The Fly-Over State of Mind

Ethan Pack

During her first floor meeting, Josie Swindler, CC '07, of Louisville, Kentucky, was asked if there was an airport in her home state. Widespread giggles erupted when she inquired whether there would be curfews and whether she would be allowed to bring her boyfriend over.

Barnard English professor Margaret Vandenburg grew up in Boise, Idaho. Most people mistake that for Iowa or Ohio. She is frequently asked why she doesn't know the name of her own state. "They think they hear me say 'I dunno,' instead of Idaho," she explains.

Amari Hammonds, CC '09, of St. Louis, Missouri, lives on a floor with seven students from the Los Angeles area. On a visit to Malibu, she was told, "people from the Midwest probably don't even know what a beach is."

As a native of Kansas City, Kansas, I can relate. In CC class, I was amused after being informed by one of my classmates that "no one between the coasts believes in pre-marital sex."

New Yorkers with Midwestern roots must negotiate two opposing worldviews, extracting what we love about home from why we left it for another. Many students and faculty members who were raised between the coasts find themselves in the contradictory position of having to defend a part of the country that failed to hold their interest enough to prevent their seduction by New York. Midwesterners, southerners and westerners are often the victims of the same provincial tendencies we thought we had escaped. We are reproved by coastal elites who purport to know everything about the world—everything, that is, except what goes on in those ignorant fly-over states. New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are more widely represented than any other states among incoming freshmen.

Anna Silverman, BC '07, grew up in Leawood, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. Three years ago, her family moved to Tucson, Arizona. Everyone she has lived with at Columbia grew up within a three-hour drive from campus. To Silverman, the adjustment of moving around the country wasn't nearly as daunting as the cultural differences she encountered. "The most shocking thing for me about coming here is that New Yorkers don't know anything else besides New York. That's been the most alarming thing—not living in a big city, but just how little people know about living outside New York," says Silverman. "I think it's a huge risk I took, coming from Kansas to New York. It's sort of weird that many New Yorkers, who you think are so ambitious and so risky, aren't willing to leave this island, or the five boroughs."

Swindler attended the best public school in Louisville, which she said effectively made it the best school in Kentucky. Out of 400 seniors, she guesses only 15 went to schools on the East Coast. "I didn't know I could leave until I took the SAT's," Swindler recalls, "And my parents didn't know either. They didn't go to college. It wasn't even on the radar."

On a class message board, Hammonds once wrote that she took three languages in high school. One student remarked, "for someone from St. Charles, Missouri, that's a super accomplishment!" Hammonds commented, "They have this idea that automatically our schools don't have the same quality of intellectual exploration." Though she grew up in St. Louis, Hammonds attended what she described as a high quality public school, located in the first suburb outside the city. Her school had qualified college guidance counselors, who were familiar with the endless private colleges that dot the Northeast. "A lot of people were really smart, but to get the in-state tuition, they would stay there," she added.

Paul Tietz, CC '08, grew up in Wayzata, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis. He surmised that fewer than 100 students from Minnesota came to New York for college. While I have a hard time believing this figure, there's no doubt that a student coming to New York from Minnesota is much rarer than one from Massachusetts. "It wasn't even a thought to most kids," he said. "A lot didn't want to. They feel like it's too much." Tietz noted a "huge trend"—students would try a semester or year out of the Midwest, only to transfer back to schools in Minnesota. He knows 10 students, out of his private school class of 100, who did just that.

For students like Tietz or faculty members like Vandenburg, the appeal of the East Coast prevailed over their local trends. "I really wanted to leave," said Vandenburg. "For school and then for life, I knew I needed to get out." Among the relatively few who left Idaho, most went to areas with similar mentalities, like Oregon, Washington, or northern California. "I only know one person from Boise who lives in New York," she says.

Meanwhile, the assumptions many carry about the personalities of students like Silverman and Swindler surprise them to a great extent. "People think I'm simple," Swindler says. "I don't know if that's because of where I'm from or the way I carry myself. But I guess the way I carry myself is because of where I'm from." Both Silverman and Swindler recalled troubling incidents when their style of interaction, less combative than their peers', resulted in profound setbacks in student and career activities. Both called their parents crying, surprised at how fiercely students competed against one another, and at the general lack of affability and genteel sensitivity with which they were surrounded in Kansas and Kentucky. "That's the culture you chose when you left us here," was Swindler's father's response.

Silverman has even noticed a conscious change in her personality as a result of her new environment. "It's made me a lot more independent, a lot more aggressive, and a lot more empowered," she observed. "I value all of those things. And I don't think that would have happened if I went to school elsewhere. I think I'd be in a sorority with fake nails and blond hair."

Professor Vandenburg first moved to Boston, where she said a strong regional bias prevailed against those not from New England. Made to feel like she didn't belong, Vandenburg came next to New York, which she immediately felt was her home. She lived in the city for twenty years before she moved upstate and started commuting to Barnard.

Not everyone finds the regional problems so easy to overcome. "I didn't feel nervous, but I should have," says Swindler. Even after doing well in the best school in her state, Swindler was overwhelmed by the preponderance of students at Columbia from private and prep schools. She comments: "The students were not what I thought. They were not nice. They got along with each other, so I didn't understand why we didn't hit it off. There was so much partying, which was weird for me, because it wasn't beers in the Wal-Mart parking lot and couples dating. It was house parties, and everyone hooking up."

"No one's ever made me feel like I shouldn't be here because of where I'm from," says Silverman, "but they've made me feel that where I am from isn't worthy." A common difficulty lies in separating the pervasive and offensive stereotypes from characterizations that are sad but true. Swindler, for example, had only seen one Orthodox Jew before she came to Columbia. New York's swirl of foreign accents excited her at first. She left Kentucky in part because of the explicit racism she found in the South, and she hopes that her children won't grow up hearing racial slurs.

"Here, and in California, they just live in an entirely different world," says Swindler. "So many people have immigrant parents, and they're bilingual or trilingual, and they've been everywhere, they've been to Europe. I feel like such a bumpkin! But I'm not; I'm sophisticated at home." Swindler also noticed economic differences. In Kentucky, she felt comfortable with her parents' $40,000 annual salary, which is roughly the median national income. At Columbia, she has been made to feel that they have significantly less money than most people.

"When I thought of coming to Columbia," recalled Tietz, "I imagined it would be open-minded, sophisticated, cosmopolitan—that there would be wide variety within general philosophies, a free and open discourse, and not the petty rhetoric thumping that you get in the Midwest. And while I agree more with predominant view here than in Minnesota, the level of discourse is just as childish, immature, and closed. It's ignorant in its own right."

Silverman complains of hearing Dorothy jokes from The Wizard of Oz when she goes out to bars ("literally every time; and they don't get any funnier"). She cited more troubling experiences of cultural prejudice in the classroom. In a sociology course, taught by a British professor, Silverman recalls being told, "something to the effect of 'all people in the Midwest are racist, or that all those who voted red [Republican] in 2004 were racist.'"

"It was very offensive," she adds. "But I didn't say anything because no one else seemed offended, so I thought maybe I was out of touch. Maybe all people from the Midwest were racist? I didn't think so, but maybe? She was a professor!"

In a class on America before the Civil War, Silverman became the professor's reference point, as she was the only student who knew the geography of the states in the Midwest, the correct pronunciation of historically pertinent towns in Kansas, and that Kansas and Nebraska share a border. After screening Daughters of the Dusk, one of the few films written, directed, and produced by a female African-American, Silverman's Women in Film professor remarked that such a movie would only be seen by people in New York and Los Angeles, and "not in a mall in Kansas." "It was interesting that Kansas was stereotyped as an anti-intellectual stronghold," Silverman recalls, "I realized I had to stand up for myself much more, because no one is going to do that for you here."

Vandenburg traces such perceptions to the curriculum, where students get the perception that culture is concentrated in the East. "If you look at the first great century of American literature, all the canonical names that come up are from a very small part of the country: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville," says Vandenburg, "It took a genius the caliber of Faulkner to even begin shifting attention to Southerners telling their own story. But that is to say nothing of the Midwest, or the Great Plains, or the West."

Politics adds a troubling dimension to regional stereotypes. Tietz, himself a supporter of Ralph Nader, has felt tension after mentioning that both his parents voted for Bush. "When I tell people that, they are aghast," Tietz said. "But I know them. They are both smart. It's just their point of view. Yet everyone I have told treats it as if my parents are stupid and ignorant and their opinion isn't valid. When I argue with my parents, I think what they say is valid, I just don't agree. But I respect where they are coming from."

It isn't a big step before regional political judgments become personal. "These are two of the people I respect the most intellectually," Tietz said of his parents. "They're self-made, hardworking, honest people. They aren't racist or homophobic (my dad's godfather is a gay hairdresser from New York), and their viewpoints are valid. It offends me that anyone who votes Republican is demonized. But it's easy to do."

"People here often don't understand why someone would vote for this president," Vandenburg notes, "They immediately judge those people, like my mother out in Idaho, to be ignorant. But they are not ignorant, they are very smart people, and they have many reasons for voting as they do." According to Vandenburg, the real problem occurs when people assume Republican voters are monolithic.

"For instance, there are a lot of folks out West who are very fed up with this administration," says Vandenburg said, including her mother among them. "They would consider crossing party lines in an election, but so far, they have not been offered candidates from the Democrats that appeal to the way they look at the world. This is when the naïveté of the powerful members of the Democrat party out east becomes so dangerous."

Vandenburg cites John Kerry's nomination as an instance in which the insular regional mindset of the Democrats gathered behind a candidate whose political popularity did not translate outside the Northeast. It is then perceived that the left is preaching down to people in the West, but not invoking their interests. "People like you and me," she said, "we knew he was going to lose, right from the start. But no one believed us; they couldn't get their heads around why this was not someone for whom people would change their voting pattern. And it's happening all over again with the coming election."

History Professor Elizabeth Blackmar deals with many of these issues in her course "The Making of the Modern American Landscape." Blackmar grew up in Kansas City and St. Louis. "Out here, people's worldviews are extremely provincial. They don't know that there is a long tradition of dissent in the Midwest, a tradition that is very much alive right now." Blackmar surveys towns in the Midwest and South, showing instances throughout American history in which these places have been the sites of strong dissent from national trends.

Echoing this, Hammonds brought up George Clooney's acceptance speech at the recent Academy Awards. "He said, 'Maybe it's good that Hollywood is out of touch with the rest of the country.' A lot of times, people on the coasts think they are on a higher level. They don't realize they do actually have like-minded people who come from all over the country."

Additionally, Vandenburg highlighted the frustrating misconceptions that result from lumping regions together: assuming Idaho is in the Midwest, for example. "We have much different values than the Midwest," she insisted. "There's the conservatism, but there's also a strong 'outlaw' cowboy mentality in the identity that is formed out West."

Tietz expressed similar qualifications about Minnesota, which has a Republican governor, voted for Kerry, and has the highest state taxes and welfare spending. "The 'red state/blue state' map has just further entrenched both sides, definitely for the worse. Minnesota is liberal in lots of ways. But there is a very strong religious presence. So it's a big mix," he said. "It's stupid to create this dichotomy: both sides profit from it. The difference isn't as profound as people make it out to be."

Professor Blackmar undermines the regional stereotypes even further, saying class differences more influential in forming divergent perspectives in America. She suggests that suburbs, whether in Long Island or Ohio, are "interchangeable"; a transition to an urban environment from these locales would be a similar ordeal. "But if you look at people from a working-class background, they would have a lot less in common with the majority of college students here," she says.

In her Landscapes course, Blackmar screens ten-minute clips of a car driving somewhere on a U.S. interstate. It takes up to ten minutes before students see anything identifiable by which to locate the region or the state through which the car is driving. "Alongside the interstate, you have the same fast-food chains, Wal-Marts, and similar nationwide outlets almost everywhere," she says. "Even if you go off the Interstate, many cities and towns throughout America are beginning to look more alike. There are fewer and fewer places left that are truly identifiable by some regional culture or feel, and identifying them is quite interesting."

Blackmar points toward the diffuse movement of Midwesterners across suburbs in different regions. To Swindler, this represents something of a brain drain from the middle of the country toward the coasts. Blackmar suggests such a trend could change the perspective of coastal Americans, as many of them will have roots from across the country. With holiday or family visits, such people will have a broader range of experiences and connections.

For now, when students from the heartland visit home, their feelings of disenfranchisement are often re-emphasized. Not fully amenable to coastal standards and expectations, we return to the majority of our family and friends who did not leave, and are then made to feel that our home no longer belongs to us. Tietz spoke about his breaks, when he spends most of his time with people who went to community or state colleges, or who just dropped out. "There's definitely some resentment," Tietz admits. "They're looking at me like I'm… well you know, Columbia, New York, Ivy League. They assume I look down on them because I left and went to a place that's supposedly more cultured."

"My boyfriend and I got out," Swindler said. "My brother got out before I did. He went to Naval Academy, so that was sort of an example. But it was definitely a weird thing; I was definitely surprised. Looking back on it, I was lucky that I did, because it's so rare." But then she corrects herself. "I feel bad saying 'got out.' If you strive for something better than someone else, they think you think you're better than they are. It is really hard. I don't want to do what my parents do, but they're not bad people." It can be especially challenging to hang out with friends from high school when, as Swindler puts it, "they think I think I'm something special. Or because they're in state schools, studying nutrition and things like that. It's very hard to say that you want something better, because it feels like you don't appreciate where you're from."

Swindler's comments about the tension involved with going home reminded me of the time my CC professor joked to a student from northern Florida and asked if she was able to talk about Plato's forms with her friends. The desire to discuss our experiences at Columbia clash with the associations they carry at home. Some of us are simply unable to bridge the gap. "I never go back," says Vandenburg, whose last two visits to Idaho were for her parents' fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries. While they come here, or meet to see her sister in California, the conservative climate of Idaho is too much for Vandenburg.

In high school, Hammonds was already negotiating her urban background with her suburban classmates. Moving to New York only exacerbated this. "I would always have this extreme aversion to people saying, 'don't go into the city [downtown St. Louis], it's dangerous," she said, noting such people also warn, "New York is dangerous." Hammonds acknowledges that she is even beginning to entertain feelings of superiority when she goes home, engaging in reflexes she has picked up in New York when contrasting herself with peers in rural Missouri.

"To mitigate some sort of 'shame,' by admitting yes, a lot of Missouri is like that, I apologize and save face by qualifying it, saying 'my city isn't that way.' But I'll readily stand in solidarity with a girl from Dora [rural Missouri] when we're together somewhere outside of Missouri," says Hammonds. She wonders whether Americans on the coast denigrate the Midwest for similar reasons, but on a larger scale. If they could undergo the reflection she had upon defending rural Missouri to outsiders, she hopes most Americans would come to emphasize their commonality with the rest of the country.

Intellectual environments, like the one at Columbia, are a key battleground of the concepts through which people look at politics and society. Students like Tietz see deep-seated problems in academia's treatment of the issues at stake. "Academics here just lump a lot of disjointed viewpoints together and describe them as being advanced or educated," says Tietz "But they are speaking about many distinct areas as if they are all one thing that means the same thing." A cycle of acrimony ensues: academia and coastal media elites find it easier to preach to their choirs and reproach those outside higher education for their ignorance.

Despite comments about backwardness, students like Hammonds and Silverman are generally grateful for their background. They tend to feel that, unlike people from the coasts, they are more likely to have traveled across the country and seen both the self-appointed centers of culture and the nuances of the red states. Most cite the intention to experience a lifestyle different than that of their childhood as the primary factor in coming to school in New York.

Americans from between the coasts then have an added incentive to excel in their new settings, apart from those who were born into the culture of New York or the glamour of Los Angeles. Our experience of our homes is such that we are willing to let them make our contribution here unique, without desiring to return to them. None of the students interviewed imagine that they would return to their home states to raise their children.

ETHAN PACK, CC '08, is majoring in MEALAC and English. He grew up in Kansas City, both the Missouri and Kansas sides.