Methods:
- My project will be a traditional research paper that will draw primarily from newspaper articles, scholarly essays, books, and primary source interviews with students from various college campuses. The core of my work will be an in-depth analysis of the often-hypocritical theories that guide higher-education–overt or not. Furthermore, I will focus heavily on collecting outside data including already-conducted surveys, studies, and experiments to support my arguments.
- Potential questions to guide me: How and when did the political climate of college campuses change in the past two decades? How much of this is related to institutional change vs natural change in student-body views? How does college curriculum reflect institutional political-sentiment? To what extent may colleges be threatening freedom of speech? What are the repercussions for intellectual curiosity and the evolution of thought if productive debate is stifled? Do academic institutions hold a form of social control over students’ opinions?
Data:
- I plan to conduct somewhere between 5-10 interviews of students at various elite colleges and universities in the US. My goal is to finish these interviews by April 19.
- I will also be compiling different metrics and figures from already published studies
- As described in my methods section, a bulk of my information will be deduced from written work such as newspaper articles, scholarly essays, and books.
- The final piece of my data is an ethnographic component. This is a project that I have been thinking about for multiple years; I have hundreds of hours of ethnographic data from my own observations and experiences. To what extent I will incorporate this data, I am unsure.