Professor: Would You Rather Be Free or Equal?

My political theory professor began the class by making a series of bizarre, outlandish statements and asking equally bizarre and outlandish questions. I was immediately intrigued.

“He’s provocative. He gets people going,” I thought to myself.

He asked the class if they would rather be free or equal. To my pleasant surprise, most of my classmates raised their hands for freedom! To my dismay, the professor shook his head and called us delusional wackjobs for preferring freedom over equality.

“Never mind, here we go,” I muttered under my breath.

He went on to explain that freedom was a state of mind, citing the experience of a prisoner of war from World War II. This POW insisted he felt most free when he imprisoned by the Nazis. He no longer had to worry about being captured and he no longer had to worry about where his food, shelter, or clothing would come from. For the first time, he found himself completely void of worry and responsibility. He was free to think beyond survival.

As much as I respect the sacrifices of that POW, the fact that my professor would cite this experience as a reason to prioritize equality over freedom just proved to me that education is no exception to the idea of “all things in moderation.” Too much education evidently makes you stupid.

[lz_infobox]This piece is part of a CampusZette series exploring the culture, oddities and experiences of students on college campuses through their eyes.[/lz_infobox]

I would never willingly trade my freedom to travel, to run, to speak my mind, to own property, to protect myself, and to live as I please for a government-provided sense of security. I would rather work in a minimum wage, retail job for the rest of my life than forfeit my rights and live in a constant state of mediocrity just for the sake of “equality.”

I believe in equal opportunity, not forced equal outcomes. But big government interferes with opportunity while it enforces equal outcomes. Government insists on keeping people disenfranchised and impoverished, offering wealth redistribution and inflated bureaucracies as the only solution. Instead of allowing parents to choose where their children can go to school and giving all students access to high quality education regardless of zip code, the government insists on keeping the poor in poverty while they pour millions of taxpayer dollars into the Department of Education and policies like Common Core that lower standards across the board.

When you say you prefer equality to freedom, you aren’t enlightened or morally superior. You’re just a tyrant that believes you should have more authority in other people’s lives than they have in their own. Clearly my PhD professor wants a little more control than just command over the classroom.

Seijah Drake is a senior at Lasell College in Newton, Massachusetts.