A Little Lite Edit

Mark Edmundson is sitting in his office and laughing at us all.

The somewhat delayed uproar following the publication of his article "On the Uses of Liberal Education: as Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students" only proves its main point -- that students expect their professors to entertain, to be respectful of their opinions and efforts, and to never criticize. Our self-righteous fervor shows exactly how close to home Edmundson hit.

The one thing we are -- here I will switch to the first person so I don't speak for others, though I think I probably do -- the one thing I am most afraid of at the university is wasting my time here. This fear is magnified by being a fourth year. I go to class (usually) and look at my watch. I take notes but don't pay attention to them until the night before the test. Writing papers proves particularly torturous; I sit in front of the computer wishing I had prepared myself in any way for the night ahead. When it's done, I edit once and don't think of it again until I get my grade.

Don't get me wrong, occasionally I give my academic subjects some thought. And there certainly are people at this school who care about their work. But do not, like so many other high school honor-rollers, confuse hours of time, homework assignments completed or number of flashcards with quality of thought. On the whole, Edmundson's article elicited such complaint because it points out exactly the image we try to deny most -- that of the student who cares mostly for the grade received and the job earned.

Where Edmundson misses the mark, I think, is his efforts to frame this phenomenon as one of our generation. As a friend of mine pointed out to me, U.Va. began as an institution full of kids whose parents expected them to go to college not for genuine academic engagement, but for only a few years of urbane stimulation. Whatever noble fantasies the baby boomers entertain of the day when they sought education for enlightenment's sake, they too crammed for exams and promptly forgot the material. They too went to college so daddy could tell his friends.

Well, something certainly is wrong with higher education, but it's not that students are media-saturated shells of cynicism and irony (may I point out at this juncture that Edmundson's favorite, Joon Lee, wrote media-saturated essays with a good deal of cynicism and irony). It's not even the consumer culture. I think it's pretty much a question of simple maturity; you can tell because students who come back to college, who've experienced something, are the ones who care most. And I don't meant to be cynical, but I'm not so sure it will ever change.

Viewpoint consists of the majority opinion of the managing board of The Declaration and is written by the executive editor on a weekly basis.