Ron Charles, an op-ed columnist at the Washington Post, penned a strangely pessimistic column about the lack of political activism in college-age kids for Sunday's edition. His primary complaint is that not enough intellectucally engaging, lefty books are popular among the demographic. College kids are reading Twilight more than On the Road.
Well, all right. I suppose a moment of snobbery grounded in over-generalization is allowed for everyone, sometimes. But there is no excuse for putting this paragraph in the paper, where a lot of readers are going to see it and be, you know, misinformed, dumbed down, exactly the things that Charles says he finds distasteful in college kids:
A new survey of the attitudes of American college students published by the University of California at Los Angeles found that two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as "middle of the road" or "conservative." Such people aren't likely to stay up late at night arguing about Mary Daly's "Gyn/Ecology" or even Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."
This is extremely weird. The report of the study that Charles cites begins like this:
College freshman are more politically engaged today than at any point during the last 40 years, with 89.5 percent reporting that they frequently or occasionally discussed politics in the last year, according to UCLA's annual survey of the nation's entering students at four-year institutions.
The portion of incoming freshmen who frequently discussed politics in the last year - 35.6 percent - surpasses the 33.6 percent level recorded in 1968, itself a 40-year high mark of student political engagement. The 2008 level was also higher than in other recent presidential election years, including 1992 (29.7 percent), when Bill Clinton was elected, the survey found.
And about Charles' that claim that "two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as 'middle of the road' or 'conservative.'"? You gotta watch that kind of formulation -- it allows for a lot of weasel-room. Here is what the study actually says:
An increase was also seen in the proportion of students who characterize themselves as liberal, which reached its highest level in 35 years in 2008, at 31.0 percent. The percentage of incoming students who characterize themselves as politically middle-of-the-road, however, has seen a steady decline and in 2008 reached an all-time low of 43.3 percent, roughly the same percentage as in 1970. One in five students (20.7 percent) identified themselves as conservative in 2008, down from 23.1 percent in 2007.
So, yes, 64% of American college kids identify as "middle-of-the-road" or "conservative." But 74.3% of American college kids identify as "middle-of-the-road" or "liberal." And the number identifying as liberal is at a 35 year high, while conservatism is dropping on college campuses.
So what is Charles complaining about? The popularity of Twilight? Who cares? It's possible to be politically aware and also enjoy pop lit. In fact, the stats Charles alludes to are good evidence of that very fact.
Charles does point out that the current generation of college kids lacks a Kerouac, but maybe that's the fault of the writers, not the readers. A new Kerouac, a new Nin, would be pretty cool.
So . . . anyone sitting on a good book?