Today's Students
EVERETT, JOHN R.
TODAY'S STUDENTS Our colleges are inhabited by serious-minded young people who are not easily aroused and professors have had to readjust to their critical ways of thinking By John R....
...Most college teachers are between the ages of 35 and 65, with the largest group concentrated in the ages over 45...
...Our contemporary students have an effective memory which goes back from seven to ten years...
...In the near future, we will publish another view of education today by C. E. Ayres, Professor of Economics at the University of Texas...
...These secular evangelists are usually doctrinaire liberals, but the arch-conservatives also have their representatives...
...Students are admitted to the fortress for fifty minutes three times a week to hear a disorganized recitation of facts or a logical exercise in irrelevancy read from ancient notes...
...Although this group does harm, it is strange but necessary to relate that the damage is slight...
...Since the professor is usually afraid or contemptuous of questions, the lectures end with the bell and a sincere sigh of relief all around...
...The question remains: "Are the colleges doing their jobs...
...nothing of Prohibition...
...nothing of the atmosphere which would approve the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Bill...
...nothing of the bleak October of 1929...
...Depression" is a word which is used by prosperous fathers to impress their children with "how tough it was when I was young...
...At the maximum, they remember the start of World War II, but most of them begin their remembrance of political and social events with the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima...
...Some of the most important teaching problems have come from the same revolutionary changes that produced our present-day student...
...They are less inclined to identify the good with a particular political party or program and more inclined to seek an independent judgment which has its own inherent authority...
...The nerve of ambition has not been severed, but cautious acceptance of limitations has replaced the more enthusiastic but unthinking "world is my oyster" view of earlier generations...
...by Ordway Tead, former Chairman of the New York City Board of Higher Education...
...THE STUDENTS OF TODAY are serious and earnest in their quest for a rational orientation to the complex modern world...
...There is still another group of professors on the campuses of this nation...
...and nothing of a whole range of attitudes, feelings, emotions and events which cling to the minds of their elders...
...Now only the most agile and intellectually alert professors have even a fighting chance in the battle of the generations...
...they have re-evaluated the generalizations which seemed so self-evident when they heard them from their own professors...
...Perhaps one can say that the contemporary student is more critically aware of the existence of grays, whereas former generations tended to see only blacks and whites...
...Within the memories of these students there are only two great world powers: the United States and Russia...
...The importance of this situation for the colleges is terrifyingly real...
...and, most important of all, they have studied their present students with an understanding and sympathetic eye...
...Much of the cake of custom has been broken...
...The future will be eternally grateful for their effort and skill...
...They have reread the classics of their fields...
...Most of these people received their frames of reference and their absolute convictions at a time when political speeches, rather than sound reasoning, were the accepted basis for classroom interpretation...
...There is also a significant number of professors who have retreated into the past and now reside in uneasy poverty behind the barricades of what they call the "scholarly tradition...
...they have discarded old notes...
...Those colleges fortunate enough to have this sort of professor are serving their students well in a very difficult and trying time...
...Slowly but surely, the main bulk of our professors are meeting serious students in a sympathetic way on a common ground of understanding...
...TODAY'S STUDENTS Our colleges are inhabited by serious-minded young people who are not easily aroused and professors have had to readjust to their critical ways of thinking By John R. Everett This article by John R. Everett, President of Hollins College in Virginia, is another in our series on the present state of America's colleges...
...To the first American generation to be brought up as world-conscious internationalists, the ideas and attitudes which cluster around such names as Taft and MacArthur seem at best quaint and peculiar...
...In spite of the weaknesses listed above, I answer the question with an emphatic affirmative...
...They know nothing of the high days of the Twenties...
...In one form or another, professors all over the country have reacted to this peculiar situation...
...They are those who were so taken with one side of the revolution that they went into higher education to save the world...
...doubts have crept into positions once held by certainty...
...Readers will recall, no doubt, the October 5 New Leader article which inaugurated this series, "How Good Are Our Colleges...
...Since Communism and Russia seem synonymous, they can make only a pretense at understanding, without powerful teachers and serious, long study, the forces which produced a Whittaker Chambers or an Alger Hiss...
...They are working against odds which few generations have had to face, but the best of them are far more effective than we have any right to expect...
...And this is true in non-economic areas of concern...
...Except during those relatively few periods of revolution in the past, the predecessors of the modern college professor had a much larger area of conviction and experience in common with their students...
...nothing of a weak and impoverished labor movement...
...Knowledge now appears to be less an instrument of power for attaining personal material advantage and more a means of understanding the world and a human being's place in it...
...They present themselves in class as seekers after anything that is solid, rather than as sponges absorbing any current enthusiasm...
...Many professors now find themselves in the position of the Baptist revival preacher who set up shop at an annual meeting of the Philosophical Association: The people were there, the words were said, but no one wanted to be saved...
...The serious student of today seems to have gone beyond the deification of political figures and the comfortable absolutism which made thinking easy and once passed for education...
...And so this list could grow...
...they have written new textbooks...
...But this is only a part of the story...
...Since colleges are to be judged by the soundness of the relationship between scholar-teacher and students, it is well to look closely at what has happened to both...
...The war and postwar memories of these students look upon labor organizations as big business with exactly the same financial power and almost the same prestige as U. S. Steel and General Motors...
...nothing of bank crises and blue-sky security sales...
...A large number of them have actively sought to change course offerings and the structure of the curriculum in a serious effort to make themselves and their material more relevant to the needs of contemporary students...
...In other words, the main burden of college teaching rests upon those who received their own formal instruction in the supercharged atmosphere of a bloodless revolution which is ancient history to the present-day student...
...Unfortunately, this generation of teachers passed through a revolution which shattered so many theories and thought-patterns so quickly that there was little time to regroup and set up a stable foundation for significant criticism and comment...
...They still cling to their absolutes and they now tilt against windmills that have not only ceased turning but have disappeared altogether...
...The contemporary student looks upon these professors with the quiet amusement usually reserved for those ancient grandparents who think that McKinley is still an issue...
...nothing of the NRA, PWA, CCC, and the rest of the governmental alphabet...
...The results of these labors have been far from perfect, but they indicate a significant degree of success...
...To some people brought up in the student generations of the Twenties and Thirties, these modern collegians seem cynical and, oftentimes, hardheaded to the point of exasperation...
...It is obvious that, to some extent, all teachers are in this situation at all times...
...The fact that today's students seem more critical than those of former years is probably best explained by the sociologists and psychologists...
...Such professors do students, scholarship and education an irreparable harm which only a false charity can justify...
...When once a few well-chosen, emotionally charged words would send hundreds of students spilling from classroom to picket line, now sober-faced youths ask questions which can be answered only with dry, cold statistics...
...nothing of the promises and counterpromises of Hoover and Roosevelt...
...The future no longer seems to be a predictable series of events, and very few young people feel that they are in command of their own destinies...
Vol. 37 • March 1954 • No. 9
