Kids today
By Justin Weinberg does a fine job of taking apart a particularly egregious example of the “these kids today” jeremiad from Ron Srigley, identifying virtually all the common tropes deployed in lazy declinist narratives in one short article:
Professors, you were not normal. You weren’t normal back when you were an undergraduate, and you aren’t normal now. Even back then, you cared about stuff (yes I’ll say “stuff”) that most of your fellow students didn’t even ever think about, and now that you’ve spent so much time studying that stuff, writing about that stuff, credentializing yourself in that stuff, and attempting to stake out status in virtue of your command of that stuff, you care about it so much more. But still—just like back when you were a student—most people, including your students now, don’t care about that stuff. This is not new.
So, please don’t write any opinion piece of the “declinist” variety—the kind that complains that things are worse than they used to be—that cites as an example of the phenomena that students just don’t care anymore. For what such an essay really tells us is how unhappy you are that the world has not changed.
A few additional musings.
1. Two of the big changes in college undergraduate degrees in the last half-century:
First, while my industry prefers the positive spin (opportunities to pursue higher education have opened up to a much greater portion of society!), another way to look at it is that a college degree has become a much more important, perhaps necessary, credential for a middle class life.
Second, I’ll leave the precise math to Paul, but college degrees have become considerably more costly than they used to be, particularly in relation to the earnings and resources of many of the people who, understandably, now feel they have little choice but to pay it.
These changes did not occur simultaneously; the first predated the second by roughly a few decades. It was in that intermediate window that many, perhaps most, of today’s college faculty members earned their undergraduate degrees. At risk of succumbing to a bit of the unreliable nostalgia Weinberg rightly warns against, I do feel like there was a bit more of the “I love learning and I’m just here to learn” mentality (it probably is a false distinction; as a person like that I’m sure I sought out and surrounded myself with like-minded people) that makes our jobs so much more pleasant. In that intermediate moment, certainly kinds of optimism and idealism about academia had a plausibility to them that just doesn’t make sense in 2016. If you’ve failed to update your idealism in light of the second change, and judge your students against your anachronistic optimism, that’s your failing, not theirs. Millions of people are now in effect being told “You have to buy this and it’s much more expensive than it used to be.” People in that situation should be expected to ask some hard questions about what they’re buying.
2. I don’t want to directly accuse Srigley of this, knowing nothing about him beyond his bad column, but I really do think there’s a real dimension of egotism and pining for lost hierarchies involved in this particular whine. Most faculty members aren’t so clueless about their students that they actually think it’s particularly likely to have the same kind of love of learning and intellectual pursuit that they do. So what they really want, I suspect, is more convincing performances of that; a kind of ritual affirming the status-ambitions of someone who enjoys going to work every day and playing the brilliant professor. This is an ugly desire, but particularly so in light of (1) above.
3. Srigley doesn’t use the term, so this is a bit of a tangent, but this reminds me a bit of why I get annoyed by lazy “everything I don’t like goes together” style of complaining about changes in university/higher education under the banner of “the neoliberalization of the university.”* I take it that insofar as neoliberal has a clear meaning it implies the application of market-oriented logics, incentives, behaviors, and such to institutions and social structures that historically operated on some alternative, or market-oriented actors descending upon those institutions and altering them for their own purposes. This actually does capture a significant part of what’s gone wrong in higher education; the destructive rise of a self-dealing vampiric upper management class with no allegiance to some of the institutions longstanding values and mission fits well within this narrative, for example. But subsuming “students acting more like consumers” (if there is even a meaningful change here, which I’m not conceding) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. With the caveat that they won’t always do it well and shouldn’t automatically get everything they want, that students are trying to figure out what they want from this and having the courage to voice it should be expected and, frankly, welcomed. There are a lot of aspects of higher education worthy of criticism; overreliance on the metanarrative of ‘neoliberalization’ runs the danger of obscuring our efforts to do so, while affirming some of our less well-earned priors.
h/t John Protevi.
* As he is wont to do, Freddie provides the reductio: anti-racist student protesters who are Doing It Wrong are cast as agents of neoliberalism.