IF YOU WANT TO GET CHEERED UP, go to a college campus. I spent a day at Yale this week and found the campus alive with debate. Students were generally more supportive of George W. Bush and the war effort than their professors, and there was a wide range of views. What’s more, some of the middle-aged academics seemed to be rethinking things. From what people told me and from what I saw, professors were genuinely listening to students, not only to figure out what the next generation thinks, but as a part of a reappraisal of their own thinking. I got the impression of minds being opened, of new facts and new ideas being considered.
I spent a lot of time on college campuses a year ago writing a piece for the Atlantic Monthly called “The Organization Kid,” and I found a student generation that was incredibly hard-working, morally earnest, deferential to authority, and not much interested in politics and national affairs. The students I saw then had their days tightly packed with studies, extracurricular activities, and community service. They had a professional attitude toward college–that it was one step in a lifelong stairway of achievement–and compared with past generations they didn’t seem passionately committed to ideas.
But when I spoke with students in New Haven this week, they described furious arguments in the dining hall over the U.S. response to September 11. I met one young man who had enlisted in the Marines. I met several who were quite willing to talk about evil, and who basically endorsed President Bush’s use of that term. I met several who felt that their professors had not prepared them to think about Osama bin Laden. One young man said his professors had taught him how to deconstruct, disentangle, and debunk. But they hadn’t actually taught him how to construct a moral argument. If I had to summarize the frustration that some of the students expressed, I would say this: On campus they found themselves wrapped in a haze of relativism. There were words and jargon and ideas everywhere, but nothing solid that would enable a person to climb from one idea to the next. These students were trying to form judgments, yet were blocked by the accumulated habits of non-judgmentalism.
The argument at Yale is not the same as the argument in Washington. In D.C., we talk about whether the United States should target Iraq, or how to construct a post-Taliban coalition in Afghanistan, or whether Russia is truly throwing in with the West. At Yale, the argument is still over whether America partly deserves the enmity of the Islamic militants, and whether the American response is moral. At Yale, the frame of debate is still four notches to the left. There are still some post-colonial theorists around, and for them every exercise of American power is somehow akin to the extermination of the American Indians. And compared with most of America, Yale is still secular. One doesn’t realize how integrated religion is into most of American life until one goes to a place where the religious element is largely absent.
But I also got the sense that a lot of the old icons were considered less relevant. I got some indications that people like Edward Said, Eric Foner, and Noam Chomsky were coming to be seen as part of an over-the-hill generation whose insights are dated. While it is still very uncool to be seen as conservative–conservatives are dweebs with bow ties–it’s also very uncool to be seen as a leftover from the 1960s. Both groups are seen as living in a time warp. One has the sense that most students consider themselves part of a mushy middle that is struggling to solidify into something.
The students are still incredibly hard-working. Many of them don’t have time for real romantic relationships. They still have a weirdly inverted social scene in which a man and a woman will rarely formally “go out.” Instead there are groups of friendships, and sometimes a friendship will involve sex and sometimes it won’t. In many cases a friendship is taken more seriously than a sexual relationship, because friends share their feelings while sex partners just swap bodily fluids.
Still, the overwhelming sense I got from my time at Yale (which was admittedly short and scattershot–I talked with two classes, and met with just a handful of other faculty members, administrators, and students) was that the place did not seem like a cloister. It did not seem dominated by ossified academic jargon. It was not dominated by narrowly meritocratic strivers or by otherworldly professors. Instead it struck me as a place of true inquiry. It almost made me wish I were an academic. Well, not quite.
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
