The Myth of Student Apathy
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “apathy” a lot recently, and the more I do the more I doubt its usefulness.
A lot of what’s taken for apathy is actually, I think, despair. It’s a nagging, grinding, chronic despair that leads a person to think that what’s wrong will always be wrong and that they can’t play any part in changing it. It’s not apathy, because apathy would mean that they didn’t care. They do care, often, but they’re resigned to things the way they are because they think they’re powerless.
This is something I talk a lot about with students when they bring up the question of campus apathy. I ask them whether the problem is that other students don’t give a damn about the barriers they’re facing, or whether they just assume those barriers are insurmountable. My hunch is that it’s usually mostly the second, even when it
