>Justin Schwartz wrote:
>>I have a suspicion it's who you talk to.
>
>so does the author. he contrasted today's students with those of his
>(and your) era. :)
David Brooks says that when he "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." Students today must be less involved in mass protests, etc. than in the late 60s and the early 70s, but it doesn't strike me as self-evident that students are less politically active today than in the late 70s & early 80s.
Princeton GS Elliot Ratzman asserts that "In the last two years Princeton has seen a virtual renaissance in accessible and smart political activism: the Workers' Rights effort, anti-Sweatshop activism, critiques of corporate globalization, a prison reform working group, renewed discourse on race, an active anti-hunger movement and the ever-enduring good works of the SVC" ("Students Have No Excuse for Not Involving Themselves in Activism," _The Daily Princetonian_ 12 March 2001 at <http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/2001/03/12/edits/468.shtml>).
Dale Murphy writes: "Though the Princeton campus does not come close to rivaling the tumult and turbulence it experienced in the 1960s and '70s, the level of activism on campus this decade surely surpasses that of the apathetic 1980s. Just this past year, about 250 students rallied in Firestone Plaza in protest of the University's practice of licensing its name and logo to companies that employ sweatshop labor. Students for Progressive Education and Action, the group that organized the rally, collected hundreds of signatures for a petition urging the University to change its policies and then led the protesting students to Nassau Hall, where they presented the petition to administrators" ("Activism," _The Daily Princetonian_ 1999 Freshman Issue, at <http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1999/07/19/activities/activism.html>).
While the very politically active (= organizers & activists = those who aren't happy with just spending "two or three hours around the table, shooting the breeze and arguing about things") are probably a tiny minority at Princeton (as we are at the OSU), Brooks' claim that "nowhere did...[he]...find anybody who seriously considered living any other way" is an overstatement.
What is true is that students are busier than ever, not just at elite schools like Princeton but at very working-class campuses like OSU, which certainly curbs students' ability to get politically involved.
>While some sociologists refute the significance of Ritzer's theory,
>those who accept his evidence see an ugly, automated future, one
>similar to that envisioned by Max Weber, the 19th-century theorist
>on whose "principle of rationality" McDonaldization is based.
>"{Weber} feared that rationalization would create a society of
>rule-bound, apolitical individuals dominated by soulless corporate
>and government bureaucracies," Crouse says, "Rationalization, for
>him, was an 'iron cage' which would become impossible to escape.
>What once seemed rational and liberating would, perversely, become
>irrational and constraining as ordinary people lost control over the
>decision-making processes that shaped their lives."
If that's the theoretical premise & conclusion, why bother to wax "ethnographic," get politically involved, etc., though?
With his title "The Organization Kid," Brooks must be making an allusion to William H. Whyte, _The Organization Man_ (1956). His tone is very 50s, very cold-war liberal, though he can't be much older than me.
Yoshie