A Millennium of Apathetic College Students
Present Parallels with the Past in Higher Education
golden age of higher education, a time when students devour books and eagerly participate in discussions for the sheer love of learning, is not what characterizes 2024, age of “transactional” students, who expect to get good grades and a degree in exchange for token amounts of work, making tuition payments, and not torching their instructors on end-of-semester evaluations – and will quickly turn to cheating if it offers the easiest path to these goals.
But the golden age of higher education can also be hard to find in the past. It was not the 1990s, two generations ago, when Generation X roamed the campus, not fretful Generation Z. Paul Trout, a disgruntled English professor at Montana State University assembled a mountain of evidence that education was being “poisoned by anti-intellectual slackers” in his article, “Disengaged Students and the Decline of Academic Standards.” A Virginia Tech professor reported a case when an instructor who tried to initiate a discussion was met with, “Who gives a shit!” Another professor observed students “getting by with the least possible effort.” Students blew off the readings, skipped class, and studied halfheartedly – but expected a good grade at semester’s end. “I pay so much to go to school here – you can’t give me D’s and F’s!” protested one student, while another threatened a professor that “I will be speaking to your superiors” if the professor did not come through with “a decent grade.” A book called Generation X Goes to College wondered if “the existing model of higher education even applies any longer to teaching this generation.”
These complaints came at the end of a long period of widening access to higher education. In 1869, only 1.3 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds were enrolled in college classes. By 1943, just before the GI Bill widened access to higher education, that figure had risen to just 6.8 percent. By 1970, the proportion had reached 35.8 percent. And by 1995, the figure was 56.6 percent. Rising numbers of students in college classes no doubt brought in many committed learners, but it also imported millions of uninterested students. For this reason, the mid-twentieth century was no golden age either.[1]
In 1980, economist Thomas Sowell fled teaching for the Hoover Institution after two decades of meeting friction for imposing high standards at multiple schools. He found that students often were “wholly lacking in interest,” “were constantly trying to manipulate their way to better grades,” and were quick to cheat. When he held them to high standards, they complained to Sowell’s supervisors, who often pressured Sowell to go easier.[2]
Russell Kirk, another distinguished public intellectual, was disgusted with what he saw of higher education while teaching the beneficiaries of the GI Bill at what was then called Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science in the late 1940s and early 1950s and then observing higher education over the next two decades. Opening the doors of the college had created “Behemoth U.” Michigan State grew from 5,000 in 1936 to 15,000 in 1953 to 40,000 by 1994. Growth filled schools with “crowds of bored and unqualified ‘students’ ” who were often “very nearly functionally illiterate.” Students were “resentful of being expected to read even textbooks” and were mainly driven by winning “certification and subsequent money.” One scholar Kirk took note of during these years estimated that most students had no goal for college. Most of the rest merely wanted to appear middle class, get a job, or win a credential. Only about 3 percent wanted learning for its own sake. The rapid growth of colleges and universities created an “inhuman scale” that made students feel like “an IBM number.” Anonymity made them feel justified when they cheated.[3]
Maybe the golden age was before the GI Bill. In 1932, Thomas Griffith started college at the University of Washington. Even then, he found it “an overcrowded educational factory for 10,000 students” who were mainly motivated by career success, not learning. “The criterion of any subject,” he wrote, “was ‘What good will it do me,’ and not our later selves but our immature minds were allowed to be the judges.” Any professors who bought up “enduring values” faced a “listless response.”[4]
Maybe the golden age came well before the twentieth century. Kirk pointed lovingly to 1877, when a freshman at Oberlin College was expected to learn German and Greek and read Livy, Xenophon, Horace, Lysias, Cicero, and Herodotus, a far more rigorous program of study than the desiccated ones of the mid-twentieth century.[5] But students showed a disregard for learning long before Behemoth U, too. In 1799, University of North Carolina students threw stones at professors and assaulted the school president. In 1805, North Carolina had a mere forty-five students – less than half the size of the roster of many individual courses at Kirk’s university – and yet half of them quit school in protest over new rules. In 1807, Princeton College students got so unruly that the state militia had to be called out, and almost half of the college’s 120 students were expelled.[6]
Maybe the golden age was the Middle Ages. Historian Morris Bishop found that the majority of students were serious back then, but he also found plenty of instances of apathy. At the University of Bologna, a student once slashed a classmate with a sword in class. Students at the University of Leipzig had a rule that forbade throwing stones at professors, a sign that the student body must have been quite unmanageable at one point. Some students put much of their energy into drinking heavily and chasing women. One reason for their apathy was a problem that sounds familiar: too few jobs for all the college graduates, trapping many in unappealing futures as beggars, thieves, performers, tutors, or teachers.[7]
A brief tour throughout the history of higher education suggests that resistance to education has always existed. No one naturally wants to come under a teacher’s discipline because learning is hard. As the author of Ecclesiastes wrote in ancient times, “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (12:12, ESV).
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[1] Susan B. Carter et al., ed., Historical Statistics of the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2:441-442
[2] Thomas Sowell, A Personal Odyssey (New York: Free Press, 2000), 270-271.
[3] Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 35-36, 76, 154; Russell Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1978), xvi, 5-6, 51, 102, 132, 214.
[4] Thomas Griffith, The Waist-High Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 22, 24.
[5] Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning, 35.
[6] Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 343-344.
[7] Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages (New York: American Heritage, 1968), 269-271.