For the last four years I have been teaching writing and journalism at Eugene Lang, part of the New School University, a gig which is now drawing to a close. I have mixed feelings about my departure. Adjunct professors are like the itinerant farm workers of our country’s college system: the schools couldn’t run without us, but that doesn’t mean we have any rights or get a lot of respect. But it has been illuminating to come to better know the current college generation. (My own college-aged son and teenaged daughter are less enlightening, in many ways; they only tell me things on a needs-to-know basis, and as the dad they figure most of what they do I don’t need to know.)

I won’t make generalizations about a whole generation (as my parents were happy to do about mine, mostly along the lines of “spoiled, selfish, self-involved” — does any of this sound familiar?) though the subject of generational divides came up often in our sometimes rambling seminars. A lot of the Lang kids look like my friends did in the early seventies: long hair, grunge clothes, hand-rolled cigarettes, sneering affect. And the New School is proud of its tradition of political discontent, and many there will doubtless look at President Bob Kerrey’s announcement that he is leaving next year as some kind of victory, though their complaints with him remain rather inchoate. And while they can be dismissive of the spoiled, selfish, self-involved grown-ups we (ie, their parents) have become, many look with plain nostalgia to the sixties as the time they should have been born in. 

A little time-travel might be helpful here: I think a day or two or no cell phone or internet, to say nothing of the three channels available on television, might cure them. Most recently the topic of generation gaps came up when my intro to journalism class was discussing “Say Anything,” Emily Nussbaum’s 2007 New York magazine story that considered the phenomenon of online everything and the people who grew up with it. Though the piece is slightly dated in the ever-morphing web world (what was MySpace, again? And how come there is no Twitter?), the class related to the general fear and alienation voiced by the elders in the story. 

For Nussbaum contends that this is the first real generation gap since, well, the sixties, and that it’s not light shows and marijuana that separates the generations but the internet. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter,” she quotes Clay Shirkey, a 42 yo NYU professor as saying. “What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” 

Oh, you had a 7-Eleven parking lot to hang out in! La-di-da. While my life would have been undoubtedly altered by knowing people outside of my immediate community (Auburn, California), I can’t say I’m really stewing with envy over the choices available to youth today. For the underground culture we nibbled at the edges of then was truly underground. My mother may have been curious about what I was off doing with my friends at all hours, and on a few occasions I tried to explain the lure of the counterculture I imagined myself part of. But it’s not like she was going to drop acid and listen to Trout Mask Replica with me, god bless her. 

Which is one problem with the generation gap analogy. I can visit YouTube, Facebook, Twitter et al anytime and while I may not see the charm of the dog-slobber videos or quite understand the desire to let everyone know what I am doing all the time, I can glimpse it. Can the underground exist online? Is it really underground if everyone can see it? Are we romanticizing the counterculture, and our status as The Others of our time? I dunno. My memory is that there was much more of a secret handshake involved then when meeting other members of the tribe, but my memory ain’t what it used to be. Blame it on the drugs.