Enlightenment, or 'Liberation'

By Dean Bakopoulos

Four years ago, after my father and I lugged the last crate of books up to the third floor of Alice Lloyd, he handed me a card.

"It's a welcome to Ann Arbor present," he said. I took the blue envelope and opened it. Inside was a certificate proclaiming that I had been given a gift subscription to the National Review.

Oh, my poor father, how astray from the trail I've wandered.

Obviously, Dad is a conservative. Now, he's not one of those Pat Buchanan loving, Rush Limbaugh listening dittoheads; but nonetheless, he's conservative.

And me, well; ... you know ... .

Left-leaning pinko, to get straight to the point.

So how does this happen? I mean, I read a lot of those National Reviews that came to my dorm room. Even taped what I thought was a particularly funny cover of the rag to my door, and wrote for this campus' imitation of the Review.

And then the changes came.

I can't pinpoint the moment of transformation. But somewhere near the end of my first year here, I found that there was something profoundly false in my beliefs. Despite my father's gift of a subscription to the "National Review," that conservatism stuff just wasn't jiving with my conscience. It didn't make sense anymore. Could I mix that political conservatism with the ideals of social justice I believed in? No. Could I tolerate belonging to a political party that rallies against the arts and free expression? No. Could I stand to belong to a movement that puts itself on a moral highground and spews intolerance? No.

Suddenly, one trip to Europe (full of hard thinking, reading and wandering) and several hundred pints of Guiness later, I became, if you must put a label on it, a liberal.

Somehow, the books I read, the courses I took, the stories I wrote, the late-night discussions at the Brown Jug - they all added up to this inner revolution. Plus, I have to thank a certain local poet and projectionist who hounded me to justify my beliefs, and I suddenly realized that I couldn't. I have to thank my friend "AM," the leftist, who asked me how I could be an artist, and yet oppose the funding of the arts? I have to thank Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and the University's chapter of College Republicans for all-too-clearly showing me the anti-intellectual arrogance and coldness that lies at the heart of the conservative ideology.

And it wasn't only a political ideology shift. In fact, the shift encompassed everything in my life, and some of the shifts happened very gradually, almost going unnoticed. But looking back at how I was four years ago, I see how much my education and experiences at the University changed me - from my spiritual beliefs to my artistic sensibilities, from my career aspirations to my very personality.

This is not a unique experience. To me, it represents the epitome of what a liberal arts education is all about: We read, think, write, discuss, create and listen. And when the dust settles, we somehow emerge differently, more complete.

Despite the mountain of debt this education has put me under, I'm entirely grateful (thank you President Clinton's student loan programs) that I've had the experience. We somehow forget how privledged we are to be here, to be students. To spend several years bettering our minds, our spirits, our hearts.

I had a wonderful fiction writing teacher here who used to always ask me about the characters in my short stories: "What's at stake here? What do these characters want? What are they afraid of?"

These seem to me to be appropriate questions we can ask of ourselves as we pursue a liberal arts education: What's at stake for us, how do we wish to conduct our lives? What do we want -want to know, to experience, to do, to create? And what are we afraid of, what can we do to overcome those fears?

I'm grateful that my education helped me to answer these questions.

Now, if we could only get dear old Dad to revert to his days as a left-leaning pinko in Athens, we'd be getting somewhere.

E-mail Dean Bakopoulos at deanc@umich.edu.

04-10-97