You really just don't get it. Your grandfather went to Harvard. You and I have nothng in common, and the students you teach and I teach are not at all the same. My students today are not stupider than they were when I started. But the society has become more conservative (and folks like your pal Clinton bear some of the blame), self-absorbed, and materialistic, and the students reflect this (not all of them of course, but a good many). College education is for many of them (most of my students are now from the white and petit-bourgeois suburbs) just another consumption good, in the sense that they buy it and expect it to do them some good in terms of future money income, but like a new suit, they do not think that they have to do anything except buy it for it to work for them. When I started, a lot of the kids were like me, from working class families, many were a bit older, and many wanted to learn something. Today at my workplace this is less so. If you want this proven to you, give up your soft job at Berkeley and apply for my old job. After you have taught four course per term with an average of 45-50 per class with no assistance of any kind, come see me and we'll talk again. I'll give you a high recommendation.
Michael Yates
p.s. It made no difference whether your grandfather or Bush got a C nor I daresay for you either. But it did for me. And so will it for many of my current students. I knew it, but many of them seem not to know or to care. Is this their fault? Of course not, but it does ot make the teaching any easier.
Brad DeLong wrote:
>
> >I talked with a friend about this distressing message. He is an
> >academic, and I am
> >not. My parents, however, were academics, at a college (later a
> >state U) not very
> >far from where Yates is about to retire. My friend's parents were
> >not academics.
> >
> >My friend agrees with Yates' perception of students as increasingly
> >blunted and
> >stupefied...
> >
> >I wonder if other academics on this list could respond to the
> >question of whether
> >or not students are or are not effectively stupider than they used to be.
> >
> >Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema
> >
>
> Of course not. The trope of decline and decadence is an old one. More
> than two millennia ago Roman aristocrats complained about the times
> and the customs: how shocking it was that children no longer
> respected their elders, that everyone was worshipping foreign goods,
> and that a slave girl cost more than a sword.
>
> But I daresay that back when my grandfather went to Harvard--at at
> time when perhaps 2% of Americans enrolled in college at all--it was
> distinctly uncool for anyone of his social class to try to get better
> than a C (and his social class made up the majority of the student
> body). And that were Michael Yates cast back in time into his golden
> age and confronted with my grandfather, or with George W. Bush, he
> would soon be singing a different tune.
>
> Brad DeLong