American University

Date: Feb 20 2018
Major: Political Science (This Major's Salary over time)
I'll begin this review with a disclaimer that while I strongly dislike AU and am glad to be no longer going there, AU is good for a certain kind of student. Just not the kind that I really want to be or associate with, and I suspect it will be largely the same for many people. I'll try to paint as sober and rational a picture as I can and let you decide. Keep in mind that almost all reviews of any schools on sites like this are strongly colored by emotion, even mine, and try to think about where the reviewer is probably coming from. Sometimes, something that someone intensely dislikes will be something that will be more positive for you. Happy school-hunting.

The academics themselves are pretty solid at AU. Professors generally know their stuff and are pretty passionate about it. Like any other school, it has its share of subpar instructors. In four semesters there, I think I had an average of one bad professor per semester, but a lot of my qualms were with the way the courses themselves were structured, which profs can only do so much about, what with departmental oversight and all that jazz. Professors definitely expect a lot from you, but they're generally very friendly and willing to help. They don't usually publicly encourage students to come to office hours, but will always be happy to see you there.

Now onto the stuff that I dislike, finally.

The environment on campus is toxic, and only getting worse. I think the roots of it are three things:

1) AU brands itself as

the most politically active college in America.

This in and of itself is not a bad thing, and is probably to be expected considering where the school is located. But it trickles into the academic side of things. No less than 2/3 of all undergraduates at AU major in either political science or international relations. Politics is discussed A LOT. It's what the school pours all of its marketing and resources into. Not even most students at AU know about the $2 million recording studio tucked away into a corner of campus that no one goes to, or that AU has one of the best pre-med programs in the country, among other things. That stuff is almost completely ignored. Politics dominates.

2) Ideological homogeneity. No less than 95% of undergraduates are politically liberal. Again, this in and of itself is not a bad thing. Most colleges these days are overwhelmingly politically liberal. That's just something that you have to accept as reality. But combine it with the dominance of political studies and topics, and you get an echo chamber. Lots of people saying the same things over and over and over. Not only is everyone liberal, but everyone is politically minded. It's impossible to escape it, so it can be a nightmare if you don't like it. I studied political science myself at AU, but because I was more interested in areas of political science that were not as widely discussed (i.e. I was a lot more interested in learning about why people voted for Trump than automatically and simplistically branding them as evil and constantly shouting "resist, resist, resist!" 24/7), I felt ostracized and was frequently told that I was "part of the problem" even though I myself am politically very liberal.

3) AU students are blind to their own classism. AU students often refer to themselves as "wonks," people who are extremely nerdy about one or more topics. It's common DC-area jargon. My small circle of friends and I had a joke that any time an AU student pointed out how you were blind to your own privilege or would ask you to walk back some seemingly harmless comment you just made, you were getting "wonked." It happened a lot. Many AU students will gleefully point out instances when you are overlooking your own privilege. Many of the more politically active ones will put out lists of demands for the administration to enact to make AU a place more friendly for marginalized groups, but if you look closely at these demands, the only class-related one is often something like a tuition freeze, or just making the school more affordable for low-income students. They completely overlook the many cultural differences between upper- and lower-class people. It never occurs to them that not only might AU be unaffordable, but it might also be a place that's just too alien for lower-class students to want to attend.

What ties all of this together and makes it all impossible to fix is that AU students, without even realizing it, are encouraged to be narcissistic. Personal identity and experiences are emphasized to a sickening degree. Any time any event, good or bad, happens on campus or off campus in the news, the first question you are encouraged to ask yourself, as an AU student, is something along the lines of "how does this affect me and my personal identity, my self-concept?" It's introspective in a really unproductive way. I remember walking around campus the day after Trump was elected and watching a group of students burning American flags on the quad, and one of them shouted something like "all of our unique identities no longer mean (expletive) if Trump is president." That's what gets me. You're in a bubble of a campus surrounded almost completely by people who think just like you, a place where you have almost all of the institutional power, and still you are afraid for yourself. What about the people outside of campus who can't enjoy the same protection? They need help. They're scared, and they have so much less agency to fix all of these problems than you do. But all you can think about is yourself and your "uniqueness" not "meaning anything" anymore. Boo hoo (again, I say all of this as a political liberal who chose AU largely because I wanted to be surrounded by people who thought like me, as my K-12 schooling was largely very conservative).

Fear governs so much more of the campus culture than anything else. AU Public Safety has to put out a campus-wide email any time "offensive posters" are found hung up somewhere on campus. It's just not the kind of place that is conducive to learning, even when the academics themselves are good. After two years, it got to be too much for my mental health. I couldn't take the constant pressure, not just to get an internship (as 90% of AU undergrads do), but to think like everyone else, to be an activist, a fighter. I'm too conflict-averse for that. I personally enjoy learning for the sake of learning, as an end itself rather than as a means to an end. I try to ask "why" more than "how." I try to let my path be governed through positive motivation rather than negative. If you're the same, definitely don't go here.

But maybe you're different. Maybe what I've outlined above sounds really cool to you. My values and experiences caused me to dislike it, but maybe yours will have the opposite effect. But I personally can't recommend that anyone go here. AU isn't doing any real good for anyone in the long run. Find a school that at the very least has a wider diversity of majors, like George Washington University—also in DC, but with a much more robust STEM program. Even that will help. You can still be politically active, but you'll be around people who view the world through a different lens, even if their political views are largely the same.

And if you aren't super political, definitely don't come here at all. You will regret it, and that's only getting more and more true as time goes on. Then again, maybe fewer political types is what AU needs. Maybe that will help calm everyone down, reminding them that other stuff exists. I don't know. Go with your gut, don't listen to me.