Reply #51: In my college teaching days [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I found that discouragingly few students were really interested in anything that hadn't been approved by the pop culture. If it wasn't sports, top ten movies, fashion, drinking, pop music, drugs, sex, TV, and maybe, depending on the person, fundie religion or fraternity/sorority activities, they just weren't interested.

Oh, occasionally, you'd get people briefly excited about a topic that was in the news a lot --tropical rainforests were a big issue one year--, but then it was back to being mind-numbed by the media. When I asked some students about this, they claimed that it was because their lives were so "stressful." These were mostly suburban and small town white kids from the Pacific Northwest, by the way.

Yet when I asked some of those same kids (when interviewing them for possible study abroad) what the most stressful experience in their lives had been, they'd say, "Uh, I don't know. Maybe moving away from home for the first time?"

I was far from the only faculty member with this complaint.

Howard Dean was being built up in the media for months before Iowa. The media-inspired bandwagon effect took hold, and it looked as if all the "cool kids" were going for Dean. I doubt that many of them even knew what he stood for, if my memories of some of the "bandwagon" attendees at anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the 1960s serve me correctly.

Another DUer posted a story (and I didn't bookmark the thread) about how one campus in Iowa had 50 students pledged to caucus for Dean and only 3 of them showed up. I don't recall what was on TV that night, but I bet there was either some "must see TV" on or midterms in a couple of large-enrollment classes or a major campus social event, and caucusing just didn't seem "important."

When Dean came in 3rd in Iowa, he was no longer "cool," since only winners are cool in the college world, and the average student lost interest and returned to such weighty matters as gearing up for the fraternity/sorority ski trip or looking for a place with a projection TV for watching the Super Bowl.

I know that there are a lot of college and high school student DUers who are active, informed, and aware. But I think they would tell you that they are a minority on their own campuses and that most of their fellow students don't care about politics or much of anything else that is outside the pop culture mainstream.