We’re supposed to give students a map. I don’t even know the terrain.
 | By Frank Bruni |
It’s sweetly customary for college students filing out of a seminar room or lecture hall to thank the professor who has just finished jabbering at them, as if all that verbiage were a favor rather than a job. I’m amused by it and grateful for it every time.
But my students this semester often murmur something else as well.
“That was depressing,” one student said — not rudely, not as a complaint, but as an accurate summary of a discussion we just had about all the falsehoods and fury that thrive in the digital age.
“Another uplifting class” was another student’s sarcastic review of a conversation about the volume and variety of President Trump’s litigation against news organizations, whose economic and reputational woes are exacerbated by his attacks.
Clearly, some adjustments are in order. But how do I describe this troubled world of ours — the grave crossroads we straddle, the mighty stakes of our decisions — in a manner both truthful and gentle? How do I gird my students for the uncertainties and obstacles ahead while equipping them with an ample store of hope?
I’ve been on the faculty at Duke University for five years now, and this past one has been the most challenging and the strangest by far.
That’s not about Duke. It’s about higher education. It’s about America. It’s about dynamics — chiefly, this country’s tilt toward authoritarianism and the rapidly accelerating advances of A.I. — that render our tomorrows even hazier than usual. None of us knows what we’re in for and up against, and that confusion crystallizes on college campuses, which are by definition gateways to the future. They’re supposed to leave students with maps, routes, a destination. Not with compasses whose needles gyrate this way and that.
For much of the past decade, college students flocked to computer science, wagering that few majors were surer on-ramps to employment. A.I. has exploded that roadway. I teach in Duke’s school of public policy, where many students point themselves toward jobs in government or nonprofit groups. The ax that fell in the first months of Trump’s present term deforested that landscape.
Those are just examples, and this is hardly the first generation of young people to face disruption and major economic shifts. I can’t say just how unusual, in a historic sense, the unease that I feel around me is.
But I can tell you that my previous nine semesters at Duke are no rival for this one when it comes to the number of students who initiate conversations about what they should do next, what they should expect after that, where the country is headed, whether they’ll have any real say in that. I can tell you that their miens are darker, their voices more tremulous. I’m like a Magic 8 Ball who won’t — who can’t — disgorge the desired answers no matter how tightly it’s clutched, how vigorously it’s shaken. One of my faculty colleagues said recently that he’d never felt so inadequate as a mentor. Same here.
And we are both dealing with an extraordinarily lucky group of young people talented, driven or connected enough to breach the sanctum of a highly selective university whose resources and range of course offerings rank it among the nation’s best schools. Still, their advantages can’t compete with their apprehensions.
They’re undoubtedly picking up on their elders’ anxiety. We’re trying to manage not only their fears and bafflement but also our own. News stories about universities since Trump returned to the White House focus on huge funding cuts for research, which have led to painful belt tightening at Duke and other schools; on investigations into admissions practices and incidents of antisemitism; and on fines, more or less, for institutions at odds with Trump’s agenda. But the Trump administration’s impact on campuses has been more sweeping than that.
There’s a nagging sense of being surveilled by invisible eyes. No one wants to draw the White House’s ire. So some of us deliberate how carefully we should watch our language, avoiding “diversity” and “equity” and the Trump administration’s other dirty words. Some of us go out of our way to make our receptiveness to a broad spectrum of ideologies clear and not to play into progressive caricatures. But which adjustments are reasonable corrections of past mistakes, which are defensible self-preservation and which are cop-outs?
And what’s my purpose? A.I. isn’t just upending the job market; it’s raising questions about the necessity and utility of an array of skills. I teach writing, which is increasingly being outsourced to bots. Some are scarily adept at it. So should I pivot to bot maximization? Should other professors in other disciplines?
But what puzzles me even more is how to respond to a concern wisely articulated by Robert Pondiscio, a former public school teacher who is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in several essays and in public remarks. He has been sounding an alarm about “the unbearable bleakness of American schooling,” a trend that predates Trump’s political ascent and that the president and his compatriots have used as populist fodder.
“If you simply listen to the stories we tell students,” Pondiscio wrote in a newsletter late last year, we promote “a view of the world in which everything is broken, corrupt, dangerous or doomed.” But optimism, he argued, is an essential civic virtue. “No society can expect its children to engage with a world they think has already given up on them.”
This world hasn’t. If I’ve given my students the opposite impression, I’ve screwed up. I need to communicate that for all this country’s current trials, it still brims with opportunities, its promise greater than its woes. And a blurry future isn’t the same as a bleak one. It just asks today’s college students to be especially nimble and patient. And it demands that those of us who stand before them work extra hard to find an honest balance between uncomfortable reckonings and reasons not to despair.
