At my college orientation this year, a speaker told roughly 200 incoming freshmen that we had a choice.
We could approach college transactionally or transformationally.
A transactional education is about checking boxes, earning credits, and collecting a degree. A transformational education requires something deeper: the courage to be present, wrestle with difficult ideas, and emerge changed.
Sitting there, I found myself wondering: Can college really transform us if we are afraid to say what we believe? And as the nation marks its 250th birthday, is this the kind of higher education system America’s founders would want?
Before I stepped into my first college classroom, older students warned me to be careful about expressing unpopular opinions. I have read stories about students facing social backlash for saying what they think.
I don’t know every side of those stories, and I don’t assume every campus is hostile to disagreement. But they have made me wonder whether I will feel as comfortable expressing my convictions in college as I did in high school.
I hope I will.
My high school classrooms included people with very different perspectives. Teachers encouraged respectful debate. I could express my conservative beliefs, listen to friends who disagreed, and walk away still respecting them.
Something important happened in those conversations: My beliefs were tested, and they became stronger. Sometimes, I saw weaknesses in my own arguments. Sometimes, another person made me think differently.
That is what education should do.
Yet, too many students appear to be learning another lesson: Silence is safer.
Researchers at Heterodox Academy have documented the problem of student self-censorship. Social scientists have described a related phenomenon as the “spiral of silence”: People become reluctant to express opinions they believe are unpopular because they fear social consequences.
What concerns me isn’t one student staying quiet during one uncomfortable classroom discussion. It is what happens when staying quiet becomes a habit.
Eventually, my generation may stop merely withholding our convictions and start wondering whether they are worth having.
The convictions I carry to college are not simply political labels. I believe in individual responsibility, free enterprise, service, faith, and an America that is worth improving rather than abandoning.
As a Daniels Scholar, I have also been taught that integrity means standing by your convictions when doing so is difficult, while treating people who disagree with you with respect.
Those two ideas belong together.
Conviction without humility becomes arrogance. Humility without conviction can become silence. Our generation needs both.
I am entering college at a time when Americans are often told how divided we are.
My generation hears plenty about cynicism, polarization, and declining faith in our country, but I choose to believe we can write a different story. Patriotism does not require pretending America has no problems. To me, patriotism means believing America is worth the effort needed to solve them.
Education should prepare us for that work. College should challenge our assumptions, expose us to arguments we have never considered, and teach us how to disagree without treating one another as enemies.
Disagreement is not the enemy of education. Done well, it is one of education’s greatest gifts.
Character is not formed by avoiding difficult conversations. It is formed by entering them with enough courage to speak and enough humility to listen.
That brings me back to the question I heard at orientation: What type of education should I strive for, transactional or transformational? I now realize our speaker was asking something bigger than how we planned to spend the next four years. She was asking who we wanted to become.
My answer is that I want to leave college with more than a degree. I want my ideas challenged, my convictions tested, and my understanding of others deepened.
Our founders did not hand us a finished country 250 years ago. They handed us a responsibility. We should not simply criticize the America we are inheriting. We should embrace the challenge of making it better.
EDUCATION SCHOOLS PRIORITIZE ACTIVISM OVER TEACHING
I want my generation to leave college believing that America’s future is not something happening to us. It is something we have a responsibility to build.
Maelin Rennemeyer, a 2026 Daniels Scholar from Windsor, entered her freshman year of college this fall