As a former professor, I’m ashamed of today’s college students
As a professor and dean for the last 30 years, I’ve been a lucky man. I realized a dream that began on my first day as a university student. I knew, after that first day, that I had found a home, that one day I would be the one standing in front of bright young faces, teaching, hopefully inspiring, and sharing the joy of knowledge.
Today, as I reflect back on my professional life, I have never felt so ashamed.
The previous generation, the Greatest Generation, saved the world by sending George Orwell’s rough men into the crucible of war in the interest of peace. White marble crosses and Stars of David in faraway places testify to the enormous price of that purchase.
But now our young people, in large numbers, along with the leaders of some of our previously great universities, stand in direct opposition to the principles they died for.
The latest Programme for International Student Assessment survey was released on
Dec. 5. In 2022, nearly 700,000 15-year-old students from 81 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) members and partner economies took the Programme for International Student Assessment test.
Statistically, 18 countries and economies performed above the OECD average in mathematics, reading and science. The U.S. was not among them. We finished 34th in math, ninth in reading, and 16th in science. And where do you think this level of ignorance stops? Not with math, reading and science.
A 2018 survey conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany revealed that nearly one-third of all Americans and more than 4 in 10 millennials do not know which war the Holocaust was associated with.
Although there were more than 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in wartime Europe, 45% of U.S. adults and 49% of millennials cannot name one.
Surprising? Not when only
34% of all respondents and 23% of millennials are certain they’ve even heard of the Final Solution. Education in this country has reached a crisis stage, and it may well be leading us into an abyss rarely seen here (for a frightening exception see: Bund, German-American).
One would be wise to revisit previous examples of anti-intellectualism being used to stifle reason, perhaps mankind’s greatest gift. And to stifle it in sometimes awful ways.
Following his failure to get into the Viennese Academy of
Fine Arts, Adolf Hitler developed a loathing for intellectuals. Hitler believed that only a few basic ideas should inform education in Germany, the supreme importance of race being one of them. The first book a child in Nazi Germany came across after kindergarten was the so-called “Primer.” On the front cover was a caricature of a Jew with the words: “Trust no fox on the green heath; trust no Jew on his oath.”
Today, similar books are used in Palestinian schools, and similar caricatures are featured.
One would think that the recent slaughter of Jews would have a tendency to concentrate the American mind, but this modern holocaust is celebrated by the weak-minded, even among our supposed elites.
“From the river to the sea” has become a campus code for awful things. Of course, consistent with other areas of glaring ignorance, surveys show that fewer than half of today’s campus-based antisemites can even name the river or the sea — and amorphous calls for “context” have become the hiding place of the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, among others. It may be time to marginalize the true haters and their enablers, provide courageous leadership unencumbered by tribalism, and grow up as a nation.
In “Requiem for a Nun,” William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Unfortunately it seems he was right: the past is still with us. Now the question is, what will we do about it this time?
Steven D. Papamarcos, Ph.D., of Williamsburg, was a professor at William & Mary and a professor and business school dean at Norfolk State University and St. John’s University in New York.