I was moved by this read:
March 23, 2002
Debate? Dissent? Discussion? Oh, Don't Go
There!
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
That familiar interjection "whatever" says a lot about
the state of mind of college students today. So do the
catch phrases "no problem," "not even" and "don't go
there."
Noisy dorm and dining room debates are no longer de
rigueur as they were during earlier decades; quiet
acceptance of differing views ? be they political or
aesthetic ? is increasingly the rule.
Neil Howe and William Strauss's book "Millennials
Rising" ? a survey of the post-Gen X generation ?
suggests that the young people born in the early
1980's and afterward are, as a group, less rebellious
than their predecessors, more practical-minded, less
individualistic and more inclined to value "team over
self, duties over rights, honor over feeling, action over
words."
"Much the opposite of boomers at the same age," the
authors write, "millennials feel more of an urge to
homogenize, to celebrate ties that bind rather than
differences that splinter."
These are gross generalizations, of course, but a
student's article titled "The Silent Classroom," which
appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of Amherst magazine,
suggested that upperclassmen at that college tend to
be guarded and private about their intellectual beliefs.
And in this writer's own completely unscientific
survey, professors and administrators observed that
students today tend to be more respectful of authority
? parental and professorial ? than they used to be, and
more reticent about public disputation.
"My sense from talking to students and other faculty
is that out of class, students are interested in hearing
another person's point of view, but not interested in
engaging it, in challenging it or being challenged,"
Joseph W. Gordon, dean of undergraduate education
at Yale, said. "So they'll be very accepting of other
points of view very different from their own. They live
in a world that's very diverse, but it's a diversity that's
more parallel than cross-stitched."
The students' reticence about debate stems, in part,
from the fact that the great issues of the day ? the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan ?
do not engender the sort of dissent that the Vietnam
War did in an earlier era. It also has roots in a
disillusionment with the vitriolic partisanship that
held sway in Washington in the 1990's: the often
petty haggling between right and left, Republicans
and Democrats, during President Bill Clinton's
impeachment hearings and the disputed presidential
election of 2000, and the spectacle of liberals and
conservatives screaming at each other on television
programs like "Crossfire."
"Debate has gotten a very bad name in our culture,"
Jeff Nunokawa, a professor of English at Princeton
University, said. "It's become synonymous with some
of the most nonintellectual forms of bullying, rather
than as an opportunity for deliberative democracy."
He added that while the events of Sept. 11 may well
serve as a kind of wake-up call, many of his students
say that "it's not politic or polite to seem to care too
much about abstract issues."
"Many of them are intensely socially conscientious,
caring and committed," he said. "It's just not clear
precisely what they wish to commit themselves to."
In a much talked-about article in The Atlantic
Monthly a year ago, the writer David Brooks argued
that elite college students today "don't shout out their
differences or declare them in political or social
movements" because they do not belong to a
generation that is "fighting to emancipate itself from
the past," because most of them are "not trying to
buck the system; they're trying to climb it." And yet
to suggest that the archetypal student today is "the
Organization Kid," as Mr. Brooks did, seems too
simplistic, ignoring the powerful effect that certain
academic modes of thinking ? from multiculturalism
to deconstruction ? have had in shaping contemporary
college discourse.
Indeed, the reluctance of today's students to engage
in impassioned debate can be seen as a byproduct of a
philosophical relativism, fostered by theories that
gained ascendance in academia in the last two
decades and that have seeped into the broader culture.
While deconstruction promoted the indeterminacy of
texts, the broader principle of subjectivity has been
embraced by everyone from biographers (like
Edmund Morris, whose biography of President
Ronald Reagan mixed fact and fiction) to scholars
(who have inserted personal testimony in their work
to underscore their own biases). Because subjectivity
enshrines ideas that are partial and fragmentary by
definition, it tends to preclude searches for larger,
overarching truths, thereby undermining a strong
culture of contestation.
At the same time, multiculturalism and identity
politics were questioning the very existence of
objective truths and a single historical reality. As the
historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret
Jacob observed in their book, "Telling the Truth
About History," radical multiculturalists celebrated
"the virtues of fragmentation," arguing that "since all
history has a political ? often a propaganda ? function,
it is time for each group to rewrite history from its
own perspective and thereby reaffirm its own past."
During the height of the culture wars of the early
90's, such views led to vociferous showdowns
between academic radicals and traditionalists. It also
led to the politicization of subjects like history and
literature, and ideological posturing that could be
reductive and doctrinaire in the extreme. Thankfully,
these excesses have begun to die down, as bipolar
dogmatism has started to give way to a scholarly
eclecticism ? less concerned with large paradigms,
and more focused on narrower issues ? but the legacy
of multiculturalism and identity politics remains
potent on college campuses.
On one hand, it has made students more accepting of
individuals different from themselves, more tolerant
of other races, religions and sexual orientations. But
this tolerance of other people also seems to have
resulted in a reluctance to engage in the sort of
impassioned argumentation that many baby boomers
remember from their college days.
"It's as though there's no distinction between the
person and the argument, as though to criticize an
argument would be injurious to the person," said
Amanda Anderson, an English professor at Johns
Hopkins University and the author of a forthcoming
book, "The Way We Argue Now." "Because so many
forms of scholarly inquiry today foreground people's
lived experience, there's this kind of odd
overtactfulness. In many ways, it's emanating from a
good thing, but it's turned into a disabling thing."
"A lot of professors complain about the way students
make appeals to relativism today," Professor
Anderson added. "It's difficult because it's coming
out of genuinely pluralistic orientation and a desire to
get along, but it makes argument and rigorous
analysis very difficult, because people will stop and
say, `I guess I just disagree.' "
Outside the classroom, it's a mindset ratified by the
PLUR ("Peace, Love, Unity and Respect") T-shirts
worn by ravers (whose drug of choice is Ecstasy,
which induces warm, fuzzy feelings of communion).
It is also a mindset reinforced by television shows like
"Oprah" that preach self-esteem and the
accommodation of others, and by the Internet, which
instead of leading to a global village, has created a
multitude of self-contained tribes ? niche cultures in
which like-minded people can talk to like-minded
people and filter out information that might
undermine their views.
At the same time, the diminished debate syndrome
mirrors the irony-suffused sensibility of many
millennial-era students. Irony, after all, represents a
form of detachment; like the knee-jerk acceptance of
the positions of others, it's a defensive mode that
enables one to avoid commitment and stand above
the fray.
What are the consequences of students' growing
reluctance to debate? Though it represents a welcome
departure from the polarized mudslinging of the 90's
culture wars, it also represents a failure to fully
engage with the world, a failure to test one's
convictions against the logic and passions of others. It
suggests a closing off of the possibilities of growth
and transformation and a repudiation of the process of
consensus building. "It doesn't bode well for
democratic practice in this country," Professor
Anderson said. "To keep democracy vital, it's
important that students learn to integrate debate into
their lives and see it modeled for them, in a productive
way, when they're in school." |
