The Year of the Imaginary College Student
Why this surge of interest in campus life, especially as fodder for ridicule? What have college students come to represent to those who presume to inhabit the “real world” that awaits them? These reports and reactions arrive at a moment of heightened scrutiny concerning the usefulness of college itself, in an era of astoundingly high tuitions and fees, and some of them have a whiff of intergenerational condescension, that enduring sense that youth (and critical theory) is wasted on the young. Compared to the scenes of sixties protest that remain most romantically legible in the American imagination, contemporary activism strikes many as low stakes and unfocussed.
.. But it’s worth asking why the politics of everyday college life, from calls for more inclusive curricula to questions about whether campus buildings should continue honoring racist forefathers, have become so important to people spending their lives far from the classroom.
.. Consider the trajectory of the typical twenty-something, born in the early nineties, a product of the test-oriented No Child Left Behind educational model. This hypothetical student came of age during the Obama era, with a new understanding of America’s future demographics, at a moment when the narrative of a red and blue America was firm orthodoxy. This student’s first Presidential election may involve Donald Trump. Identity politics, in the world this student knows, are no longer solely the province of minorities who have been pushed to the margins. The same ideas about inclusivity and belonging that spark campus revolt also underlie the narratives of grievance and decline animating supporters of Trump and the Tea Party.
.. the reason that college stories have garnered so much attention this year is our general suspicion, within the real world, that the system no longer works. Their cries for justice sound out of step to those who can no longer imagine it. Maybe we’re troubled by these students’ attempts to imagine change on so microscopic a level.