The Gates of Academe: What Kind of Students Are We?

One look at me and a casual observer would know that I am not a traditional student. But excepting this old man, what of the modern college student of the early 21st century? Recently, on another blog, I linked to several posts about another perspective on the current crop of students...which was not entirely positive. I suppose it is the fate of those outside the current generation of students to take issue with the essence of the modern experience, just as it may be the fate of today's student to discount the wisdom of those that have preceded them in the journey through academe. In spite of the myopia of both perspectives, the discussion can inform, and thus serve, perhaps, as a bridge for common understanding. Dum spiro spero.......

Here's another retrospective piece on the difference between the student of today, and the student of the 60s, that halcyon age of revolution, passion, and tolerance.

Some snippets of the piece.....

Some years ago a friend mentioned that a professor at Berkeley he knew had either left for another teaching job or quit teaching altogether (I can’t remember which). The professor had no complaints about the salary, his opportunities to do research and writing, or his department colleagues. In most respects, he was quite happy at Cal—except for the students. And in fact, his complaints about the students were quite limited and specific. He had told my friend that the students were very, very good academically. They could and did do the work. They kept up with the course material, and did well on tests. But they were boring. They weren’t passionate. They weren’t engaged. And because the students were boring, he had come to find teaching boring. So he gave up his tenured position for some other place in academe, or perhaps outside academe altogether.

My friend told me that the professor’s indictment had been directed at virtually all of his students on the campus, but he had mentioned his Asian-American students as the clearest examples of what he had come to dislike about his students—always very bright, always very academically competent, always intent on doing well—but boring.
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I did my teaching at Northwestern University, where most of the students had what I came to regard as "the habits of achievement." They did the reading, most of them could write a respectable paper, many of them talked decently in response to my questions. They made it difficult for me to give them less than a B for the course. But the only students who genuinely interested me went beyond being good students to become passionate ones. Their minds, I could tell, were engaged upon more than merely getting another high grade. The number of such students was remarkably small; if I had to pin it down, I should say they comprised well under 3 percent, and not all of them received A's from me.
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Asian-Americans comprise a much smaller percentage of enrollments at Northwestern than at Berkeley. But Epstein doesn’t think much of the students at Northwestern, either, and his criticisms are very similar to those expressed by those who have mentioned Asian-American students specifically in this connection. This is not a racial and ethnic issue. Asian-Americans simply exemplify traits that many faculty and observers of American higher education have started to feel ambivalent about and to find problematic when they are carried beyond a certain point. Furthermore, Epstein seems to put his finger on the wider problem. It’s not just the narrow academic focus: it’s the whole achievement-oriented mentality of the current generation of students—and its predecessors for several decades.
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Horowitz’s complaints in Campus Life prefigured those of current observers of the college scene like Joseph Epstein:

When undergraduates perceive college as mere preparation for professional school, they hold themselves in. They push themselves to make high grades and present an unblemished portrait before an admissions committee. This means that they do not let themselves explore their inner selves or their world. How can they afford the luxury of contemplation when they are accumulating the grade point average necessary for application forms? How can they ask themselves the painful questions of youth? Real growth might knock them off the ladder to success.

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In the Sixties at Berkeley, we shared some of the characteristics of the students Horowitz interviewed (and liked) in the 1980s, but we didn’t have to feel we were non-conformists. We were not swimming against a powerful tide: we felt we were the tide. Our professors in the Sixties at Berkeley might have found us immature, but it is most unlikely that they would have found us boring. The French would have described us as engagé, and I’m sure the university was better for it.

It would be interesting to canvas the opinion of faculty members whose memory covers more than the thirty years that Joseph Epstein taught at Northwestern. That takes Epstein back to 1974—when according to Horowitz undergraduate culture had resumed the trend towards "grade grinding" and pre-professionalism—and not to the Sixties. Perhaps a survey of professors who taught in the Sixties would confirm an impression of mine that might strike many as heretical and shocking: that the Golden Age of the American university was Berkeley (and other universities like it) in the Sixties.