This piece was written as part of the Veritas Institute, a program of the Veritas Forum at which college students spend a week learning from top scholars in the fields of science and technology and write an essay about a topic at the intersection of science and the big questions. Fare Forward is pleased to support the Veritas Institute by publishing some of the best submitted pieces.
Football, Science, and the Things In-between
Between the rural South and the Ivy League, a philosophy major finds a sense of perspective.
By Blake Whitmer
I never quite found my place in Harrison, Arkansas. It was the place of my birth, and the place where I, my grandmother, and my great-grandfather grew up—but I never quite felt like a local. Harrisonians have a reputation for racism, science denial, and the like, but I never met the racists. Maybe that’s because I wasn’t popular. When it came to science denial, I went out of my way to avoid the topic. I’m sure that I could have crushed any of my peers in a debate, but that’s a good way to lose friends, and I didn’t have enough of those to risk losing them.
Still, just because Harrison doesn’t love science doesn’t mean that it doesn’t love anything. Football was a pretty big deal. Every Friday night, students and parents and fans lost themselves in the overwhelming spirit of high school football. The team was our best and bravest, those worthy to challenge the football teams of the neighboring towns. And they had plenty of support, too: the band members played the national anthem, the cheerleaders led chants, and everyone else piled into the student section. Under the Friday night lights, the entire community came together as one.
Besides football, there wasn’t much else that we did for fun. I was never invited to parties. Maybe there weren’t any parties. I guess it’s possible the entire town was just as uncool as I was. Alternatively, we might have all been too religious to party. Faith was a big deal in Harrison. At church, we learned that alcohol and dancing and parties were bad, but also that when the Lord taketh away, the Lord giveth. Religion provided a key social structure to our community, gathering up the various segments of our community—students and teachers, doctors and patients, businessmen and consumers—once each week. I liked church because it gave me interesting existential ideas to ponder. My community liked it because it was a chance to get out of the house, catch up with old friends, and watch each other grow up. Our church parties were potlucks, and we bonded over making it to the good lasagna before it was gone.
. . .
In my freshman year of high school, I stumbled across Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. This book shattered my horizons, leading me to re-evaluate what can and cannot be done with the human mind. It took the interesting existential ideas I had found at church but let me use the logic and reason required in my science classes to reckon with them. Whether or not Mere Christianity can be considered a work of philosophy is debatable. But nevertheless, it was within its slim covers that my love of philosophy was born.
I quickly devoured other Christian apologetic texts. I went from C.S. Lewis to William Lane Craig, skimmed Augustine, and eventually found G.K. Chesterton. I found apologetic videos on YouTube, where the debate between religion and science dominated intellectual discourse. In an era dominated by the New Atheists and “creationist owned compilations,” it was a relief to see such robust, intellectually defensible conceptions of Christianity.
Thus, it was religion that gave me my first intellectual role models. Because of this, religion is what got me out of Harrison. I got an A in chemistry, but I had never met a scientist, read a scientific article, or heard of an h-index. I got an A in algebra, but that didn’t let me in on mathematical proofs or machine learning or financial modeling. In short, I had no idea what was possible beyond the limits of my small town. But I knew all about religion, and I understood the career path that Christian intellectuals like Lewis and Chesterton and other heroes of the faith had taken. Through this window, I got my first glimpse of the world of academia, and this motivated me to lift up my eyes toward what might lie beyond the world I knew. I took a shot at some top schools. I got a bite.
For me, science and science denial are not political issues, but rather cultural issues, shaping and being shaped by the passions of myself and my peers.
My story may well sound familiar. In some ways, I’m just a statistic: one of the many talented Arkansans who left, contributing to the “brain drain” in our nation’s rural areas. But what I realize now is that I’m also one of the few people who have seen both sides of our nation’s cultural divide. I have lived and studied among rural Americans, and I took the same science curriculum that led them to reject vaccinations, mask mandates, and lockdowns. I have also lived and studied among the elite, those who will go on to become our nation’s next scientists and politicians. For me, science and science denial are not political issues, but rather cultural issues, shaping and being shaped by the passions of myself and my peers.
In the fall of 2019, I took my place in the coveted halls of the Ivy League. The impact of the eight schools that make up the Ivy League has been on full display during the pandemic. While President Biden himself is not Ivy League–educated, he is the first U.S. president since Ronald Reagan to lack that credential. Biden also filled his team with plenty of elite scientists and doctors—for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci graduated top of his class from Cornell Medical School, and Biden’s surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, went to both Harvard and Yale.
My hometown has historically been skeptical of elite, coastal institutions like the Ivy League, but for the first 18 years of my life, this skepticism consisted largely of disinterest. We didn’t think about the Ivy League. We didn’t care about it. This might have been a problem for me, one of the few people who sought to cross from one world into the other, but everyone else was completely unaffected. Recent events have changed that. With the 2020 rise of the Covid-19 virus, my new world and my old world were forced to interact. Despite being a long 18-hour road trip apart, the Ivy League and rural Arkansas have to share a president—as well as a surgeon general, chief medical advisor, federal laws on mask mandates, and—you get the idea. All of a sudden, Harrison (and a lot of other places like it) was finding its skepticism of elite institutions taking on far more shape and weight.
Former president Donald Trump portrayed himself as a great reformer, running against an elite stranglehold on our nation’s government. He promised to “drain the swamp” and be a champion for the everyday man, the factory workers, and the people in flyover country. In my home county, this rhetoric was extremely successful, with 79.8 percent of residents voting for Trump in the 2020 election. At my college, which has seen 164 alumni become members of Congress, the effect was exactly the opposite.
Rural America’s skepticism of elites extends beyond elite politicians. My hometown is also skeptical of philosophy, my area of study. Beyond the usual warnings about philosophy being useless and unemployable (“You study philosophy? What are you going to do with that? Work at the philosophy factory that just opened down the road?”), whenever philosophy does become relevant in the news (as in the case of the recent debates over critical theory and similar arguments over alternative views of gender), my hometown is pretty much always skeptical.
Perhaps most surprisingly, science—long heralded as the most impartial, objective, and certain academic discipline—has also become an increasingly political issue. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 45 percent of Republicans in 2021 claimed to have “‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in science,” as compared to 79 percent of Democrats. Back in 1975, opinions were more even between parties, with science holding the trust of 67 percent of Democrats and 72 percent of Republicans. If we look back to 2020, when the pandemic was at its peak, we see that this confidence in science influenced views of the Coronavirus, as Democrats were four times more worried about catching the disease than Republicans. In 2021, we again saw a political divide when it came to vaccinations, with 92 percent of Democrats but only 56 percent of Republicans having received at least one dose.
Over the course of the pandemic, I felt this cultural divide acutely. In March of 2020, my school switched to online-only classes. Like most of the world, I played it safe and stayed inside. Half a year later, in January of 2022, I finally returned to campus. We were required to wear masks everywhere, even outside, and everyone got tested twice a week. A few months later, in March of 2021, I went back to my hometown for online-only classes (we alternated who could stay on campus to keep the student population low and “slow the spread”). In stark contrast to my school environment, my hometown had resumed its normal festivities. Churches, gyms, and restaurants were all running at full throttle. Masks were not required and in fact were actively discouraged. To make a long story short, my hometown consistently resisted government mandates, while my college town crafted and multiplied them.
. . .
Politics has played an important role in shaping science denial, but in my experience, the role of academia has largely been ignored. Through my studies and my time at Dartmouth, I have come to believe that the underlying structures of academia play an understated role in shaping cultural perceptions of science—and thus, in shaping our political climate.
There are two main reasons for this. First, academia is extremely competitive, and attitudes towards competition vary from culture to culture. In Arkansas, we don’t compete with one another (just against neighboring towns at football games), and we especially don’t compete academically. But in order to succeed in the world of academia, you must compete, and you must compete hard. To even set foot on an Ivy League campus as a student, you must cross the hurdle of a 7 percent acceptance rate—but acceptance is only the beginning. When I got to Dartmouth, I found for the first time that getting an A required me to outperform dozens of other students who were just as talented and motivated as I was. We also compete—constantly—for top internships and leadership of clubs. Dartmouth is even competitively social: we battle to get invited to the best parties, rush the top fraternities, and have the coolest friends. No facet of our life is free from struggle. Then, after graduation, we compete for acceptance to another batch of low-acceptance institutions, like investment banks, consulting firms, and Ph.D. programs. Do I blame my hometown peers for wanting to live a simple life, free from this chaos? Not particularly. Sleepless nights and constant anxiety are not for everyone.
The second way academia shapes our cultural divide comes through its geographical location. The top ten graduate schools for biology, for instance, are all located along either the East or West Coast. The best school in Arkansas ranks much lower, coming in 175th place. And even that school is a 90-minute drive from my sparsely populated hometown, well beyond the range of an average field trip.
These two factors led all of us in Harrison to have a distorted view of science. In the world of academia, science is a process, in which new science is constantly published and each of us is free to participate. Even at the undergraduate level, my school has countless opportunities for students to be involved in their own, unique academic research. But since no real science was occurring in my hometown, we viewed “science” as the thing we read about in textbooks. “Science” was when we took a multiple-choice test and got a good grade. We viewed science as a static set of facts, immutable and unchanging, and not as a dialectical process that we might have the privilege of contributing to. Can it really be a surprise that we chose to become high school football stars instead of scientists? Is it any surprise that we resist novel developments in science when we view science as unchanging?
I might even go so far as to say that rural Arkansas and the Ivy League could each teach the other a thing or two about the good life
Despite its many rewards, too, there are also downsides to intense competition. About halfway through the pandemic, my college had a mental health crisis. This manifested in various ways. Many of us complained on one of our anonymous social media apps. Others drank the pain away. Some of us suffered in silence. But our crisis was finally forced into the limelight when three students committed suicide. The combination of social isolation and intense competition caught up with us. The student body staged a large protest in response.
Our college president wrote in response to our crisis: “The pandemic has exacerbated many problems, but foremost among them has been mental health. On this critical issue, we must do more to support our community.” Soon after, my school’s administration sent out a “healthy minds survey” to the entire student body. It asked questions like: “Do you see yourself as a part of the campus community?” and “Do you feel that you lead a purposeful and meaningful life?” Personally, I felt that none of these questions ever got to the core of Dartmouth’s problem with mental health. I am grateful to Dartmouth’s administration for the support they have provided me, and whether healthy minds survey was a success has yet to be seen. But nevertheless, at the height of the pandemic, when my peers were behind closed doors or on an anonymous app or got a bit too drunk to watch their words, they continued to curse our administration for their mental suffering. Over the pandemic, Dartmouth was not a fun place to be.
Dartmouth is far from a perfect place; however, I don’t exactly blame it for its mental health crisis. Long before applying to colleges, I was told by a mentor that the Ivy League was a miserable place, but that the suffering was worth it in the long run. He told me about his 80-hour work weeks, complete lack of hobbies, and low-sleep nights, but also about how he landed a lucrative job right out of college that perfectly set up the rest of his career. Based on his example and many others, seems reasonable to assume that the success, high stress, and mental health issues go hand in hand. As Spinoza once said: “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
My hometown is also far from a perfect place. The racism is, frankly, inexcusable—but somehow, from my position straddling these two very different worlds, I can’t bring myself to blame my hometown peers for their science denial. The world of elite science is 1400 miles and 500 SAT points away from rural Arkansas, and that’s not an easy bridge to cross—in either direction. I admire any Arkansan scientists who do make this journey, as they both fight against the trend of rural science denial and provide a much-needed unifying force in our nation. I also admire my friends and neighbors who have remained in my hometown, contributing to its flourishing and working to make it a good place to live instead of contributing to the “brain drain.” I have similar feelings about Dartmouth. I am proud and grateful for the opportunities it has given me, but I can say for a certainty that it isn’t a perfect place either.
I might even go so far as to say that rural Arkansas and the Ivy League could each teach the other a thing or two about the good life—certainly both of them have made me who I am. And speaking for those of us who stand in the middle of America’s cultural divide, I see a lot more sites for potential bridges than are visible from the furthest edges of our seemingly unbridgeable gap.
Blake Whitmer is a rising senior at Dartmouth College.