I am not as curious about how my daughter and her classmates will fare at the university or their respective institutions of higher learning as I am curious about how the faculty will fare. On Monday, for example, when my daughter and the rest of the 1999 ACS crop sits down in their first classes, their professors and instructors will be looking at a huge group of young adults with whom they have little in common. It's educated versus less well educated. It's family experience versus single life, in most cases. It's better off financially versus less well off.
Professors spend their money on families, homes, cars, charity and leisure.
And those professors have got to make their material meaningful to an ever-younger group of students, whose experiences differ ever more dramatically from the professors' experiences as each academic year comes and goes. My father recently sent me a listing of experiences that the faculty and staff at Beloit College in Wisconsin compiles annually to help guide the educational process to a satisfactory ending. Consequently, they have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era, or for that matter, Jimmy Carter's lust, Gerald Ford's wife and daughter or the Nixon or Kennedy White House. They were prepubescent when we fought the Gulf War, and Vietnam is just another story their fathers tell. They were 11 when the Soviet Union fell apart, and the Berlin Wall means little, if anything, to them.