WASHINGTON — The other day, while happily contemplating the
corruption that is turning up at the United Nations, my plans to
contemplate what it all means were disrupted by a telephone call
from a college student in tears. No, it was not a young man in
tears but a young woman, and so you will understand why I packed
away the stories of corruption in the United Nations. Reporters at
the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere have found that
Saddam was paying off world leaders — one being a powerful
bureaucrat at the UN — with billions of dollars skimmed from the
famed oil-for-peace program. This, along with mounting evidence
that the Europeans were prospering handsomely by supplying arms to
Saddam and any other well-heeled tyrant, might explain why “world
opinion” was so opposed to our invasion of Iraq. Documents in
Baghdad amount to a veritable corpus delicti.
Yet there will always be time to ventilate the misbehavior of
the hypocrites at the UN and in foreign capitals. For now I have my
troubled young friend to contend with. She is a student finishing a
college degree on a major American college campus, and her recent
experience reminds me a matter that has fetched my attention
frequently of late, to wit, many college students do not have much
to them. In a word, many are vacuous.
My friend had been visiting with some male and female friends in
her off-campus apartment. The friends were slow to leave as the
evening dragged on, and so she went to bed, expecting them — all
good friends — to depart soon after she disappeared. When she
awoke the next morning she found one of the young men had drunk his
way through the night in her living room, watching DVDs and
emptying her refrigerator. By 9:00 a.m. he was stupefied and mildly
abusive but otherwise preparing to drink his way through the day.
My friend sent him packing, but she was deeply troubled and I
suspect alarmed. She had never seen the young man act that way
before.
I guess this is what is called “binge drinking,” and apparently
there is a lot of it on college campuses nowadays. When I was a
student in the 1960s I knew of students who drank their way through
the weekend and would sozzle themselves on an occasional weeknight.
That was a lot of drinking, but apparently students today drink
with even more abandon. On college there is not much more to do.
Rendering oneself comatose is the most interesting pursuit
available.
Certainly the college curriculum on most campuses is neither
interesting nor demanding — which is the crux of the matter.
Anyone who has had an opportunity to compare the workload of a
generation ago with the workload carried by college students today
knows why college students have a lot of time on their hands. The
profs demand much less reading and writing today than in the 1960s
when campus reformers began to gut the curriculum. The reformers
relaxed the rigor of college studies. Today’s profs must have a lot
of time on their hands too. Maybe they too binge drink, but more
discreetly.
Actually the very best students today are probably as good as
the best students were in years gone by. Their performance upon
graduation suggests that. But it is the lesser students who strike
me as so empty. When I encounter them they seem almost always to be
very amiable but also ignorant, aimless, and bland. Today’s youth
culture lacks esprit. I suspect this is because so little
is demanded of the rank and file. They have their cars and
high-tech entertainments, ample funds and time on their hands. They
are a pale rendition of generations past.
I was struck by the vacuity of today’s college students while
watching CNN’s documentary of the rise and fall of Dr. Howard Dean.
Much of his support came from college students. They were the
contemporary version of the 1960s collegians who campaigned for
Senator Eugene McCarthy’s insurgent presidential bid against
President Lyndon Johnson by getting “Clean for Gene.” Those
students had some fizz to them. They sang folk music and they sang
well. They composed slogans and they were literate. I disagreed
with them, but they were for the most part learned,
highly-principled, political activists. Dean’s youthful volunteers
brigades were dopes, and untalented dopes. Unless CNN was befooling
us, the kids were listless, vacant, and not even very convincingly
angry. The songs they sang were infantile.
If I were among the bored and the under-employed on campus
today, possibly I too would become a binge drinker. Yet it seems
like an awful waste of time and for that matter of good booze.
Perhaps they could steal a chapter from 1920s collegians and become
goldfish swallowers — assuming the animal rights indignados would
not object.
