oppenheimer notes the preponderance of, well, less than mainstream beliefs at the college, "In my week at J.B.U., I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time." And yet he also thinks that the students he met there were, "for the most part, the kind of thoughtful undergraduates whom top secular colleges would be proud to have." This despite an overwhelmingly conservative political outlook: pro-Bush, pro-Iraq war, mostly anti-abortion (I suspect the way he got the middling figures he got on abortion was by including those who believed it should be legal in cases like rape, incest, and life of the mother as believing that it should be legal in some circumstances). Oppenheimer makes a little more of their differences than I might have, of course--finding that only a third would oppose homosexuals teaching in schools doesn't seem like strong evidence for openness toward gays--but he seems to get that many of the students are independent minded, not Christian zombies.

The line, though, that most struck me, was this one: "The only thing they all agreed on was that there was something special about their campus culture, even the parts they disagreed with." These schools aren't perfect (far from it), and they are faced with a constant struggle over how and when to modernize, but these schools, in many ways, are some of the few places that preserve the old small college experience that's been eaten away by the excess and debauchery of the modern university--wide-eyed kids away from home in the middle of nowhere without much money, getting into mild amounts of trouble, but surrounded mostly by thoughtful individuals bent on reading, learning, and thinking through the problems of life.