The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles has been surveying the attitudes of college freshmen every year since 1966. This year, they found the lowest support they have ever recorded for casual sex. Only 40 percent of today's college freshmen agree that it is OK for two people who like each other to have sex, even if they have known each other for only a short time. 60 percent disagreed. The percentage of 1998 freshmen who are in favor of abortion was the lowest since polling on the subject began.
Most students are no-nonsense when it comes to crime and punishment.
Exactly 75 percent support the death penalty. A few weeks before I had my conversation with my student from Littleton, I had a less dramatic epiphany in that same freshman writing class. I was grading their argumentative essays, in which they had to write a persuasive essay taking a stand on some controversial issue. I realized that, for the first time I can remember in my twenty-something years of teaching and giving this assignment, each of the 25 essays was what I considered right on target with the issues. While rhetorical skill sometimes left much to be desired, there was not a liberal bromide in the whole collection.