Props again to Thivai for pointing out this article:

Thresher made a distinction between students who come to campus in a “poetic” frame of mind and those who come in a “prudential” frame of mind. “Certainly more kids are entering in a prudential frame of mind,” Hargadon said. “Most kids see their education as a means to an end.”

They’re not trying to buck the system; they’re trying to climb it, and they are streamlined for ascent. Hence they are not a disputatious group. I often heard at Princeton a verbal tic to be found in model young people these days: if someone is about to disagree with someone else in a group, he or she will apologize beforehand, and will couch the disagreement in the most civil, nonconfrontational terms available. These students are also extremely respectful of authority, treating their professors as one might treat a CEO or a division head at a company meeting.

“Undergrads somehow got this ethos that the faculty is sacrosanct,” Dave Wilkinson, a professor of physics, told me. “You don’t mess with the faculty. I cannot get the students to call me by my first name.” Aaron Friedberg, who teaches international relations, said, “It’s very rare to get a student to challenge anything or to take a position that’s counter to what the professor says.” Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist, lamented, “They are disconcertingly comfortable with authority. That’s the most common complaint the faculty has of Princeton students. They’re eager to please, eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them, eager to conform.”

For the generation of runners of things which came to power in the Clinton years, at least a modest degree of participation in college-years protest was very nearly mandatory. The new elite does not protest. Young achievers vaguely know that they are supposed to feel guilty about not marching in the street for some cause. But they don’t seem to feel guilty. When the controversial ethicist Peter Singer was hired by Princeton, there were protests over his views on euthanasia. But it was mostly outsiders who protested, not students. Two years ago the administration outlawed the Nude Olympics, a raucous school tradition. Many of the students were upset, but not enough to protest. “It wasn’t rational to buck authority once you found out what the penalties were,” one student journalist told me. “The university said they would suspend you from school for a year.” A prudential ethos indeed.

I have a lot of problems with this article and hyperbolic descriptions of rediculous classifications like “today’s young elite,” but with that said, they always hold some truth. There are always small observations that we can relate to - and that’s why there is way too much of this stereotyping lit. in the press.

Anyway - reading it, I was overcome with this feeling of regret that I didn’t cause more trouble while at UCSD. I often felt that same disgusting “ethos that the faculty is sacrosanct.” And the faculty loves it … their egos inflating more every day. Also everywhere you look on that campus you can find students, “eager to please, eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them, eager to conform.”

I was part of that and I’ve realized it too late. Not that I idolized my professors, but I wasn’t informed enough to really argue with them. Now, every ten pages or so in whatever book or article I’m reading, I always think of some point I should have argued. The university sytem - at least at UCSD - gives you just enough room to protest, to make your point, to fill out your paperwork - that in the end it exhausts you and you realize it’s not worth the effort. You can complain, but you have to do it by their rules. There is a sociology at UCSD built around collecting individual accheivements, maintaining non-confrontation, and sucking up to professors who are also in a race to collect their accheivements. This can both postively bring about an atmosphere of respect and productivity and negatively bring about conformity and authoritarian elitism.

If anything was to break the conformist mind state of UCSD students I would have thought an ultra-conservative presidency and administration as well as unpopular war would have done just that, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Non-conformity at UCSD still means non-participation (it looks uncool to try) and operating in a small margin of rebelion which is mostly couched in intellectual rhetoric in order to impress professors (probably the original reason they are protesting in any case).