the thing about the liberal arts is like, my experience attending a liberal arts college in a somewhat remote college town gave me a pretty fantastic education and much of the ways I write and critically analyze things that people praise me for came from receiving an interdisciplinary education from a bunch of weird professors on a farm who get excited about applying feminist theory to neuroscience papers or creating really surreal interactive theater in a service tunnel that's a commentary on the surveillance state. Also it was really pretty and I got to have a lot of unique and positive experiences that would probably otherwise be impossible to encounter otherwise.
But also there is a particular brand of extremely toxic "the personal is political" insane identity discourse and harsh judgement of peers that manifests on an isolated liberal arts campus that social media discourse has only recently begun to try and approximate. People in Philly stare at me like I'm from an alien planet when I talk about how during my senior year of college people said I was defending and upholding patriarchy by dating a manl; or how people were "held accountable" for associating with someone who during a class discussion "reified the legitimacy of borders, geopolitical and psychoanalytical" or something extremely abstract like that. I remember being told to "decolonize my gender" by one of the first people I told about my Gender Questioning Trans Feelings.
And yet in some ways it was like a four-year inoculation against the insanity that would become social media discourse. You can't make me see "theyfab discourse" as materially meaningfull. I already lived through "are street lamps inherently SWERFy" and "is it ableist to say that unhoused people would prefer to have housing."
