As fall classes begin, you have every reason to feel good about yourselves. You are among the winners in the college admissions game. Even if it means working at a job during the school year and taking out a loan, you and your parents have figured out a way to pay for your education. I’m writing you this letter to pass along my hopes about the coming term.
The labels you have been saddled with since you were first known as Generation Z are changing once again. Your stint as the COVID Generation is over. Your newest label is the Anxious Generation. It’s a label borrowed from the title of New York University Business School Prof. Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller and reflects his belief that being brought up on smartphones has hurt your capacity to relate to others and addicted you to a host of internet-connected devices.
The generational labels you have been given tell an important story. The online teaching you experienced during your COVID years set most of you back in your classes, and, as you know from your own day-to-day habits, Haidt is on to something when it comes to smartphones. I constantly see students of mine who are great conversationalists sitting next to each other at meals texting away rather than speaking.
There is a long history of older generations pinning labels — usually harsh ones — on the young. Just think of being called the Silent Generation or the Me Generation. Hardly flattering! I wouldn’t let this current labeling get you down, but I hope you will ask yourselves how much time you are spending each week staring at one screen or another.
It’s not your smartphones that I most worry about, though. It is how you treat one another. Last year, the brutal Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza were enormously divisive campus issues.
Your refusal to ignore suffering in a far-off land was good, I thought. The antisemitism and Islamophobia that followed were a different story. They made conversations hard to come by and gave the impression that many of you were guided by a double standard when it came to global politics. Why, for example, was there no campus outcry over Russia’s war on Ukraine?
Don’t look for too much guidance on Israel and Palestine from your elders. The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and most recently Columbia have all resigned in the wake of criticism of their handling of Gaza protests on their campuses, and colleges and universities are pulling back from staking out positions on public matters. They want to avoid taking sides, as a Harvard task force put it, on issues that “do not directly affect the university’s core function.”
I hope you will view this retreat from taking sides as an opportunity for you. Just imagine that instead of shouting “From the River to the Sea!” demonstrators on our campus worried over the Middle East had made “Two States Now!” their chant. Such an appeal for justice would have forced a look back in history to the founding of Israel and its relationship to the Holocaust, and it would have forced a look forward to the future of Gaza and the question of Palestinian rights on the West Bank.
As we begin the fall term, some deans may encourage those of you who still feel angry and hurt about last year to look for comfort in “affinity groups.” Too often, I am afraid, that phrase means, “Seek out those with whom you share a racial, religious, or ethnic identity.” I hope you will downplay such advice and seek out those who are different from you, even if it means walking on eggshells for a while. It is in contested and unfamiliar territory that the solutions to our current campus civil wars lie.
In the end you are going to have to do what every previous college generation has done under pressure — trust your instincts. But if there is past advice I would turn to, it is that which the late essayist Marina Keegan offered in an article she wrote in her senior year for the Yale Daily News. On the eve of her graduation, instead of saying goodbye to her classmates, Keegan looked back on their shared four years and reminded them, “We’re all in this together . . . .”
Just the right advice, I think, for these tough times.
Mills is a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and author of “Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.”