THE PORTABLE GENERATION
Mills, Nicolaus
"What are they like?" Because I teach and because the college at which I teach, Sarah Lawrence, has a reputation for being experimental, I am constantly asked this question about my...
...It breeds resentment and, above all, it puts twenty-year-olds in a situation in which they must operate in a medium that is not the one in which they make their subtlest, and most perceptive, distinctions...
...No John and Robert Kennedy to mourn...
...One is wary about passion (not sex) because what can be relied on are friendships, not marriage...
...It makes sense, of course, for women to have careers that will let them be self-supporting, and it is practicable for couples to live together before settling into marriage...
...the kind of sophisticate who knows what the gentrification of cities is doing to the poor but has too much invested in an apartment to want the gentrification to end...
...More willing to go to a museum than a library...
...To be sure, the exceptions are still the ones who are taking such risks...
...But for the Class of '82 and those their age, something more is going on...
...Their eyes are on the prestigious medical, law, and business schools...
...SO PORTABILITY BECOMES an answer or symbol for those coming of age in the '80s...
...I find instead enormously complex students whose willingness to travel light and start over reminds me how profoundly my '60s generation failed to understand that politics is a marathon, not a sprint...
...If anything unites the veggies, the joggers, the ecologists of this generation, it is a fear of contamination, and nothing embodies that contamination more profoundly than the Pentagon and the nuclear industry...
...They are aware, as no college generation in recent memory, of being in for a long haul, and they have begun to prepare themselves accordingly...
...AS A RESULT, they have become a portable generation...
...No Vietnam War to protest...
...They are not at home in a union hall or a city ward, and they are not about to make the kinds of alliances that would draw them into partnership with poor blacks or striking farm workers...
...They must, they know, be loyal to a past that has liberated them in profound ways, but the more loyal they are, the more difficult it becomes from their point of view to find a voice or a cause recognizably their own...
...The current abortion controversy and the Equal Rights Amendment struggle are, of course, grim reminders that soon the country could easily move backward rather than forward...
...In either case, though, I think it needs an answer...
...Lately, however, I find that what lies behind this question, particularly when posed by friends who, like me, grew up in the '60s, is not curiosity so much as fear—fear that the people who are emerging from our colleges in the 1980s are hip conservatives...
...What they are really fighting is not marriage or monogamy or parenthood...
...Whatever their faults, this crop of college students shows little affinity for playing ostrich...
...No Washington moratoriums to gather at...
...More anxious to make a movie or work for a film company than at a publishing house...
...A generation whose most ubiquitous possession is the nylon backpack and whose life style is reflected in a readiness to change addresses or schools with little notice, begin or end relationships with a minimum of trauma, keep free of controlling beliefs...
...I cannot figure out whether it is a dare or a write-off...
...but they are setting a new tone, and as the economy worsens, their choices seem increasingly prophetic...
...Why this should be so is, I find, much harder to say, but at this point five factors seem to me especialy worth noting: • Post-Liberation Blues • Like any number of college generations, this one has the sense of coming of age at a dull moment in history...
...But far more decisive, particularly among women, is the feeling that the great liberation battles have already been won...
...No SDS to join...
...Dozens of other careers now seem out of reach or hopelessly overcrowded...
...What it says to the current generation of college students is, "You're impoverished...
...234...
...But there is something more here than a slippage in reading scores or how much time the Class of '82 spends watching TV: at issue is the fact that this generation of students is geared to the visual...
...For behind it lives an arrogance that menaces us all...
...Strangelove...
...Now it has the capacity to hurt...
...233 • Fear of Divorce • By now even government statistics are telling us that everyone is getting married later, living alone longer, having fewer children...
...For the Class of '82 and those their age, the upshot is a dilemma that won't go away...
...Most of the time I resist answering...
...But were the worst to happen, what it would mean to the current generation of college students is a renewed war in which a previous generation has all the heroes...
...they work hard to get the grades these schools want...
...The result is that for any number of them there is an extraordinary gap separating the language of the visual that is natural to them from the bookish language of the schools in which they have spent most of their time...
...You have no Mississippi to go to...
...But there is also a less predictable, more interesting phenomenon: preparation for jobs that are not careers so much as a means to an end...
...A half-decade ago, when Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford were our political heavyweights, such a statement would have fallen on deaf ears...
...For them, the hard part is going beyond this perception...
...What they are fighting is the prospect of divorce...
...The student my friends picture getting a diploma these days is a combination jogger, vegetarian, Reaganite, future condo dweller: someone who sees the country's current state of disarray but won't do anything to change it...
...Contamination Politics • To call this an apolitical generation is to imagine that they were sleeping while the catastrophe at Three Mile Island was occurring or to fail to realize that Pentagon talk about winnable nuclear wars strikes them as dialogue from Dr...
...One finds that a job rather than a profession makes sense when it comes to work, and one practices a politics in which avoiding impurity is more crucial than winning...
...It has thrown them back upon themselves instead of freeing them, and it has done so almost in direct ratio to the purity of their commitment...
...One is prepared to forgive, prepared to move out, prepared to end up "just friends"—all without the irrational commitment that might make such adjustments unnecessary...
...One goes to a law school (preferably an untraditional one) not in order to practice law but to work for welfare rights...
...They are not Tom Wolfe's "me" generation, nor Christopher Lasch's cultural narcissists, nor the crazies of Joan Didion's The White Album...
...The result is that for the Class of '82 direct political involvement has, with some notable exceptions, been an isolating experience...
...No wonder you're the way you are...
...They have an almost fatalistic belief that two people cannot remain together over a lifetime, and what they are seeking to do in their various postponing strategies is to put off divorce...
...One holds back on words because one doesn't have a clear voice, because in the end only the visual seems authentic...
...The Visual Bind • It is commonly assumed that television has turned this generation into lousy readers with 30-minute attention spans, and their lowered College Board scores suggest that they have gone downhill in the way they test...
...Downward Mobility • It is not only the housing market that has closed down...
...One stays at home baking bread to sell to local stores in order to pursue unprofitable work such as writing or painting...
...For the Class of '82 this means a realization that they may end up less well off than their parents...
...The problem is the self-fulfililng nature of their fear of divorce...
...This stereotype both worries and puzzles me...
...And yet in the end there is more to portability than just knowing how to withhold gracefully...
...No Martin Luther King to heroize...
...More at ease in front of a screen than a book...
...When I teach, I do not find stereotypes filling my class...
...But when all these precautions are taken with the fear of divorce in mind, it means finally that in the name of safety something is withheld...
...No wonder the best you can do is take our style minus its content...
...Because I teach and because the college at which I teach, Sarah Lawrence, has a reputation for being experimental, I am constantly asked this question about my students...
...It is not a gap like the one that affects so many Spanish-speaking children in the public schools, but it is a gap, and its effects cannot be underestimated...
...This generation finds something contaminating about workaday politics...
...For some, the immediate reaction is to become professional with a vengeance...
...I am suspicious of any generalization I am likely to make, and I sense that the people who raise that question secretly look on me not as a teacher but as a human zoo keeper—an authority on an exotic species I am empowered to keep under control from September to June...
Vol. 29 • April 1982 • No. 2
