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Not an encouraging portrait from philosopher Steven Hales. For those teaching "average" students at an "average" institution of higher education: does this ring true to you?
I'm a mathematician at a UK university. It's good, I'm very glad to be here but my experience of teaching the u/g population, even in a more advanced class, is much as described by Professor Hales. Maybe understanding this requires the attention of skilled social scientists – and if that reflects an inadequate understanding of what social scientists do, or can do, then at least I will have learnt something.
I am a philosopher at a public R2. The situation is absolutely as Hales describes it, maybe worse — for example, I worry that many of my students are not even able to understand single sentences of written text.
It's mostly like that, especially when it comes to reading, writing, using LLMs, and lying.
In my experience, the phone addiction isn't quite that bad, in that many students aren't phone-addicted. But yes, a substantial number are.
A philosopher in New Zealand. Same here, for several years. The undergraduate students who went into COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 were still able to read and write and concentrate. But since then, my students have closely matched what the article describes.
Yes, this is basically right for the "average" student where I teach (a decent, though not elite, institution). The attention fragmentation and absenteeism are especially bad. For the last couple weeks, I've only had about a quarter of my classes turn up, and a good chunk of those who do turn up just scroll their devices the whole time. I'm not sure what to do other than focus my attention on the students who really want to be there and really try (I actually think that there's something especially virtuous about the few students who resist the many incentives present today to be bad students; they merit our attention!). Attention fragmentation and absenteeism are the big changes over the last few years. Students have long regarded a college education as merely a means to an end rather than worthwhile in its own right. The widespread use of AI is just a manifestation of that attitude.
Tangential to the gist of the post, I agree that "the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration." It's Finnegans Wake, no apostrophe. Only slightly more on point, it's not "just" the phones. Our demand for distraction afforded by technology extends back to the replacement of the command line with GUI and to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web.
The description is correct, but I don't know how different it is from, say, 25-30 years ago when I was an undergraduate. Much of what Hale describes was true of me (and pretty much all my friends) as an undergraduate at a regional state university. I came from a working class family, am of average intelligence, took a transactional attitude toward college, hated reading, slept or day dreamed through most of my classes, had little ambition beyond getting a job with middle class wages, etc. But college got me interested in the life of the mind, so that by the time I graduated I was beginning to shed the bad characteristics Hale mentions. College benefitted me precisely because it helped me shed those characteristics. Maybe things have gotten slightly worse (because of phones, social media, etc.), but I doubt it's significantly different from a generation ago.
I taught a course on the Republic in 2017 at one public university. (Not to toot my horn) but students found it riveting and always had things to say in class. I am teaching the same course now (Spring 2025) and my experience is exactly as VAP describes theirs. 1/4 attendance, with a majority of attendees glued to their computer screens. I ask easy, obvious questions and mostly get crickets. It is bizarre.
I teach at a regional public R2. This does not ring true of my philosophy majors and minors. They generally try their best at the reading, and many come to class with good questions. They are diligent about coming to class, and they appreciate constructive and detailed feedback on their writing. Many show clear improvement throughout the semester. They are a joy to teach, in general.
This does ring true of at least half of the students in my general education courses, sadly, though I do think the writer might be a bit burnt out and is making some unwarranted assumptions.
I teach at a "top" (say, USNews Top 30) R1 and this does not my experience at all. I wonder if I've gotten lucky or if the gap between students at "top" universities and 'average" universities has widened?
I taught at a school very similar to Steve’s. Southwest Missouri State, which became Missouri State.
Things were already headed south pre-Covid. The main problems were: (a) declining basic skill levels; (b) apathy; (c) rampant cheating, long before ChatGPT.
During Covid it all got worse. Post Covid even worse.
The last time I had really talented, really engaged students was pre:2015.
I would not become a teacher now under any circumstances.
My experience confirms his account almost to the letter. 🤷♂️
I read that with a sense of relief–because it turns out I'm not alone. Though the phone addiction here is less severe, and the reading deficit is worse (just following basic instructions is hard for many; they seem to skim a bit then guess at the assignment).
I'm at a private R2 and this describes many students in my introductory courses. My most common comment I now write at the bottom of my exams for students who get a C-/D/F is: "I think it would be a good idea to buy the book and perhaps read it."
To reply to Justin about this not being that different:
I spent my freshman year at Michigan, and that first semester, Fall 1998, I took Intro to Political Theory. I won't name the lecturer, but I will say the lectures were not particularly good. Many people stopped going to them, though attendance at discussion sections, or at least mine, was pretty good. The day before the Thanksgiving holiday, there were about a dozen people in the lecture. This was a class that had 3 TAs, to give you an idea of the total enrollment. As dedicated as I was to the subject — and I was captivated by political theory — my attendance at the lectures was scattershot. (Not that it hurt my grades; one of my responses on an exam was used by my TA as an example of how to answer that question.)
I'm at a 4-year regional public institution pretty similar to Hales'. His description fits my experience in general education classes; less so in upper-division.
His comments about literacy are especially apt. At least half of my gen ed students are, as he says, functionally illiterate. They don't read for pleasure – and so, their vocabulary is poor, as Hales notes. Like him, I often field questions about the meaning of common words. They dislike reading: they'll often ask how 'hard' a class will be, and I think this is mostly a matter of how much they'll be expected to read. They find even college textbooks challenging to understand – and they often don't know how to use the text itself to answer their questions about it, even when the answer is near at hand. (For example, they'll be brought to a standstill by a technical term, even when the meaning of the term was given in the text just a few sentences earlier.)
I have long adopted strategies to force students to read. These days it's Perusall and regular in-class exercises that require them to engage with the text. I have to print the pieces of text out for them, though, because I can't let them access the text on their devices. If I do that, the distractions those devices offer will inexorably wash away the textual attention I desire. I now strictly ban devices in my classes unless the student presents a good reason (which almost never happens). The in-class exercises (which are graded pass/fail) are also necessary to combat the absenteeism that Hales mentions: if students are not given a very direct motive to be in class, anywhere from one- to two-thirds of them will often not show up.
I'm less inclined than Hales to blame the students themselves, though. He says that students simply don't care. That may be true of a few, but for more of them I think it's a matter of how many non-academic pressures are weighing on them. They're holding down two part-time jobs to pay for college. They have family (whether younger siblings or children or aging parents or grandparents) who rely on them. They're worried about their own, or family members', immigration status. They get sick, and the college's health clinic doesn't have any appointments until 2 weeks out, and they can't afford healthcare. I honestly can't blame them if, in the midst of all these affairs, the requirements of a class they were never intrinsically interested in to begin with take a back seat.
I won't repeat what others have written about the accuracy of Hales' description (true in some ways, in some ways not at all at my private regional university). But as per Gary Bartlett, I find much more interesting rebooting a standard undergraduate philosophy class to challenge students to change their behaviors and learn. I do something similar to Bartlett when we do textual analysis of (often historical) primary sources–print out copies of two or three paragraphs, give students 5 minutes at the beginning of class to [re]read them, and then challenge them to discuss what is literally in front of them. I still have students write "formal essays" two or three times a semester, but they make up a small fraction of the overall course grade. Greater in weight are low-stakes, in-class writing exercises that test reading comprehension, ability to articulate a view about the text, etc. Do that twice a week for 1 or 2 points (out of a hundred points) and you're looking at approximately 30% of the overall grade–a grade that in some sense students can ace simply by showing up. Rather than sound like the old person shaking the fist at the clouds, I'm curious what else faculty have done to address this demographic of students.
I teach honours students at a university with the highest entering average in Canada. During my latest exam I had students ask the meaning of 'hasten' and 'disanalogous' which were used in exam questions. It wasn't just one student either and they were all native English speakers; it was enough of them that I had to make an announcement explaining the meaning of the words. It was an eye-opening experience.
I taught college/university level for about 30 years at eight of so joints in the Bay Area–Berkeley, Stanford, the two major art schools, religious schools, community college, etc.–, and was blessed with being able to get out of that sordid racket at the beginning of Covid. As indicated in a comment above, much of that behavior was true even in the mid-90s, although of course the laptop & phone plagues only became nightmarish this century. I've blocked out a few thousand of the worst incidents in academia, but I think I could still cite 5-50 examples of behaviors of every type Hales describes. I gather from my friends' anecdotes that Covid made things even worse, not just in terms of basic academic skills, but also intensifying the emotional de-skilling so characteristic of internet and social media use.–If you're stuck in the racket, I recommend the following: Just teach the interested students, and figure out ways for the uninterested ones to pass. If there are no interested students, just use the class time to hone your comedy routines (I first heard this advice from my philosophy professor circa 1980, and it worked for me: a number of students told me that although I stunk as a teacher I would have made a good stand-up comedian).–On a more positive note, I insist that I never (NEVER) found any correlation between student interest and student skills. I shudder at the memory of some of blank stares and empty souls of dozens of highly skilled students, including and especially at Berkeley and Stanford. On the other hand, one of my all-time favorite students was a Marine with maybe 6th-grade reading skills in a community college Modern Art class. In class he regularly asked some of the most interesting questions and made some of the most penetrating remarks (about everything from Monet to Jasper Johns) of any student I ever heard anywhere at any level. Alas, he disappeared near the end of the semester, and left an appreciative note saying that he was being shipped out to 'Haidi' . . .
Jumping off of Gary and Thornton's comments above, I was surprised at just how little responsibility Hales takes for his students' behavior in his classes and how little agency he ascribes to himself in shaping the dynamic of a course. As a professor, you can create structures and incentives that will motivate many students to develop the skills that you want them to develop and behave the way you want them to behave. For example, like Gary, I ban laptops and phones (and enforce the ban!), while Hales seems to just say "Well, that won't work!" This is why it seems to me that this essay is the venting of someone experiencing burn out.
This is extremely depressing.
To the extent that what Hales describes is very common, it seems to follow that a BA degree from many American colleges/universities should not be taken seriously as a credential.
It’s wildly different. I have been teaching since 1993 and watched the transformation happen in real time.
Schools often have policies that constrain what faculty can do. Before accusing Hales of “not taking responsibility,” maybe it’s worth meditating on that. I was not permitted to ban phones or laptops in my classes. And failing or giving Ds to loads of students also was not tolerated.
Maybe it's worth meditating on why you did not have any "really engaged" students after 2015.
It doesn’t ring true to me, at least to the extent that most of my students don’t fit the description given—although several do. To give an example, I have no attendance policy but usually have about 90% attendance rates and most students seem to do most of the readings— I’m sure very few do them all, but that’s no different from when I was an undergraduate decades ago. I ask students to read novels and very old texts (the Iliad, etc). Again, it seems like most of them do it (or atleast do enough of it to productively talk about segments of it in class). I’m at a large state university, but in the honors college there, fwiw.
The cheating stuff does resonate with me. I’ve shifted to in class essay exams to curb that because it is rampant on papers.
Tom Carson @21 raises an issue that came to mind as I read Hales' piece: is the declining competence-signaling value of an American university degree being accounted for institutionally? For instance, are major employers and higher institutions of learning and research (especially abroad) using supplemental intake assessment methods for American-educated candidates, or discounting the value of an American degree relative to peer(?) countries? And is it really that much worse in the USA versus, say, Canada, the UK, or Australia?
Tom Carson @21 raises an issue that came to mind as I read Hales' piece: is the declining competence-signaling value of an American university degree being accounted for institutionally? For instance, are major employers and higher institutions of learning and research (especially abroad) using supplemental intake assessment methods for American-educated candidates, or discounting the value of an American degree relative to peer(?) countries? And is it really that much worse in the USA versus, say, Canada, the UK, or Australia?
I teach at a large public university and what Hales describes is 100% accurate to my experience. I disagree with Ian's suggestion that this is in the hands of the instructor. A large number of students just cannot engage with course content in an intelligent manner in a classroom setting, for various reasons. I often have the experience of students approaching me after class to express a confusion or ask a question, and I always encourage them to ask the question *during* class. I almost always get something like the following reply: "I don't want to look stupid". There's an alarming level of isolation and aversion to open discussion amongst college students nowadays, it is truly regrettable. It seems like college is not a particularly fun or exciting time for many students these days, which is such a shame.
Ditto for a BS degree. I was on the science/engineering faculty of two public universities in the Rocky Mountain states from 1988 to 2014, when I left academia to help found a bioengineering firm. I taught mostly at the graduate level, and I recall many days when I was disappointed and even shocked by the performances of almost half of the entering graduate students in a given academic year. They simply didn't learn material that I had to learn as an undergraduate in many cases. Their writing skills also left a great deal to be desired. My science and engineering colleagues frequently wrote large portions of their student's MS theses and PhD dissertations, something that I refused to do. As a company CBO until my retirement in 2022, I found the interviewing process similarly disappointing – many STEM interviewees did not know basic material that they should have learned as sophomores or juniors. More recently hired company employees have commonly expressed the opinion that a university degree merely represents a credential needed to get a job rather than evidence of an interest in learning. The decline in academia also negatively impacts the business world.
Perhaps some people wanted to be university teachers and not preschool teachers, and don't appreciate the apparent transformation?
Last classes I taught, I announced that no phones or computers would be allowed. If a phone went off or was used, the student had to leave the class; if it happened again, on the third time they had to leave the course itself. It worked even though I suppose it wasn't "legal" in some sense of the term.
Teaching in the UK. Similar experience. No real diagnosis, but just saying that the admins and professional trainings don't help. I was explicitly told that we are not allowed to ask students "have you read the syllabus" as this would sound hostile. I was told that are not allowed to fail students even if they get all the facts (such as philosopher X said P) wrong and present no argument. Even if they use AI, if they don't admit using AI, there's often "insufficient evidence" to catch them. And even if there's solid evidence (e.g. fabricated references), they get a "verbal warning" in the first instance, and then they learn to avoid getting caught. And even if they don't hand in anything, we are pressured to do everything to get them to submit something, however late, so that they won't fail, so that we can keep retaining the students. And however crappy their assignments are, we are supposed to say something good about it, to say something encouraging. (Some might say that there's instrumental value in encouraging students who have put in absolutely no effort. Maybe, but I think there's something fundamentally unfit about this.)
I've had several students ask me the meaning of the word "permissible" during an ethics exam. I'm not certain whether it's some multi-semester prank, or a troubling sign of the times.
Chronic absenteeism?
Disappearing?
They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes?
They want me to do their work for them?
Pretending to type notes in their laptops?
Indifference?
It’s the phones, stupid?
I know! I know! Top campus leadership, right?
Steven Hales’ account is not inaccurate, and yet I have a different perspective I would like to share as someone who also teaches at an “average” university. With my students, I experience:
1. An almost complete absence of the type of student who is mainly interested in the grade they will get in the course and not much else beyond that. That my students haven’t been conditioned by their academic background to care much about grades is of course in certain ways a bad thing, but it is also has the benefit that it can make them more receptive to the kind of transformative impact that you can get from studying philosophy for the first time.
2. If they do have a background that is relevant to their educational pursuits, it is usually one of struggle — family conflicts, mental health issues, poverty, violence in their communities, and many other things. Ask these students to write for 5-10 minutes in class about “what is one struggle that shaped you?” or “what is one life event that changed you as a person?” and then tell me what you think of their writing. These students know things that many of us do not know, and they have insights that many of us do not have.
3. Of all the students I could imagine, my students these days are the ones who potentially have the most direct connection to what Epictetus has to say about dealing with loss, what Camus has to say about finding meaning amidst the absurdity of life, what Aristotle has to say about the importance of habituation. This is especially true of the students I’ve had in my courses after the COVID-19 pandemic. These students are more receptive to the things philosophy has to teach than any students I’ve had in more than 20 years of teaching. I’ve had more deep life conversations in office hours with students than ever before.
Again, I do not want to dispute the accuracy of what Hales or any of the other commenters have said — I teach the same students they do. But still I believe the points above are worth mentioning. I feel more engaged with the current group of students than any group in the past, and I promise that I am not making things up or just trying to be optimistic. If you teach the most valuable things that philosophy has to offer, and you do it with passion and conviction, you will have trouble finding a more engaged group of students than the ones around now. I wouldn't trade these students for any other group.
The intellectual impoverishment of the typical college student is mostly due to impoverished social life- their social life is limited to social media, watching movies, playing video games, and immeidate friends and family. You don't have to be Piaget to realize we learn as children and young adults and emotionally mature by interacting in maybe not supportive but not so impoverished environments. I'm not sure many or some of the students involved have a real life in the real world in a certain sense, at least not intellectually. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's like they live it seems from these reports in a very comfortable closet resulting in their limited vocabulary and not being able to engage in the world of ideas and other lives outside their closet except in a very rusty and dull Skinnerian way. Their computer skills are probably high- they will go far with that skillset.
I would be curious to hear what the experience has been like for teachers at schools ranked top 5 or top 10 on USNews. Do they notice a bad decline? And how does the rate of decline, if any, match the timeline of the internet, the smartphone, and COVID?
This article [ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major ] paints a bleak picture of the English major at Harvard, but I wonder if that's limited to the feebler humanities or if it's infected philosophy, too.
I don't believe that their computer skills are likely high, yet they might nevertheless go far. Real computer skills entail a demanding learning curve. They are difficult to aqcuire. Knowing how to futz with Excel, not so much, though one can achieve amazing results merely futzing with Excel!
The notion that students of the generations of the rise of digital media are somehow thereby especially tuned into those technologies seems wrong to me. The students are not "savvy." They have no idea. They are as perplexed by technology as I am, an old man.
I'll comment on two aspects: attendance and the gym. Where I work (in Australia) we are, mostly, not allowed to require attendance in lectures. They are all recoreded. Unsurprisingly, attendance is typically poor. For most lectures it's lucky if you get 1/4 of the students to come. We can require attendance in small sections, and most do come to those. (The university even allows students to sign up for classes where the lectures over-lap, on the assumption that they will only go to one.) In my experience, students who don't go to the lectures do significantly worse on average, but without the requirement to attend, most simply won't. I recently taught fair sized elective where I was allowed to make participation mandatory, much like it was in the law school classes I took. Unsurprisingly, attendance was much better, and I think people learned more. University policies obviously matter, and it matters if these are focused on learning, or not bothering students.
When I am teaching, I fairly regularly go to our gym on campus. Hales's account fits here to a T. Students will routinely sit on equipment while scrolling through their phones, significantly longer than would plausibly be necessary for a break between sets. As with Hales, I'll often complete two or three other sets while waiting for a student to stop scrolling through his phone. They become very indignant if you ask them to please move off the equipment if they are not going to use it. It's behavior that shows a serious lack of courtesy and awareness of others, but is so common they have no idea it might be a problem. And, as noted, given that this is an activity they do by choice, that they can't stay off their phones is very sad indeed.
Matt, a friendly suggestion about the gym. Just ask how many more sets they will be doing. That helps them preserve the illusion they are on the machine to work out and you are just a fellow gym rat. I've found it helps move the phone squatters along.
The descriptions from Prof Hales were similar to mine (public "bottom" R1). The discussion above is also quite helpful. I will just add some of my experience.
First, I am at a STEM-oriented school. Most "good" students are at STEM programs. Many philosophy students study philosophy just because they cannot get into some "elite" programs. Interestingly, at least from what I see, the reason why those students who do not succeed in their classes is precisely that they are bad at time-management, or they have too much going on in their life, or they do not have good "discipline", etc. In a word, they do not have good learning habits (not because they are less smart).
Then, I am facing this dilemma. If I set up strict rules, they are probably going to fail. You cannot change their habits by setting up rules in one class. And, they will leave philosophy. Meanwhile, if I simply accommodate their needs, that does not help with their learning. So, it looks like I need to find the "golden mean" here. I need to be more strict, but I cannot be too strict because that would just push them away.
I am curious about some concrete strategies about dealing with this, especially from those who share my experiences.
I wonder to what extent the proliferation of young adult literature has stunted students' reading and vocabulary skills. There was a lot less of this when I was growing up (born 1980). If you were a nerd, you might read Lloyd Alexander's and CS Lewis's books for younger readers, but after that, it was pretty much on to Tolkien. Not every in my social circle is an egghead, and it was pretty common to read Lord of The Rings, Dune, etc., by the early teen years. Now, there is just so much young adult literature that one can avoid ever having to read books that are more demanding.
I have noted here in the past my generally encouraging experiences at UC Berkeley, but I'm at the law school and my work with undergraduates involves either the self-selection of motivated, ambitious students, or intermediation by law professors who hire undergraduate RAs. I recently hosted an undergraduate intern from Smith College whose impressive cold-call to inquire about opportunities at Berkeley Law signaled a promising relationship. She is smart, professional, ambitious, and a delightful colleague. And she just received an award from a research center in DC for the most original paper about the Executive Branch, a work she was preparing while an intern.
My understanding is that humanities at Berkeley are thriving. Granted, this story is Berkeley-branded, but the numbers are informative: https://news.berkeley.edu/2022/10/31/defying-negative-stereotypes-humanities-majors-are-booming-at-berkeley/
This is very depressing and something must be done – the only thing I can think of is a total no cell phone policy (and no smart watches or even smart rings, apparently they have those now too) – no laptops (they'd find a way to get online), all work is to be written in a pad of paper. And the syllabus is just the 'great books' course (so no online journal articles) – just read the great books and write about them in a pad of paper and get graded on that. This is how it should be anyway and how it was back when actual thinkers like Bertrand Russell were coming up in the ranks. (pads of paper, ink pens, great texts).
It’s very hard to imagine too many — if any — university administrations allowing this.
I tried pretty much anything and everything, sought advice from teachers I respected, read seemingly relevant books, etc. Eventually I gave up, and, as suggested above in my comment, adopted a kind of two-track approach: teach the interested students, and make it super easy for the uninterested students to pass. I remember discussing this with one of my revered professors at Berkeley, and we agreed that the way to think of grading is that an 'A' is what it always was, and a 'B' is what used to be a 'C-'. I think that the only technique that I used that had a success rate above 0% was showing a bit of film from YouTube at or near the beginning of class, and then using that as a hook in the lecture-discussions (e.g. showing the last bit of Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us to introduce and discuss Islamic art). And usually at the beginning of the semester I'd show an entire film, or at least some substantive bit, and use that to motivate interest and discussion. So, for example and most successfully, when I began a course in Ethics (I taught it maybe 15-20 times), I'd show the first episode of Kieślowski's Decalog, 'I am the Lord thy God', and use that as a hook to discuss will, determinism, fate, character, choice, etc.–Give it a try. I think its success rate was at least equal to Alcoholics Anonymous's.
My sense is that the gap has widened. With the much-discussed "demographic cliff" looming (perhaps among other factors), the effort to keep enrollments up at many non-elite institutions has led to lowering admission standards. At my institution, this trend really began with the 2008 financial crisis, but the pandemic and the demographic cliff cemented and accelerated it.
I am Emeritus at an eastern Research University, so my experience is mainly with Masters and Doctoral students. They are obviously not representative of today's undergraduates. But I do have experience of being an undergraduate at the U. of Wiscosin-Madison in the late fifties early sixties and Prof. Hales' comments could have been written then, mutatis mutandis re: technology. The student body was less representative then than now because fewer young people went to college, but the U. of Wisconsin was both a top academic institution and a renowned "party school." Students couldn't write then, if by writing you mean absolutely grammatical prose and clear thinking. The same is true of Prof. Hales' non-academic contemporaries. Some could, but I don't know the percentage. Many looked for "gut courses" (geology was a big favorite), and cut corners using whatever means were at their disposal (which didn't include Google or Wikipedia, but would have if they were available and they would have used them if they could). They didn't have ChatGPT but everyone knew they could send away for a term paper written by a starving graduate student for $50 or whatever. They cut class whenever they were able. Adherence to standards was linked to grades and was tighter for those who were premed or prelaw. I was a math major/premed but took philosophy courses, including one on Existentialism and I "read" Being and Nothingness. It is still opaque to me. I couldn't read it then and I recently tried again. No go.
I like Colson Whitehead and Barbara Kingsolver but find other "good" writers not to my liking and I can't read them and perhaps in Prof. Hales' terms I'm functionally illiterate with respect to them. I also read popular detective fiction. If I only read those things (which I do for the same reason I read Whitehead or Kingsolver, because I like reading them). Exactly what "function" does Prof. Hales have in mind?
Math literacy? Precalculus is not arithmetic. I know quite a bit of mathematics and am writing a research monograph but knowing calculus or precalculus is a measure of nothing vital for everyday life as far as I can see (including the ability to think logically). If you can't do simple arithmetic that's too bad, because it is useful for many practical things but there are practical workarounds (calculators). I wonder if Prof. Hales can still do long division or take square roots by hand, as I learned to do (and now have no use for). In my day precalculus was a college first level math course. Now they teach it in highschool as college prep but for no practical reason.
I've been in academia my whole professional life and find today's students MUCH better than the ones I taught in the 80s and 90s, distressingly many of whom wound up as money grubbing opportunists. They ubnderstand things about the world and our society we never did.
If. you want to get a picture or the "average" student in the 30s or 40s just watch some of the movies of that era (Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers, for example, or the numerous "Hey kids, let's put on our OWN show"). I don't like being judgmental, but I find Prof. Halels' own judgment that today's students aren't serious like in his day both historically inaccurate and with a distinct elitist odor. I suspect he is an excellent educator. But I find his social judgments about today's students narrow minded. And it's not as if the academic institutions and their students he seems to miss so much have such a sterling record. I think today's students "get it" much more than we did, even if their language doesn't conform to his standards of correctness. They certainly can make themselves understood and actually write to communicate much more than we did, even if they do it with different technology. (Imagine, they don't even know how to use carbon paper. They are addicted to xerox machines. They use their thumbs, not all their fingerrs. Etc.).
In short, in my opinion (and it is only that) Prof. Hales is just an old guy yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off his academic lawn. And the subtext I hear from other commenters is that academia isn't like it used to be. They are correct. Those days are over. Sorry.
On YA fiction: I seriously doubt it's the, or even a, culprit. A more likely culprit is just that they don't read, period. If you're not used to reading, then a ten-page philosophy paper–even a very accessible one–is going to look like a serious hurdle.
Also, much of the YA literature out there is really quite good. Sure, it's more fun to read than James Joyce, and easier to understand, for some values of 'easier' and 'understand'. But it also has plenty to sustain an interrogative interest (as decades of high school English teachers can attest), and lots of it contains some pretty sophisticated reflection, if you make an effort to scratch below the surface.
As in other domains, the drek is drek, and the good stuff is genuinely good. And it's easy to forget, when we're talking about Literature-with-an-L, that all the really great works are outnumbered ten to one by drek. Yes, even the classics were outnumbered in their own time–indeed, many of them were themselves numbered among the drek.
Sounds good. I've seen a lot of people say that. I've seen a lot of people try that. But I have seen very few people succeed. I would be surprised if Hale hasn't tried all sorts of things to reach his students. You can reach a student here or there, and that's valuable. But the situation remains largely as he describes it.
Kudos to him for speaking truth, on a topic where there are very strong pressures not too.
If your last experience of undergraduates was 70 years ago, it’s possible that you are not in a position to understand how they have changed in the last 30 years. Indeed, in the last 5-10. You might take notice that the other commentators (who are not at places like Berkeley) are largely seeing what I am seeing.
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