Postmodern Rebellion and the New College Experience

A few months back, the New York Times initiated an essay contest in which is asked college students to write a response to an essay by Rick Perlstein, What's the Matter With College?

Last week, the winner was announced. Nicholas Handler (Yale '09) responded with his essay, The Post-Everything Generation. Perlstein's essay was a nostalgic look back to a time when college was a place of rebellion, political agitation, and exploration of outsider culture. His essay seemed to lament the fact that kids today are too damn smart, too damn ambitious, and eager to take a seat at the table in society and the business world. Handler's essay puts a very different spin on the current college experience, summing up nicely something we've discussed here before on Future Majority: a guiding philosophy for the Millennial Generation.

Here's the relevant excerpt, but you should read the whole thing:

For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old cliches of social change and moral outrage–a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language–the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do.

But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.

College as America once knew it–as an incubator of radical social change– is coming to an end. To our generation the word ‘radicalism’ evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. ‘Campus takeover’ sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s– it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.

As a former English Lit. grad student, and an ex-philosophy major to boot, I love Handler's grounding of his piece in Jameson's Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. His movement from postmodern literary theory towards a positive vision of civic action and participatory democracy via the netroots is literally the arc of my life for the last 6 years. As such, Handler's piece resonates to my core. Take away the horn-rimmed glasses and skinny-jeans, and the whole thing rings true to me. What do you think of his take on the Millennial ethos the the college experience?