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 collegeâs 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 fatherâs face.
His wife asked him if he was all right.
âIâm just so damn proud of her,â he said and rubbed his hand over his eyes.
This is the part of the college experience that President Donald Trump and his minions donât seem to ever grasp.
Maybe thatâs because they donât 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 donât stand up to any sort of scrutiny.
Trump, for example, has blasted the humanities departments at Americaâs elite universities for being centers of âwokeism,â whatever that is. His solution is to cut funding not to the humanities, but to the sciencesâas 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 DePauwâthree of the Hoosier stateâs finest schoolsâof 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 doesnât admit women. Nor does his eye ever focus on any other independent colleges or universities that deny admission on grounds of religious faith.
âWokeismâ may lack a concrete definition, but hypocrisy clearly has a face.
That of Todd Rokita.
What Trump and Rokita donât 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 milestoneâa 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 fatherâmy grandfatherâwas a day laborer.
Dadâs 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 Momâs side of the family, my grandfather was the first to get a college degree. He pursued his education with a pioneerâs 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 didnât 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.
Thatâs the part the Trumps and Rokitas donât get.