Professor Tom Bertonneau (who never insisted on being called “doctor”) has recently retired from his long teaching career. In today’s Martin Center article, he reflects on today’s college students (and in a subsequent piece will turn his attention to the faculty).

Bertonneau laments the decline of higher education generally and finds that most of the students are just not serious about learning. He quotes a conversation with a faculty colleague: “I’m tired,” she said, “of writing the same comments and criticisms over and over on student assignments.” He continues, “She meant not only that succeeding cohorts of freshmen bring with them ad seriatim the scribal incompetency that public secondary education appears to foster, but that the same students, either during the semester or in one course after another, reveal themselves as unable to internalize basic corrections.”

Corrections? Most students don’t care if their writing is correct or not.

Worse, however, is the widespread political mindset among them. Bertonneau writes, “Students have adapted, in some cases eagerly, to the pernicious ethos of denunciation that prevails under ‘wokeness’ on every college campus. Inculcated in the theories of universal racism and a malicious patriarchy, their adolescent narcissism inflated by constant baseless praise and the exuberant celebration of their non-existent moral perspicacity, students are ready to be ‘triggered.’”

Trying to teach under these circumstances was excruciating.

In January, we’ll run the second part of Bertonneau’s not-so-fond look back at teaching.