Have College Students Checked Out?
The Republican Administration continues on its merry way burning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Their agenda is as wide-sweeping as it is distressing and requires a compliant, uninformed (or misinformed), and apathetic populace.
Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country…
So it makes sense they’re putting America’s educational system on the chopping block. Ian Bogost shares some of the sad details in The Atlantic:
Since January, the Trump administration has frozen, canceled, or substantially cut billions of dollars in federal grants to universities. Johns Hopkins has had to fire more than 2,000 workers. The University of California has frozen staff hiring across all 10 of its campuses. Many other schools have cut back on graduate admissions. And international students and faculty have been placed at such high risk of detainment, deportation, or imprisonment that Brown University advised its own to avoid any travel outside the country for the foreseeable future.
Bogost notes that educators and administrators believe this is the worst attack on schools since the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Less federal money means fewer classes, higher tuition, and reduced access to money-strapped students. The classic American college experience which has provided generations with the time to think, to study, to follow Socrates’ injunction to “know thyself” may not be available much longer.
“Addiction to one screen or another has destroyed average student attention spans…“
Bogost again:
Your kid could end up on a campus with reduced student services and activities, aging rec centers, shrunken-down humanities departments, less prestigious faculty, and a class cohort that has been stripped of foreign students and also thinned of anyone who happens not to be well-off. It could be a dreary and degraded version of the life at school that you may have once enjoyed yourself.
Some pundits feel the worst has already occurred.
An anonymous college professor has been sharing their thoughts under the name of Hilarious Bookbinder on the Persuasion website. Bookbinder presents a picture of students and student life that is – to this reader – shocking, if not unexpected.
In a nutshell: addiction to one screen or another has destroyed average student attention spans. Students don’t read. They don’t study. Hell – sometimes they don’t even show up for class. (And they rarely apologize or offer a valid excuse for their absences.) They use Chat GPT to do their writing and don’t even try to hide it. Their sense of entitlement is as overweening as their achievements are underwhelming. All in all, it’s a devastating and disheartening picture of life on campus, circa 2025.
Bookbinder states up front that not all students are like this. It’s still possible to spark curiosity and foster learning. It’s just getting harder and harder and harder to do.
Here are a few of the highlights – if that’s the word – of Bookbinder’s piece:
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to and move their eyes over the words just to get it done…Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
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Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought. What I mean is the reflexive submission of the cheapest cliché as novel insight.
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The students cheat…I can’t assign papers anymore because I’ll just get AI back, and there’s nothing I can do to make it stop. Sadly, not writing exacerbates their illiteracy; writing is a muscle, and dedicated writing is a workout for the mind as well as the pen.
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The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages. I’ve mostly made my peace with that, do my best to give them a taste of the life of the mind, and celebrate the successes.
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Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies. Troy Jollimore writes, “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated over the past few semesters.” Faculty have seen a stunning level of disconnection.
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There’s more – a lot more, and if you’d like to read the rest (and I hope you will), you’ll find a link below. It doesn’t make one jubilant about the state of education in this country.
Let’s hope that whatever fate lies in store for America’s schools doesn’t make the sad state of affairs Bookbinder describes seem like a lost Golden Age.
Want to read the full piece?
Read “The Average College Student Is Illiterate” by Hilarius Bookbinder
