by Tom Pantera
Columnist

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what the experience of going to graduate school taught me about myself. Those were important lessons. But it also taught me about some other people as well.

Since I began my nascent teaching career before I left Fargo-Moorhead, I had some exposure to college students (actually, I had a fair amount, since one of my kids had graduated only recently and the other still attends Minnesota State University Moorhead). One of the reasons I decided on a career change is that I found I really liked people that age. Their energy and enthusiasm was infectious; no matter how bad a day I was having, an hour in the classroom always left me pretty sunny and pumped-up.

But now, with a life basically centered around school, those lessons have been thrown into a little sharper relief. I realized that recently when one of my students asked me a question I’d never been asked: What were college kids like in the ‘70s?

There were some obvious answers, of course, which I didn’t waste time giving her. Our hair was much less attractive. We had older brothers and sisters who lived through the turmoil of the 1960s, so we were weaned on notions of anti-authoritarianism and general rebellion. America was considerably different then and there was more hope, even among our elders.

There were differences in the way we socialized, as well. It took me a long time to figure out what those were, but I actually did that before I left F-M. Every three years or so, one of the local college kids gets too much to drink and either dies of alcohol poisoning or wanders into the Red and drowns. When that happens, everybody acts surprised that college kids drink. There’s a lot of pearl clutching. My answer is always, “Duh.” But there is a difference between now and the old days. College kids in the 1970s occasionally drank to the point of passing out, but it wasn’t the competitive sport it seems to be now. We never heard of power hours and even if we had, most of us knew that 21 shots of hard liquor in an hour just wasn’t a good idea. We didn’t need mandatory alcohol classes to tell us that.

We came of age at a time when Americans were still optimistic. It was morning in America – even for those of us who didn’t buy Ronald Reagan’s crap – and we figured that things would turn out okay. Even though we graduated into the recession of the early ‘80s, my classmates and I figured we’d muddle through somehow.

That doesn’t seem to be the case with today’s college students. And who can blame them? They’re graduating into the worst economy since their great-grandparents were their age.

Of course, their fear isn’t obvious unless you let yourself be attuned to it. It’s in their eyes when they peer out at the terra incognita of the real world. It’s in the hesitation in their voices when you ask them about their future. It’s in the shrug that ends a lot of the “what do you want to be when you grow up” conversations. It’s almost as though they don’t want their elders to see how scared they are. It’s kind of sweet, really.

But they don’t whine about it. They’re smart enough to do what they can now, and most of the ones I see are working hard to get some purchase on the future. And that, ultimately, is the best thing about the students I know: They do what they can to keep the fear at bay, which really is all they can do.

And I’m really impressed by how seriously most of them take their education. They’re almost physically hungry to learn; there’s no other way to put it. I think I’m a pretty good teacher. I like to challenge my students to think, because in order to do what they want to do they have to think in a certain way they’re not used to. You can nearly hear the mental wheels grinding when they try to figure out an assignment. And when they get it, there’s a real sense of triumph.

That, more than anything, is what I’ve taken away from six years of teaching, two of them at a large, prestigious school that draws some pretty hard-nosed kids (which is to take nothing away from MSUM students; they’re the same, they’re just in a slightly different, somewhat more laid-back atmosphere).

So, in the end, I’m optimistic. I know these kids and I can assure you that while their generation will screw up the world in their turn, just as ours is now doing, they’ll muddle through. They know change, and the speed at which it comes, better than most of us oldsters do. It’s rapidly becoming their world.

College kids always get a bad rap to some degree. That’s because in a lot of important ways, college kids haven’t changed all that much over the centuries. They still like to party, they still can be a little silly, they still can be damned ignorant. It has been ever thus. The way college kids are is largely a function of the stage of life they’re at: not quite kids and not quite adults. They are taking the first tentative steps toward finding their place in the world. And they’re taking those steps with virtually no knowledge of what they’re really stepping into. We who have occupied our place for some time should be mindful of how terrifying that is.