>
><paste>
>
>The Organization Kid
>by David Brooks
>
>The young men and women of America's future elite work their laptops to the
>bone, rarely question authority, and happily accept their positions at the
>top of the heap as part of the natural order of life
>
>A few months ago I went to Princeton University to see what the young
>people who are going to be running our country in a few decades are like.
>Faculty members gave me the names of a few dozen articulate students, and I
>sent them e-mails, inviting them out to lunch or dinner in small groups. I
>would go to sleep in my hotel room at around midnight each night, and when
>I awoke, my mailbox would be full of replies—sent at 1:15 a.m., 2:59 a.m.,
>3:23 a.m.
>
>In our conversations I would ask the students when they got around to
>sleeping. One senior told me that she went to bed around two and woke up
>each morning at seven; she could afford that much rest because she had
>learned to supplement her full day of work by studying in her sleep. As she
>was falling asleep she would recite a math problem or a paper topic to
>herself; she would then sometimes dream about it, and when she woke up, the
>problem might be solved. I asked several students to describe their daily
>schedules, and their replies sounded like a session of Future Workaholics
>of America: crew practice at dawn, classes in the morning, resident-adviser
>duty, lunch, study groups, classes in the afternoon, tutoring disadvantaged
>kids in Trenton, a cappella practice, dinner, study, science lab, prayer
>session, hit the StairMaster, study a few hours more. One young man told me
>that he had to schedule appointment times for chatting with his friends. I
>mentioned this to other groups, and usually one or two people would
>volunteer that they did the same thing. "I just had an appointment with my
>best friend at seven this morning," one woman said. "Or else you lose
>touch."
>
>Forum:
>
>The Next Ruling Class?
>What makes today's students tick? And how did they get this way? Join David
>Brooks for a special forum on this article, in Post & Riposte. There are a
>lot of things these future leaders no longer have time for. I was on campus
>at the height of the election season, and I saw not even one Bush or Gore
>poster. I asked around about this and was told that most students have no
>time to read newspapers, follow national politics, or get involved in
>crusades. One senior told me she had subscribed to The New York Times once,
>but the papers had just piled up unread in her dorm room. "It's a basic
>question of hours in the day," a student journalist told me. "People are
>too busy to get involved in larger issues. When I think of all that I have
>to keep up with, I'm relieved there are no bigger compelling causes." Even
>the biological necessities get squeezed out. I was amazed to learn how
>little dating goes on. Students go out in groups, and there is certainly a
>fair bit of partying on campus, but as one told me, "People don't have time
>or energy to put into real relationships." Sometimes they'll have close
>friendships and "friendships with privileges" (meaning with sex), but often
>they don't get serious until they are a few years out of college and meet
>again at a reunion—after their careers are on track and they can begin to
>spare the time.
>
>I went to lunch with one young man in a student dining room that by 1:10
>had emptied out, as students hustled back to the library and their classes.
>I mentioned that when I went to college, in the late 1970s and early 1980s,
>we often spent two or three hours around the table, shooting the breeze and
>arguing about things. He admitted that there was little discussion about
>intellectual matters outside class. "Most students don't like that that's
>the case," he told me, "but it is the case." So he and a bunch of his
>friends had formed a discussion group called Paidea, which meets regularly
>with a faculty guest to talk about such topics as millennialism,
>postmodernism, and Byzantine music. If discussion can be scheduled, it can
>be done.
>
>The students were lively conversationalists on just about any topic—except
>moral argument and character-building, about which more below. But when I
>asked a group of them if they ever felt like workaholics, their faces lit
>up and they all started talking at once. One, a student-government officer,
>said, "Sometimes we feel like we're just tools for processing information.
>That's what we call ourselves—power tools. And we call these our tool
>bags." He held up his satchel. The other students laughed, and one
>exclaimed, "You're giving away all our secrets."
>
>But nowhere did I find any real unhappiness with this state of affairs;
>nowhere did I find anybody who seriously considered living any other way.
>These super-accomplished kids aren't working so hard because they are
>compelled to. They are facing, it still appears, the sweetest job market in
>the nation's history. Investment banks flood the campus looking for hires.
>Princeton also offers a multitude of post-graduation service jobs in places
>like China and Africa. Everyone I spoke to felt confident that he or she
>could get a good job after graduation. Nor do these students seem driven by
>some Puritan work ethic deep in their cultural memory. It's not the stick
>that drives them on, it's the carrot. Opportunity lures them. And at a
>place like Princeton, in a rich information-age country like America,
>promises of enjoyable work abound—at least for people as smart and
>ambitious as these. "I want to be this busy," one young woman insisted,
>after she had described a daily schedule that would count as slave-driving
>if it were imposed on anyone.
>
>The best overall description of the students' ethos came from a professor
>in the politics department and at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
>International Affairs, Jeffrey Herbst. "They are professional students," he
>said. "I don't say that pejoratively. Their profession for these four years
>is to be a student."
>
>That doesn't mean that these leaders-in-training are money-mad (though they
>are certainly career-conscious). It means they are goal-oriented. An
>activity—whether it is studying, hitting the treadmill, drama group,
>community service, or one of the student groups they found and join in
>great numbers—is rarely an end in itself. It is a means for
>self-improvement, résumé-building, and enrichment. College is just one step
>on the continual stairway of advancement, and they are always aware that
>they must get to the next step (law school, medical school, whatever) so
>that they can progress up the steps after that.
>
>One day I went to lunch with Fred Hargadon, who has been the dean of
>admissions at Princeton for thirteen years and was the dean of admissions
>at Stanford before that. Like all the administrators and faculty members I
>spoke with, Hargadon loves these students, and he is extraordinarily
>grateful for the opportunity to be around them. "I would trust these kids
>with my life," he told me. But he, like almost all the other older people I
>talked to, is a little disquieted by the achievement ethos and the calm
>acceptance of established order that prevails among elite students today.
>Hargadon said he had been struck by a 1966 booklet called "College
>Admissions and the Public Interest," written by a retired MIT admissions
>director named Brainerd Alden Thresher. Thresher made a distinction between
>students who come to campus in a "poetic" frame of mind and those who come
>in a "prudential" frame of mind. "Certainly more kids are entering in a
>prudential frame of mind," Hargadon said. "Most kids see their education as
>a means to an end."
>
>They're not trying to buck the system; they're trying to climb it, and they
>are streamlined for ascent. Hence they are not a disputatious group. I
>often heard at Princeton a verbal tic to be found in model young people
>these days: if someone is about to disagree with someone else in a group,
>he or she will apologize beforehand, and will couch the disagreement in the
>most civil, nonconfrontational terms available. These students are also
>extremely respectful of authority, treating their professors as one might
>treat a CEO or a division head at a company meeting.
>
>"Undergrads somehow got this ethos that the faculty is sacrosanct," Dave
>Wilkinson, a professor of physics, told me. "You don't mess with the
>faculty. I cannot get the students to call me by my first name." Aaron
>Friedberg, who teaches international relations, said, "It's very rare to
>get a student to challenge anything or to take a position that's counter to
>what the professor says." Robert Wuthnow, a sociologist, lamented, "They
>are disconcertingly comfortable with authority. That's the most common
>complaint the faculty has of Princeton students. They're eager to please,
>eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them,
>eager to conform."
>
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com