Editorial : Chronicle article unfairly criticizes 21st century college culture

College students these days don’t have late-night, philosophical conversations like they used to. So said James M. Lang, an associate professor of English at Assumption College in Massachusetts, in an opinion article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education last week.

‘Almost every academic I know has fond memories of late-night dorm-room bull sessions about the meaning of life,’ Lang said. Lang points to several anthropological studies that confirm such philosophical conversations are absent among today’s college students. But the cause for such changes in 21st century college culture lies not in some inherent defect in Generation Y, but in the changing and expanding nature of higher education.

Syracuse University provides a perfect example of the changes to higher education in the past several decades, changes away from the traditional, liberal-arts-centered model to profession-driven, practical training. Secondly, people now satiate their existential curiosity on the Internet, through a myriad of online forums and public blogs previously unavailable to inquisitive college students.

Vigorous, open-ended discussions in today’s classrooms still leave students pondering and chatting afterward. But those classes leave students hanging on to different questions than before, questions that are less tied to the theoretical humanities and more to practical applications.

Is one era of college culture better than the other? Are college students of the 21st century somehow handicapped because they all cannot intelligently discuss Henry David Thoreau’s Walden experiment? The answer is no. As long as college students aim to use their studies — whether in the classics and humanities or in computer science and marketing — to be productive and honest members of society, then who cares what they’re talking about late at night.