Generation 9-11

Sleepy, gray afternoon--a challenge to any professor. And for the first few minutes of class last week, University of Michigan sociologist David Schoem had some trouble rousing the 18 freshmen in his seminar on "Democracy and Diversity." One student slurped yogurt while another stretched his arms wide and yawned. A few others casually took notes. But the lassitude ended abruptly when Schoem switched the discussion to America's war on terrorism. For the rest of the hour, the students argued passionately and articulately about foreign policy, racism and media coverage. Then, New Yorker Georgina Levitt offered one view that stopped the debate cold. "September 11 has changed us more than we realize," she said. "This just isn't going to go away."

At Michigan and campuses all around the country, the generation that once had it all--peace, prosperity, even the dot-com dream of retiring at 30--faces its defining moment. College students are supposed to be finding their place in the world, not just a profession but also an intellectual framework for learning and understanding the rest of their lives. After the terrorist attacks, that goal seems more urgent and yet more elusive than ever. In the first week, they prayed together, lit candles and mourned. Now they're packing teach-ins and classes on international relations, the Mideast, Islamic studies, even Arabic. Where they once dreamed of earning huge bonuses on Wall Street, they're now thinking of working for the government, maybe joining the FBI or the CIA. They're energized, anxious, eager for any information that will help them understand--and still a little bit in shock.

 

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It's too soon to tell whether 2001 will be more like 1941, when campuses and the country were united, or 1966, the beginning of a historic rift. So far, there have been only scattered signs of a nascent antiwar movement; at Michigan and other campuses, students' views are in sync with the rest of the country's. In the NEWSWEEK Poll conducted last week, 83 percent of young Americans said they approved of President George W. Bush's job performance and 85 percent favored the current military action. These figures are consistent across all age groups. But students also understand that the future is increasingly unpredictable and that long-held beliefs and assumptions will be severely tested in the next few years. "Our generation, as long as we've had an identity, was known as the generation that had it easy," says Greg Epstein, 24, a graduate student in Judaic studies at Michigan. "We had no crisis, no Vietnam, no Martin Luther King, no JFK. We've got it now. When we have kids and grandkids, we'll tell them that we lived through the roaring '90s, when all we cared about was the No. 1 movie or how many copies an album sold. This is where it changes."

What will they make of their moment? It's always tricky to generalize about a generation, but before September 11, American college students were remarkably insular. Careers were their major concern both during the high-tech boom (how to cash in) and after (how to get a job). According to the annual survey of college freshmen conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, only 28.1 percent of last year's freshman class reported following politics, compared with a high of 60.3 percent in 1966. Nationwide, campus activism has been low key through the 1990s. That was true even at Michigan, the birthplace of SDS and a hotbed of antiwar protest during Vietnam. Alan Haber, a 65-year-old peace protester and fixture on the Ann Arbor campus since his own student days in the 1960s, says that before September 11, there was no central issue that ignited everyone, just a lot of what he describes as "little projects": protests against sweatshops or nuclear weapons. He thinks that may change as these campus activists begin questioning the U.S. military efforts. "This situation," he says, "bangs on the head and opens a heart."

Despite their perceived apathy and political inexperience, this generation may be uniquely qualified to understand the current battle. "I think they realize more than the adults that this is a clash of cultures," says University of Pennsylvania president Judith Rodin, "something we haven't seen in a thousand years." While their parents' high-school history lessons concentrated almost exclusively on Western Europe, they've learned about Chinese dynasties, African art, even Islam. They are more likely than their parents to have dated a person from another culture or race, and to have friends from many economic and ethnic backgrounds. Their campuses as well are demographically very different from those of a generation ago. "It's gone from a more elite institution to more of a microcosm of the population," says David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, a national association of colleges and universities.

Others argue that this spirit of tolerance can have a downside, particularly now. When author David Brooks, who wrote a widely discussed Atlantic Monthly article on rampant pre-professionalism at Princeton last year, returned there after September 11, he found a surging interest in global affairs and issues of right and wrong--but also a frustration with the moral relativism of much of the curriculum (see this week's Web Exclusive at NEWSWEEK.MSNBC.com). One student told him that he had been taught how to deconstruct and dissect, but never to construct and decide.

Michigan, one of the country's premier universities with more than 38,000 graduate and undergraduate students, has spawned campus groups reflecting virtually every corner of the globe and every world view, from the conservative Young Americans for Freedom to groups that still cling to dreams of a socialist utopia. There are also substantial numbers of Jewish, Arab and Muslim students who have made the politics of the Mideast a personal cause. But on the morning of September 11, senior Geoff Gagnon, editor of The Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper, thought an issue much closer to home would be sparking angry debate that day. An athlete had been accused of sexual assault--a major story on a Big Ten campus--and Gagnon had been at the paper until well past 3 in the morning nailing down details. He was still groggy when his roommate burst in to tell him that NPR was reporting a "big plane crash in New York." Gagnon rushed from his apartment to the Daily newsroom, where he and his staff gathered around the TV. Soon, classes were canceled for the first time since the 1975 blizzard. "We just watched this thing unfold like everyone else," he says, "except we had to figure out what it meant for the 40,000 people here."