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Debate?
Dissent? Discussion? Oh, don't go there!
Summer
2002
by
Michiko Kakutani '76
Michiko
Kakutani is the lead book reviewer for the New York Times. Copyright © 2002 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.
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-GenX generation -- suggests
that the young people born in the early 1980s 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."
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What
are the consequences of students' growing reluctance to
debate?
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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," says Joseph W. Gordon, dean of undergraduate education at Yale. "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 September 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 1990s: the often petty haggling between right
and left, Republicans and Democrats, during 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,"
says Jeff Nunokawa, a professor of English at Princeton University.
"It's become synonymous with some of the most nonintellectual forms
of bullying, rather than as an opportunity for deliberative democracy."
He adds 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.
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, 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
does, 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 observe
in their book, Telling
the Truth About History, radical multiculturalists celebrate
"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 1990s, 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,"
says 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," adds Anderson. "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 1990s 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," says Anderson. "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."  |
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