The Post Generation

It's not the culture wars, it's the culture shifts

I have been an instructor or a TA in college classrooms for just under fifteen years now. In that time, a lot has changed: social media went from being a fun pastime to a central part of life, often for the worse. Handwritten essays and exams all but vanished--although the rise of AI means they may be about to return. Students' interest in politics has waxed and waned, strongest during the 2016-2018 period and reaching a nadir about now.

The biggest changes, however, have been gradual and then sudden. Speaking in plain generalities: undergraduate students don't read mainstream sources anymore, they seem to read structured texts of any kind (magazine articles, books, novels) a lot less than any generation I've known, and shared experiences beyond social media seem to have largely vanished. At the same time, students are stressed and cynical in ways that seem both adaptive and maladaptive to their circumstances.

Something will need to change—or, rather, a whole lot of things. The first step, however, is to think about what these changes are and what’s producing them. Some changes have to do with broader shifts in the economy (like how the Internet has flattened the entire cultural and media industry), while others have to do with the increased uncertainty of the economy and the greater strain on student finances. Getting clear about this matters a lot.

Writing about classroom dynamics is a little risky, because there's always the chance that a student will think you're writing about them. In this case, I'm more than certain that I'm not, although since some of these dynamics have been accelerating they have been most pronounced this semester. I'm not judging, however: sometimes, as a social scientist, I'm just interested in observing and cataloguing changes. As a working instructor, more to the point, the feedback I'm most interested in comes from how different allusions, tactics, and even occasional jokes land. Those can be tracked, even if loosely, in the moment. And since some of my lectures and lessons have remained more or less the same over that period (some, of course, aren't even my own, but taken from the people for whom I served as a TA), I have a good sense about what some of the changes are.

Post-Religious

Surprisingly, the single biggest change in my classroom experience has been the death of religion. Students used to have at least a passing familiarity with the major tenets of Christianity and other prominent religions. When I teach about issue indivisibility and the bargaining model of war, I introduce the subject by referring to Solomon and the two mothers. That story used to be an on-ramp to questions about how you can't (and can) divide the indivisible. These days, I might as well be referring to some obscure Mesoamerican corn god or Polynesian genesis myths for all the familiarity it strikes with my classes. 

It's not just a question of knowing this story or that belief. It's a question of having any relationship to organized or traditional religion whatsoever. Although many of my students continue to have what would have looked like a "normal" relationship to religion thirty years ago (identifying as religious, attending services every once in a while, and so on), I would hesitate before saying that this is routine or unusual for their generation. Indeed, more often I'm met with bafflement or profoundly stereotypical anti-religious views that resemble the sort of accusations and beliefs that you'd expect from people raised in a profoundly irreligious country, like the USSR or China. Religion still exists, in other words, but it's not something that cuts across class or other lines--it's something that has become almost vestigial.

Some readers will mourn this, others will celebrate it. At a sociological level, it's stunning to me because it means that there's a whole realm of phenomena that I now have to approach as if there's no baseline whatsoever (imagine teaching about ISIS if people have no understanding that religious affections can generate anything but extremism--the case reads very differently to people taking this as a normal outcome rather than an exceptional one). At an andragogical level, it's like losing an entire repertoire of allusions and examples--imagine if everyone under 22 had never heard of professional sports or Star Wars, and then imagine trying to find common ground about how to explain the world. 

Post-Media

The statistics have not caught up with this observation (partly because the American use of time surveys are not released as often as I'd like) but I can say for sure that students read conventional sources less often than they used to. It was once the case (even at my current university) that at least some students would read the expected establishment sources and be more or less current with the New York Times, the Washington Post, or (for the rightist or the business major) the Wall Street Journal. That has faded past retrieval. 

By and large, the newspaper ritual has faded to the point that students seem to have only a hazy idea of how different news brands are "supposed" to relate to each other. That is, they've heard of CNN, NBC, the NYT, and so forth, but the idea that cable news, broadcast news, and newspapers fill different niches is mostly foreign to them. It's funny to me to occasionally get to explain how the three-network era worked to students, but it's also telling to me that the cachet of--and appreciation for--different media brands and outlets has largely gone away. (Need it be said that local newspapers may as well be the relics of a different civilization to them?)

In some ways, this is democratizing. In other ways, it represents the flattening of perceptions of what news is and how to evaluate news outlet quality beyond all reason. Anything on the Internet is presumptively of the same quality, because students do not encounter outlets beyond the Internet. All of the cues that used to help distinguish the quality press from the rest--even down to the quality of design and of advertisements (one could tell a lot from whether a magazine advertised Patek Philippe or memory aids)--has gone. High prestige outlets with smaller circulations, like the New Yorker, are not translating at all. 

What has replaced all of this? TikTok.

Post-Confident

I began my teaching as a TA sitting in the back of Politics of the Former Soviet Union in September 2008. A month before, Russia invaded Ukraine Georgia, and enrollment went from 20 or so to more than 50 (incidentally making this a much more difficult course to TA, as suddenly I was reading a lot more than I'd expected). A week or so into the semester, the markets crashed. And two months in, Barack Obama won. It was an exciting time!

Students reacted appropriately and engagingly with these topics. They knew what had happened and had questions about them. Beyond that, they had emotional reactions to them. And--and here's the kicker--they worried but they weren't frantic.

To be sure, this was at Georgetown, where course rosters had a VIP column just in case you were teaching a Shriver or a Kennedy. (Once, a professor mispronounced a Bush administration official's last name, and a student corrected the pronunciation. Challenged as to how the student was certain, the student replied, "He's my dad.") But this was also not far off from how UMass students engaged with the news and the world when I first arrived (2015-2018). The couple of weeks after the 2016 election felt like a calamity, and the student reaction was palpable.

Over time, however, students have become less interested in current events in general and more transactional in their relationship to college. Before the past couple of years, I'd never--literally never--had students tell me that they expected my class to be an easy A because it's a gen ed. (I teach two courses with gen ed tags, but both of them are important courses for our majors.) Students are a little bit more blunt in their demands these days, but not always in a way that’s productive.

Over the same period, students' relationship to current events have changed. Students have always been somewhat checked out of current events (I certainly was! I have little memory of a lot of medium-size events from the Bush administration because I was in school) but now they seem somewhat more so and their responses to events seem to be filtered through anxiety. Moreover, the overwhelming impression I get from discussions of current events is one of simple burnout and disinterest: yes, things are happening over there, but I can't change them and I wouldn't have the energy to if I did.

This seems like my harshest assessment but it's one where I'm most sympathetic to students. It is difficult to convey--perhaps impossible--to anyone who isn't in a college classroom how much more students have to deal with stress. Rents and living expenses are exorbitantly expensive, not least thanks to NIMBY college towns who seem bent on extracting as much rent from undergraduates as possible. (At this point, I assume there's someone with housing insecurity in every large class--even every medium sized class.) 

(Yes, old people, I hear you say that things were like this when you were in college too--but please consider that there's a difference between "occasionally this happened" and "this is now a structural feature of the classroom.")

The rising costs of everything but tuition (although at my university that will increase next year as well) shade everything about college. It's incredibly expensive to do any of this, and the only way that people can afford it--not justify it, but afford it--is to turn the credential into higher wages. If you're thinking about short-term economic necessities (and I don't just mean employment after college, but balancing 30 or 40 hours a week of work with school right now), then anything that doesn't seem immediately practical will be viewed with hostility. 

This isn't an intellectual response: it's a response from stress caused by specific material insecurities. The fact that such responses are then validated and intellectualized by social media and other outlets is a compounding factor. 

This provides a fertile ground for conflict and misinterpretation. If a professor isn't always "on", or if deadlines exist, or if feedback is given, then it's easier to label those as hostility, unfriendliness, or even unprofessionalism. Similarly, if students cynically believe that the only purpose of gen-ed courses is to make more money for the university (and, to be sure, that's about 15 percent of it), then why not use less than honest means to get through them? If you assume they're only pretending to teach us, then why not only pretend to learn?

---

I'm not enough of a reductionist to think that everything I'm seeing can be traced back to the fact that students are paying more for a credential whose return is less certain and which serves a transactional rather than transformational role in their lives. I do think, however, that conditions producing stress and anxiety make it harder to adopt a growth mindset, be open to perspectives and lessons that will only pay off over years rather than days, and to be open to connections with people in established institutions--not least because those institutions are (again, somewhat not unfairly) identified with the conditions producing scarcity in the first place.

I am, however, confident in one thing. Having a Ph.D. and being committed to an intellectual vocation (they are not the same thing) has always, everywhere, meant being somewhat separated from the cares of most people. Yet the erosion of common ground within student cohorts and between students and faculty is moving faster than I've seen it in my own career. And the changes are of such a fundamental sort that they are either beyond my problems to fix (I can't lower tuition or increase state aid, nor, really, can my institution) or require a massive effort to even try to redress (I guess I'm going to have to learn who Charli D'Amelio and someone called "Mr. Beast" are--I hope they have something useful to add to discussions of the bargaining model of war). Bigger but still plausible changes, like tweaking how the faculty transfers cultural capital, are not impossible but are likely to run into all the usual knives of faculty life.

Yet the real lesson here seems to be that there needs to be a fundamental re-connection between institutions, faculty, and students. Simply doing the same old things in the same old ways without addressing massively changed background conditions is a setup for failure. Throwing up our hands and just letting the students all pass with As is a threat to my self-worth and the value of my 403(b). Endlessly catering with "grace" is likely harmful. And so on. But something here needs to change.