Former U. Provost addresses Generation X political apathy

It's a common complaint. Generation X wants nothing to do with politics. "You'd have to be from outer space not to notice," former Penn Provost Tom Ehrlich said in a speech last night. Ehrlich, a former Harvard Law School dean and Carter Administration staff member, spoke of his growing dismay at the lack of political engagement among Gen X-ers. Ehrlich spoke to about 25 students and administrators at Houston Hall. His lecture, which marked the first of a series of seminars sponsored by the Provost's Office, was titled "Politics and Generation X." He cited a survey showing that only 10 percent of today's freshmen talk about politics frequently, compared with 15 percent in 1995 and 30 percent in 1968. However, unlike most observers, Ehrlich did not attribute this decline to apathy. Instead, Ehrlich explained that Generation X is angry. They distrust a system which is, in their view, controlled by money and in which an individual cannot make a difference. "Generation X has never seen [democracy] work," Ehrlich said. In contrast, there has been an increase in individual community service, which rewards the volunteer with tangible results. A growing number of Generation X is involved with mentoring programs, soup kitchens and other such small scale projects. But Ehrlich said that this was no substitute for what can be achieved by groups that work together and with the community to affect policy change. Ehrlich spoke of one solution to this problem: the use of institutions of higher learning to reinforce a sense of moral and civic duty among students. Saying that "our civic muscles have atrophied from lack of use," Ehrlich cited several institutions -- including Tufts University and Swarthmore College -- which have instated programs intended to exercise just those muscles. For his part, Ehrlich has gone back to teaching. In the past couple of years, he has taught service-based learning courses on the West Coast. In each course, he chooses a local issue of enough importance to give his students a sense of doing something significant, but small enough that they can feel their work making a difference. He recently examined welfare reform and low-income housing issues with classes in the San Francisco area. In a question and answer session following his lecture, Ehrlich challenged the young people in the audience to explain why they think their generation took such a small role in civics. One student replied that the atmosphere is heavily focused on pre-professionalism, which leaves little time for civic duty. Another student agreed with him and took his argument a step further, saying that they choose not to get involved because the industries "[they're] going into don't value it in [them]." However, according to a third student, the trend simply reflected a shift in the way people become involved in politics. He pointed out that many prominent politicians today started out as businessmen.