Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
Some proponents thought that civic engagement and dialogue
might unleash radical and unpredictable social change; new political
vistas would open. Some believed that the political equality
and respect intrinsic in truly open-ended public deliberation was
more radical than the economic redistribution promised by an
activist state.
Gen-X Students
In 1994, when many professors were Boomers, their students
predominantly belonged to Generation X (born between 1965 and
1984). A typical undergraduate of that time had begun to pay
attention to the public world during the relatively uneventful
administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Members
of Gen X formed a relatively small cohort, raised in the shadow
of the much more numerous Boomers, and they had the weakest
sense of their own distinctness as a generation. In fact, no entelechy
had occurred during their formative years. However, the X-ers
shared a sense that they had arrived too late for the dramatic
events of 1965 to 1975, yet they lived with the consequences of
their parents’ choices. Further, they were marked by rising economic
anxiety and a belief that their individual performance in
school would have profound effects on their economic futures.
For “high-performing” students, including those who were female
or people of color, some new opportunities seemed to have opened
up. But the obverse of opportunity was risk. Students believed
that they stood alone in the economy, unable to fall back on unions,
neighborhoods, or even intact families. Especially after the recession
of the early 1990s, higher education seemed the indispensable
key to security. The economic value of college, rather than its potential
for social change, was its most salient feature for students
and their parents alike. 8
The annual survey of incoming first-year college students
conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI)
16
8 See Lewis A. Friedland and Shauna Morimoto, “The Changing Lifeworld of
Young People: Risk, Resume-Padding, and Civic Engagement,” (CIRCLE Working
Paper number 40, September 2005).