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Ron Charles, a senior editor at the Washington Post, has an op-ed in today’s paper (“On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats“) about how much the current generation of college students … well, sucks.
They don’t read great literature, apparently. They don’t read Richard Brautigan. (Really? Richard Brautigan?) They’re not interested enough in books of poetry, or in artsy smutty (published) diaries. And this lack of interest in the printed-and-bound word is the source of their lack of interest in politics.
Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not clear. The piece is a mess, frankly. Examples:
- Charles doesn’t see any contradiction in quoting a prof who sniffs that today’s college students “do not have any shame about reading inferior texts” and complaining that this generation hasn’t produced its own Jerry Rubin.
- When he wants to know whether there’s any activism on the campus of today, he asks the co-editor of the Kent State literary magazine.
- He grounds his claim that students are politically disengaged by linking to a web essay whose first line is “College freshmen are more politically engaged today than at any point during the last 40 years.”
Charles says this generation isn’t reading, or producing, radical novels or poetry — but most of the radical writers he cites are polemicists. Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, and Malcolm X weren’t writing novels, and Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, and Richard Brautigan weren’t leading revolutions. (If a great political novel emerged from the ferment of the late 1960s, Charles doesn’t mention it.)
The moment that Charles is lamenting is not a moment of radicalism’s ascendance in culture, it’s a moment of counterculture’s ascendance in mass media, and of publishing’s dominance in the media mix. Is Soul On Ice a more incisive critique of American racial politics than The Wire? Was Soul On Ice more read in its heyday than The Wire was watched when it came out a few years ago? Charles doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.
Charles is eager to juxtapose books with the internet, as if books and Twitter are the only two media in existence. But The Autobiography of Malcolm X wasn’t published until after Malcolm’s assassination — Malcolm didn’t get his word out through writing books, he got it out through newspapers and speeches. Abbie Hoffman did write books, but he did it for a simple reason: television and radio didn’t have a place for him, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.
This is a core truth that passes Charles by — college students read Soul On Ice in the late 1960s because it was their only way to find out what Eldridge Cleaver was all about. They read Anais Nin because she, and writers like her, were their only source of smut. They read Jerry Rubin’s Do It! for the cartoons, and the grainy black-and-white photos of naked hippies, and because there was no way in hell that Rubin was ever going to get a chance to do his schtick on television.
Jon Stewart doesn’t exist in Charles’ conception of today’s college student’s intellectual universe. The millions of hits that political rants past and present are getting on YouTube don’t exist. Barack Obama exists — Charles mentions in passing that he’s a top selling author on American campuses — but as Meredith Sires notes, that fact seems to have left no impression on him.
We are living in an age when political discourse is more open — and more open-ended — than it’s ever been before. We are living in an age of sharply rising youth political engagement, of the production and consumption of tremendous new cultural artifacts, of the redefining of what culture is and who it’s for. But Charles can’t — or won’t — see any of it.
The Volokh Conspiracy has a post up on the survey of faculty political beliefs that we linked to yesterday, arguing that it understates professors’ leftward tilt.
First, it says, research suggests that the 28% of survey respondents who consider themselves “middle of the road” are probably more liberal than the average American moderate. Second, it notes that the only left-wing options offered were “liberal” or “far left,” and wonders if the inclusion of a “radical” option would have brought the left-of-liberal numbers up.
My own sense is that surveys like this are more useful for examining change over time rather than for their precise numbers, but it’s always good to take a hard look at their assumptions and skews anyway.
A new study of more than twenty thousand full-time faculty at American four-year colleges and universities reveals a professoriate that tilts left, but not at the expense of ideological diversity.
In the study, 55.8% of faculty surveyed described themselves as “liberal” or “far left,” as opposed to 44.3% who called themselves “middle of the road,” “conservative,” or “far right.”
These results are almost identical to those collected the last time this survey was conducted, three years ago. Other findings changed dramatically, however:
- 66.1% said they had a professional responsibility to “help students develop personal values,” an increase of 15.3 points since the previous study.
- 70.2% said the same of helping students to “develop moral character,” a 13.1 point gain.
- 75.2% said they work to “enhance students’ knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups,” a 17.6 point rise.
- 55.5% said they consider it “very important” or “essential” to foster “a commitment to community service” in their students, a 19.1 increase.
We’ve just gotten a heads-up from Roy of The Young Vote about an action taking place in New York this afternoon…
At 3 pm today, there’s going to be a CUNY rally at BMCC against Governor Paterson’s proposed budget cuts and tuition hikes. The rally is going to be held at the outdoor plaza at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, 199 Chambers Street, and will be followed by a march on City Hall at four.
Here’s the rally’s facebook event page and a map of the location.
For the last four years a growing movement of Harvard medical students has been working to expose and limit pharmaceutical companies’ influence on their university.
So they were perturbed, to say the least, when they discovered a representative of the giant drug company Pfizer photographing students participating in an on-campus demonstration on the issue last fall.
Pfizer admits that the photographer was one of their employees, but refuses to release the man’s name, and contends, as the New York Times paraphrased their statement, that he “photographed the students for personal use.”
At least 149 Harvard medical school faculty are on the Pfizer payroll in one way or another, and the company finances two research projects and a continuing medical education program on campus. In addition, Pfizer made donations of $350,000 to the medical school last year.
The pharmaceutical industry is already the subject of a Senate investigation of their influence on American medical schools, and yesterday Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley sent Pfizer a letter saying he was “greatly disturbed” by the the incident, which, he said, “raise[s] concerns that Pfizer is attempting to intimidate young scholars from professing their independent views on issues that they think are critical to science, medicine, and the health and welfare of American taxpayers.”
Grassley asked Pfizer to provide him with an accounting of all payments the company made to Harvard medical faculty since the beginning of 2007, and of all corporate “communications [including photos] regarding Harvard medical students demonstrating and/or agitating against pharmaceutical influence in medicine” since the beginning of 2008.
He gave them a one-week deadline to respond, and a Pfizer representative said on Tuesday that it would “fully cooperate with Senator Grassley’s request for information.”
studentactivism.net 
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