I am a thirty-six year old college professor struggling to come to terms with my mortality. With each passing year, my students look younger, dress younger, and, most importantly, think younger. Unlike many of the people I teach, I still buy my music at the record store, do not have a Facebook profile, and have never sent an instant message. I have come to accept the look of polite boredom that passes across my students’ faces as I remember a time when phones were phones and cameras were cameras, the greatest threat to America’s security was a Soviet missile, and information rested on library shelves rather than internet servers.
Yet for all the consequences of advancing age, I find myself equally uncomfortable in the presence of older colleagues from around the country who lament students’ mercenary attitude toward grades, poor writing skills, and disinterest in learning for learning’s sake. In the public eye, these laments intensify as media outlets characterize people in their twenties as materialistic, coddled, and narcissistic. In November 2006, Forbes Magazine labeled the current crop of college students as the ‘most-managed generation’ because of their overbearing parents. Last February, a study released by five psychologists claimed that today’s college students are the most self-centered since the study’s origin in 1982.
If I am sympathetic to my students, it is only because I remember a time when my peers and I also suffered at the hands of our cranky elders. Not long ago, the ire of the middle-aged was directed at ‘Generation X,’ or the lazy, politically-apathetic, and morally-bankrupt slackers of the early 1990s. I can only remember the frustration I felt at the presumptions of a group of adults who had the privilege of being born during a period of unprecedented prosperity and political responsibility. While my parents’ generation had their trials, whether on the moon, on the phone to the Kremlin, or at the Dallas book depository, these events in no way compare to the confusion and anxiety felt by those born and raised amidst Watergate, two energy crises, the end of the Cold War, the 2000 election, and the tragedies of 2001. If there is a divide in this country, it is not to be found in red and blue states, or the religious and the secular, but between those born roughly before and after 1968, or between the ‘baby boomers’ and the rest of us.
Unlike our elders, my students and I grew up as connoisseurs of political scandal. Nixon resigned when I was an infant, Oliver North became a household name when I was in high school, and Jim Wright resigned as House Speaker as I was contemplating college. Those in their twenties may well be able to chart a similar trajectory through Monica Lewinsky, Mark Foley, and Scooter Libby. Like my students, I also grew up in a media-saturated age in which celebrities, whether O.J. Simpson or Paris Hilton, often and easily trump the more serious issues of the day. And I, too, know the capacity of technology to define a generation. When I started college some students still brought typewriters to school. When I graduated, we had email.
Perhaps the greatest difference between those who remember the 1960s and those who do not regards the increasing disparity in wealth that has come to characterize America since the 1970s and 1980s. As opportunities for some grow at a much faster rate than for others, the broad middle finds itself squeezed by rising college tuition, expensive health care, the reality that one could lose one’s job to someone overseas, and the sad truth that people under forty are paying into a social security system that will likely collapse the day after the last ‘baby boomer’ dies. For young people, the result is an intensely competitive world, with the frustrating knowledge that they will probably not do as well their parents, and that the people in charge would rather stall the solution into their old age than do the unpopular work of cleaning up the mess that they inherited and made worse.
In this environment, it is not hard to see why young people would embrace a guarded and self-interested view of their education or career. In an age when counter-culture icons peddle retirement plans on television, a nation’s infrastructure collapses as the cameras train on Lindsey Lohan, politicians on both sides of the aisle posture as American soldiers die, and government earmarks rise as personal savings decline, I can understand the urge to circle the wagons and ensure the future.
Perhaps my students will disagree with me. I don’t profess to know how they feel about their futures. Perhaps that is the point. It may just simply be time for those whose time has come and gone to get out of the way and stop pointing out the flaws of those with so much ahead of them. As my students return to college each semester, I urge them not to be distressed or distracted by the messes of those who should have known better. It is not their job to mediate disputes that took place on college campuses forty years ago, and it is not their fault that their elders turned out to be such a startling disappointment. One last piece of advice to them: don’t trust anybody. I mean nobody—even those in their thirties with whom they share the same basic experience. Sadly, we turned out like everyone else. When our moment came, we squandered it on dot com bubbles, sub-prime real estate, and reality television. I can only hope for better for them.
Jim Allegro turned in his flannel to teach history at the College of William and Mary.
