The College Conundrum
By Suzanne Fields
Thursday, October 4, 2007

College just ain't what it used to be. The evidence lies all around. If you're a baby boomer you're going to feel old, very old.

Nicholas Handler, a Yale junior and the winner of an essay contest by the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times, says the contemporary college generation is "post-everything, post-cold war, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post 9/11." He even subscribes to literary critic Frederic Jameson's description of the young as "post-literate." Instead of rebels without a cause, their cause is rebelling against their parents' generation by pointedly not rebelling. The students who protest just to imagine how their parents might have felt are reduced to wearing their parents' old Che Guevara T-shirts.

But the fault, dear Brutus, may not lie with those parents, but the generation's professors, writes Frankie Thomas, a junior at the University of Southern California and a runner-up in the contest. "They made us buy and read $100 textbooks that they had written themselves," she writes. "Their lectures were word-for-word recitations of these very books. And it was excruciatingly clear, from the way they spoke, that these may have been the only books they had ever read." Such are the luxuries of academic tenure. the rest