Pretentious professor discovers that today's youth, among other things, use "like" too much.

Kids today, they're not like they used to be.

A clichéd and silly argument, but one that evidently carries a lot of weight if made by an esteemed professor of something-or-other:

"Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. A prizewinning scholar, he has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, and Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. He has also written for such publications as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor."

Good to know. Now that we've gotten that important bit of information out of the way, let's get to Professor Edmundson's great epiphany: Today's college student is a lazy, anti-intellectual bore who we may pretend to pity but must actually despise. He spends too much time in front of the TV, playing video games, or on the Internet. (Odd that Edmundson classifies the Internet as yet another purveyor of passivity-inducing material; his article, "Poets and Writers" informs us, is "Online Only." The many impressive publications Edmundson is affiliated with, according to his bio, have websites--is he accusing Harper's of being no better than Lifetime? Oh, nevermind.) Young people today, Edmundson argues, have too much stuff, and too great a sense of entitlement, to be thoughtful, hard-working college students. Oh, and, in case no one's noticed this, they say "like" an awful lot.

Edmundson bases his claim on the fact that his students write, on course evaluations, that they found his class "interesting" and "enjoyable." This must mean, the professor contends, that these students have learned to expect life to be one big TV show for which they are the audience.

Didn't it occur to Edmundson that these students might, like him, find the evaluation forms dippy and superficial and that, wanting to avoid lingering on such a trivial task, yet not wanting to harm their teacher, they wrote generically positive comments on the forms placed before them? It's the simple rule of "ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer"--few course evaluation forms solicit anything beyond "good teacher--should be given tenure" or "bad teacher--had affairs with 5 girls and 6 boys in the class, and failed the remaining 2 students."

Edmundson admits that the forms are part of the problem, but puts most of the blame on the idiotic students in his class, or, on a more general level, on consumerist society, blah blah blah:

"There was an undercurrent to the whole process I didn’t like. I was disturbed by the evaluation forms themselves with their number ratings (“What is your ranking of the instructor?—1, 2, 3, 4 or 5") which called to mind the sheets they circulate after a TV pilot plays to the test audience in Burbank. Nor did I like the image of myself that emerged—a figure of learned but humorous detachment, laid-back, easygoing, cool. But most of all, I was disturbed by the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervaded the responses. I was put off by the serenely implicit belief that the function of Freud—or, as I’d seen it expressed on other forms, in other classes, the function of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth or of Blake—was diversion and entertainment. “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.” Enjoyable: I enjoyed the teacher. I enjoyed the reading. Enjoyed the course. It was pleasurable, diverting, part of the culture of readily accessible, manufactured bliss: the culture of Total Entertainment All the Time."

Sorry, what? These students were asked, presumably at the end of the term, when students are exhausted and have more important things on their minds, like final exams, or scrambling to find a job after graduation, to fill out a sheet of paper that asks for sound bytes. Any reasonably intelligent student can offer a couple of them up. What exactly does he expect on these forms, a thesis statement and three supporting paragraphs on a subject of their choosing? Esoteric comments, preferably in a dead language, that note how he, the professor, is not merely entertaining, but ought to be made a divinity within the religion practiced by the speakers of that dead language?

Sadly, the well-intentioned Allan Bloom paved the way for such garbage with his far-more-reasonable Closing of the American Mind. Now there's a built-in audience every time an academic with enough high-quality affiliations decides to complain about consumerist society and the dumbing down of the American university education.