Since the rise of the counterculture in the 1960s and the idealization of rebellion for its own sake, it’s been awfully hard for young people to rebel. How are you supposed to be a rebel or a maverick when everybody else is one too? The Scrapbook solved this problem, as a university student on a left-wing campus many years ago, by wearing a tie to class. But we acknowledge that this was an extreme measure to which most peaceable young people would be reluctant to resort.
In the Washington Post this week, we read about a Boston College professor of philosophy who’s found a way to encourage real rebellion: She challenges students to ask someone on a date. Just—a simple date. She includes only two requirements: no alcohol and no physical contact.
At a time when campus social life seems to oscillate between drunken hookups on one end of the spectrum and loneliness on the other, dating can be a “weirdly countercultural thing to do,” as Professor Kerry Cronin puts it. And in the age of microaggressions, asking another student to coffee or dinner might easily sound like some strange and vaguely inappropriate advance.
Cronin also thinks college kids don’t date much anymore because they’re facing tremendous loads of student debt and need to find a good job to pay them off. “Even students’ parents are telling them: ‘Don’t get caught up in a relationship now; you need to get your career set and on track before you even really start thinking about that,’ ” she says. Dating entangles people in emotional relationships that distract them from long-term career goals; it’s far easier simply to hook up from time to time and move on.
“This is mostly not about meeting your soulmate,” Cronin tells her students; “it’s mostly about social courage and challenging yourself to be a little countercultural.”
How deeply sad that it’s come to this. But we’re happy to know there are cultural insurgents like Professor Cronin working to upend the conventions of a twisted age.
