Last Friday, the New York Times ran a story about a columnist for Yale's student newspaper. The student's column was solely about sex, and it was evidently the most popular column in the Yale Daily News. This got me to think, "What if The Spectrum had a column devoted only to sex?" This reminded me that not only do I know all of our columnists, I am one of the columnists, thus prompting me to answer my own thought, "perhaps not."
This Yale columnist told the Times that she gets most of her ideas from her friends. Well, this one's easier to answer for me. See, I live with mostly engineering majors, and most of them are my friends; should I use the same method for column material as she, the students at UB would read about Battlebots and differential equations every other Wednesday.
No, I didn't think you'd like that either.
So, what do college students want to read about? Obviously, sex sells, and apparently it's working really well at Yale. I think about my father's generation, though; he was an undergraduate at the height of Vietnam and in law school at the height of Watergate. I'm sure the newspapers put out by students then were filled with political and social debate.
As a big geek, that's exactly what I'd like to write about. You know, save sex for the bedroom, bring me Bush vs. Saddam, Fallwell vs. Islam, John Paul II vs. abortion, et cetera. I wrote a column early in the semester about Iraq, and the only letter I received about it was from a student at Southern Illinois University. I wrote a column two weeks ago about girls and relationships, and I got actual hate mail.
I wish I could say that this is a startling development, but easily the most popular part of any student publication at UB is the Generation personals, a sexually explicit, no-holds barred hormone-fest in print.
Naturally, I read them too.
My point is that at one time college students were the most visibly politically active social demographic in America. Our own government, in 1970, murdered a Kent State University student for protesting Vietnam. That was before any of them under 21 could vote, but while any of the men over 18 could be sent to Saigon upon the expiration of their student deferments.
College students were on the front lines of the sexual revolution, and college students embraced rock 'n' roll. Environmentalism has a home in academia, and so does the civil rights movement. It was people our age that fought the Nazis in the 1940s, and it was people our age that fought the U.S. government in the 1960s. I have to believe that there is more to the student population than sexual distraction.
I was an Orientation Aid this summer, and I saw what I think was the very best of college students. Our staff lived, worked and partied together. We would pick each other up when things got rough, and not just for the sake of thriving at a job on three hours of sleep, but because we could empathize with one another.
Especially inspiring were the freshmen, trying to show each other around, acclimating each other to campus. It was the biggest step in their lives, and they wanted to do it together. People they had met that day, in line for a room key or eating a boxed lunch that made American Airlines cuisine taste like an Emeril dish.
This type of humanity, compassion and empathy are what we're capable of, and it's imperative to remember that. UB has students involved in political debate, who care about social ills and sympathize with the unfortunate, yet seemingly behind closed doors. We are no different than our parents' generation; we just don't have a visible rallying point or the feeling that we can change anything. We retreat to simple entertainment, like sex columns, for our social consciousness.
Society is ready for open, biting dialogue; it craves it, but my generation has been largely inoculated to controversy, deafened to the sound of unrest throughout the world. The university atmosphere has historically been a haven of liberal thought, of new ideas, and of innovation. Now, college is seen as the mother of all keggers mixed with social apathy. At UB, I see the same thought, reiterated in a million ways, and that thought is of boredom, listlessness and intellectual malaise. Students from Wilkeson to Winspear are socially famished. The cause might be distrust in authority, yet it might also be too much trust in authority. My guess is that it's the latter.
We've been coddled, our parents give us everything, and we have no incentive to work. In the Great Depression, working and initiative meant eating the next day. Today it is some intangible mark of achievement, like a grade or some other institutional pat on the back. The desperation is gone, the goals are muted, and the reasons for trying at all are jaded. In short, we are weak.
In high school, my AP European History teacher would ask us, if there were another Pearl Harbor, would we as a generation want to fight? I was a high school grad for two and a half months before our Pearl Harbor, and my teacher's cynicism has been justified. We let George Dubya and his Lone Star Posse play earth's clean-up hitter, and all they've done in the past year was swing really hard at a ball on a tee. Now the United Nations throws them a curve and it's Casey all over again.
Where are we, the college students, on this? Who knows? We haven't said anything. Richard Nixon knew exactly how the college students felt about him. Sure, he didn't care, but at least they let him hear it. What about El Presidente Bush Dos? He doesn't care either, but we have hardly given him the chance to know, and it's not his IQ this time that's hampering him, it's our lack of volume. Maybe we're too busy with our heads elsewhere - somewhere in our pants, perhaps.
