Deliberations on Apathy

Aside from the infamous stereotype concerning college girls perpetuated by the late, great rap musician Easy E, not many others have gained higher esteem in the public mind than the notion that university students are politically apathetic.

With intemperate abandon, pundits question our levels of civic commitment and participation. And perhaps they have a point, for after seeing the strange amalgam of students on our campus—from regiments of studious pre-professionals to rag-tag pods of degenerate, smoking liberals—and after examining the execrable voter participation data for 18 to 24-year-olds, one of our Duke campus cats might raise the hypothesis that at least some students are generally indifferent to life, the universe and, well, everything.

Though it may be easy to think that alienation and apathy are recent phenomena, people have been griping about the indifference of the masses since the Old Testament, with the parable of the prodigal son giving splendid illustration to the timeless archetype of the profligate, dissipated youth.

“Characterizations of Americans as apathetic, indifferent, or complacent are older than the republic, of course,” writes Glenn Altschuler in “Apathy, Apocalypse, and the American Jeremiad.” Altschuler highlights the commonplace use of sermons in the 19th century to berate the faithful for their apathetic tendencies.

Although I think it’s safe to say that fewer Duke students today are inclined to heed the words of an itinerant preacher, we are still targets of secular diatribe that criticize our lack of political participation.

But is it really true that we’re as politically prude as people make us out to be?

Research suggests that the answer to this question may not be clear-cut. Experts studying student civic involvement have independently arrived at contradictory conclusions. Some make sweeping cultural pronouncements about how kids today are more concerned with iPods and I-banking than campaigning for their local state representative. Others, however, suggest that the level of 1960s political activism continues to exist, but student involvement now manifests itself in community service, religion and minority activism.

Paul Loeb, one such scholar of the latter stripe, set out traveling around the country, meeting with students while writing his book “Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus.” He argues that students removed themselves from social engagement largely because of a cultural shift toward hyper-individualism, which taught them that political activism is not a priority.

Mattson suggests that our unwillingness to participate in politics stems from our preoccupation with the marketplace. He points out that our long history of American workaholism continues to thrive today. Since the middle of last century, more and more middle class Americans are starting to work at a younger age.

And the issue of money continues to plague many students at Duke. One needs not wonder why they are not politically active when the cost of education drives them to assume debt loads approaching six figures. They are rationally focused on getting good grades so that they can get good jobs and good pay; distractions from this cause become secondary.

Nonetheless, an intriguing study of undergraduate politics published by Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton in 1998 suggests that student apathy may be a myth. Gathering data from a broad sample of undergraduates, student leaders and student affairs officers, the study arrived at results that might surprise people who level charges of apathy against students. They discovered that a whopping 64 percent of undergraduates surveyed were involved in volunteer activities, and that “traditional campus political groups” had yielded to “support/advocacy groups,” which they found at 69 percent of the universities they studied. Moreover, they learned that these groups were gaining popularity among students at colleges and universities during the 1990s.

The study also found that on-campus groups have a tendency to splinter into smaller, specialized factions—a tendency that any visitor to the Duke activities fair can easily recognize. A quick look around the fair reveals a multitude of religious organizations whose aims are similar: The Cambridge Christian Fellowship, the Campus Crusade for Christ, the Catholic Student Center—and that’s just the C’s. Female a cappella groups are no exception; there’s Out of the Blue, Deja Blue, Borrowed and Blue—to say nothing of the other colors.

Also stunning is the data Levine and Cureton cite pertaining to campus protests. According to the authors’ analysis, “Student protest is booming.” In 1969, near the height of political unrest, 28 percent of undergraduates reported participating in a demonstration. A decade later, the proportion of student protest participation had dropped to 19 percent—today it stands at 25 percent.

Modern activism, however, no longer reflects the ideological fervor of the ’60s. Levine and Cureton found that the two main protest issues today involve multiculturalism and the high costs of college.

A study by Alexander Austing in “The Changing American College Student: Thirty-Year Trends 1966-1996,” which included over 9 million students, also suggests that there has been a shift in undergraduate values toward materialism and away from “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.”

Although this survey may not tell the whole story at Duke, which has been host to a number of protest movements ranging from anti-war bus blockades to sexual assault parades to anti-pickle company boycotts in recent history, they have been the little siblings of advocacy and identity movements.

Even still, identity and advocacy movements have kept a low enough profile over the years to inspire an effusion of articles and editorials about apathy in The Chronicle. A survey of records from the past 10 years produces more than a handful of articles bemoaning the lack of political involvement by Duke students. A few examples: “Student activism must go beyond basketball” (06/02/94), “In midst of prosperity, youth of America fails to define itself” (10/08/97), “Students shrug at 2000 campaign” (01/20/00) and finally, “Students decry apathy on campus” (11/04/02). At a very unscientific glance, it appears that apathy has been a persistently addressed “problem” of relatively static proportions during the past decade.

It seems, however, that labeling college students as generally “apathetic” lacks subtlety. Clearly, with greater or lesser lustiness, they are involved in a variety of organizations with different programs directed at accomplishing a particular set of objectives. Indeed, the only area in which our demographic may reasonably be called apathetic is with respect to voting: U.S. Census Bureau studies indicate that only 29 percent of 18-to 20-year-olds voted in the 2000 presidential election.

Many experts across various fields have speculated about possible reasons for our lack of voting, ranging from the possibility of a biological mechanism behind our political inaction to psychological and behavioral explanations for our apathetic tendencies.

Biologists argue that there is a scientific explanation for our behavior. At the most fundamental level, all our actions are guided by our biological machinery and based on our historical dependence on natural selection as the process by which our complexity was produced.

"Everyday experiences teach us, cognitive psychology examines closely, and the evolutionary theory of knowledge indeed explains that our intelligence can be conceptualized as the result of an adaptation to earlier living conditions, and from this perspective many of our peculiarities and inadequacies can be understood,” explains Heiner Flohr in “Political Sociology from a Biocultural Perspective.” “Pertinent examples might be our cognitive tendency to form oversimplified notions of humans and things (somewhat like the politically influential ‘enemy images’), our cognitive difficulties in comprehending entire causal systems with their feedback, our inability to imagine the effects of such phenomena as exponential growth of resource utilization.”

It might not be unreasonable to hypothesize that the idea of political apathy on college campuses, and by extension at Duke, derives at least some of its energy from biological reasons that adolescents are inclined to do little, or even nothing. Rodents, if forced to run on treadmills, have been known to stop out of an innate tendency to conserve energy.

Perhaps we are similar. In fact, a recent study published in the Journal of Neurosciences found that adolescent brains really do manifest neurobiological signs of lower motivation than adult brains. One might speculate that this difference in motivation may have something to do with the fact that the frontal lobes of the human brain, a region of the brain in effect responsible for high-level decision making, are fluid and plastic until the early-to mid-twenties. Apathy researcher Dr. Robert Marin has found that patients with damage in this region show high-levels of apathy, and other researchers have also discovered a correlation between increased apathy and reduced bilateral frontal lobe volumes in patients.

Psychologists frequently point to the “repetition effect” as a behavioral explanation for student political apathy. The principle holds that people are more likely to repeat a behavior if they have already done it once. Teenagers, therefore, have not yet voted and getting to that point of repetition requires an additional input of energy to break the apolitical inertia that exists among students.

Another possible cause of apathy is specialization. As students, we have been “professionalized,” as New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it, at younger ages, and by definition have directed our finite energies at achieving particular objectives—at the exclusion of others, like generalized political activism.

Finally, there is the possibility suggested by some psychiatrists that apathy is a necessary adaptive response to excessive stimuli. On any given day we are bedeviled by literally hundreds of commitments ranging from jobs to independent studies to classes to extracurricular activities—a workload for which we are poorly suited.

Our progenitors in prehistory certainly had no need for to-do lists or Palm Pilots and the ability to cope with the bewildering perplexity of modern life, and so they never developed the neural machinery for it. At this juncture in human history, natural selection probably will wind up favoring individuals who are selectively apathetic, capable of focusing on a few things at the exclusion of the rest.

It seems wisest to conclude that for all the punditry, apathy has been overstated as a campus problem. Although it is true that activism has evolved considerably since the 1960s, it has not disappeared and, very probably, has increased in scope.

Far gone are the days of the Freedom Summer and vigorous anti-war protesting. Somehow we have allowed ourselves to sink into the miasmic depths of pre-law, pre-medicine, pre-business—for money and prosperity we have sacrificed principled engagement and been reduced to degenerate solicitation, tugging at the robes of the University like lobbyists, begging for special privileges and benefits.