The Times tackles college

Every weekend, my preferred means of procrastination evolves from Wonkette and IvyGate to the Sunday New York Times. While I waste my weekdays away reading about unfortunate underclassmen who ask their professors out on dates via public listservs, once Sunday rolls around I avoid work by perusing a slightly more sophisticated news source.

This past weekend, I had a lot to look forward to: The Times Magazine was hyping its "College Issue," which promised to cover everything from admissions to campus vernacular. I also wanted to see the winner of the Times' student essay contest, as too many attempts at reading the Tory had left me in doubt of my generation's ability to craft a coherent sentence.

So, what pearls of wisdom did the Times impart to me?

To start, former Nixon speechwriter and current Times language guru William Safire informed me that college students respond affirmatively to queries by saying "Ah-ite." We also refer to attractive women as "shawties" or "stellas," while shunning the practice of "hallcest."

Randy Cohen, aka "The Ethicist," taught me that using Adderall to gain a test-taking advantage was illegal and unhealthy, but not at all unethical. (Cohen is of course a highly regarded philosopher, having qualified for his current job after stints as a writer for The Rosie O'Donnell Show and Late Night with David Letterman).

Concerning admissions, Susan Dominus bemoaned the fact that in today's hyper-competitive world, one particularly talented student got rejected from Princeton and all of the other Ivy League schools that he applied to. This applicant's apparently stellar achievements included getting a 2200 on his SATs, being elected co-captain of his cross country team and being a descendant of James K. Polk.

So maybe the adults were clueless when it came to college. But surely the students' prizewinning essays on what college meant to them would be better?

I started with the Honorable Mentions. Frankie Thomas, a junior at USC majoring in "cinema-television critical studies," lamented the lack of intellectual activity in college. She complained about cruising through her courses while encountering pompous professors (they walked into lecture playing their own theme music) and vapid classmates (they preferred facebook.com to Foucault).

Wow. Film school in Southern California isn't intellectually challenging? What a shock. If Ms. Thomas would like to see a rigorous professor actually test the analytical limits of his students, I'd invite her to sit in on one of Hays Rye's biochemistry lectures with me. She'd feel at home, as he also has his own theme music — I can hear the Star Wars Imperial March play every time he steps up to the blackboard.

I skipped the other Honorable Mentions and moved on to the contest's winner. Entitled "The Posteverything Generation," Yale junior Nicholas Handler wrote about how he has struggled to reconcile the 1960s' legacy of rebellion with our generation's materialism and apathy: "Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy ... We are the generation of the Che Guevara teeshirt."

Despite everything that had preceded it, I thought that the winning essay was brilliant. At Princeton, I believe that we're confronted with the same sort of self-doubt. We read about Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society in our history textbooks, and get to act out our New Left fantasies for a day by rallying for the Jena 6, but in the end, we're plagued by the seeming futility of our actions and the lack of a wider social movement.

So, my fears had been partially assuaged. Someone from my generation could still write. And articulately describing the problem is oftentimes the first step toward fixing it. Jason Sheltzer is a molecular biology major from St. Davids, Pa. He can be reached at sheltzer@princeton.edu.