The Long Arm of the Law
Eric Miller
January 1, 2002
The presidential election of 2000 may have been a dead heat everywhere else, but here at Geneva College Bush didn't even break a sweat. When our student newspaper sponsored a mock election in late October, Bush won 87 percent of the vote. No one blinked. Three cheers for the GOP. Prior to coming to teach here, I had imagined that Geneva, a member of the evangelical Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, might harbor a sturdy Democratic presence. Located in western Pennsylvania, the college is within walking distance of dilapidated old steel mills-reminders of the victories labor won through generations of costly struggle, but also of the final defeat that occurred when, in the early eighties, steel manufacturers in the Beaver Valley simply shut down their plants and took the jobs elsewhere. It took about ten years for people to start painting their houses again, friends tell us, quiet testament of a long, bitter recovery. Memory registers at the voting booth: on election day our neighbors, including a son who is a sophomore at Geneva, went to the polls to pass out fliers for Democratic candidates. When I interviewed for this position a few years ago, I discovered a sizable contingent of Democrats on the faculty and in the administration, many of whom had cast their first votes in the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. Mid-century progressivism grounds their political identities, and over the years they have fostered a tradition of liberal idealism at Geneva. After my interview I told friends that the political flavor of the campus seemed "spicy," and I looked forward to lively discussion and debate-a tonic after the nineties' flat centrism. It was not to be, and I am not alone in ...
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