By Catherine Terelak

Dear Attention-Seeking Professor, 

Welcome to late middle age! While we haven’t met, you once snapped your fingers at me while I was cashiering at Ace Hardware, which told me all I needed to know about the kind of person you are. (True story.) Additionally, I feel as though we’ve been introduced through Karen memes and American Psycho. Do you know how to read? Oh — In English and French? What a miracle! Studies show that your generation was exposed to lead as children, leading to psychosis, ADHD, and antisocial behavior. According to me (FYI, the NYT is for crosswords now), your cohort is cynical, emotionally repressed, and desperate for the comfort of a strawberry daiquiri and the stability of an early retirement. You are a “generation of swine” (Hunter S. Thompson’s words) because you came of age when it was cool to embrace the onslaught of anti-intellectualism and consumer excess for which you blame poor, sweet, earnest Gen Z.

You made good money, watched Sex and the City, and had sex in cities. You shacked up in the cokey haze of the late eighties and early nineties, eventually procreating and adopting a style of parenting that would make Harrison Bergeron blush. Culturally, you moved the needle of the American dream so far afield as to make it unattainable and actually meaningless. You invented the six-figure job and the four-bedroom house. You bred the two dogs named Fred and Ginger in the sick, twisted puppy mill of Clinton-era optimism. 

Like Amy Poehler’s character in Mean Girls, you were quick to cede moral authority for fake boobs, a pink tracksuit, and a tray of margaritas. So desperate were you to be our friends and equals that you neglected to be competent, authoritative parents… and professors. “I’m a cool professor,” you said. “Not like other professors.” Now, even your feeble attempts at finger-wagging are dampened with the humiliating sweat of ironic detachment. See: “[Attention-Seeking Professor] thinks deeply about the state of today’s youth while reading in a hammock.” 

Think back to the Paleolithic Era, when you were twenty-two. Did you take advice from cavemen who seemed like attention whores? The ones who were like: “Why Gen B only want to play with fire? Why they burn things down? Why they want to hunt big animals to cook in big fire? Why no one interested in making simple tools anymore?” Even though the old caveman’s generation literally invented fire? 

And making simple tools did remain a foundational skill of the era, and the attention whore caveman was making an important point in calling it a useful thing for young cavemen to do. But the thing that made the young cavemen want to spear out their eyes — beside his misuse of the word “exposé” when quoting a stone tablet about fire use among young cavemen — was his fucking whining. 

“Why young cavemen want bigger cave for bigger fire? Why young cavemen want biggest fire? Why young cavemen so conformist and stupid? Why young cavemen can’t digest raw meat like old cavemen? Why young cavemen can’t hunt and gather? Why young cavemen divide labor? Young cavemen not rational actors. Young cavemen just stupid. Young cavemen need big loud caveman to help.” 

At the end of the day, it’s not about our parents, society, or Fred and Ginger. It’s definitely not about you. We suck. We know we suck. (Oog do fire bad.) It’s not our fault, but it is our problem — and we have to start acting like it. You’re right in this sense, and since you’ve made such a public attempt to reach us, allow me to offer this apology on behalf of people between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two:

I’m sorry you’re stupid. 

I’m sorry you’re cringe. 

I’m sorry you see us as children. 

I’m sorry you teach a useless discipline. 

I’m sorry the ultimate purpose of the liberal education is to liberate us from old people who get their kicks making poorly-written spectacles of our flaws. Your parents aren’t your friends, Grinnellians, and neither are your professors. Don’t get it twisted. Your friends are your friends. Use them to organize better ways of thinking and being than the ones you’ve been given. That is the prize. Keep your eyes on it. Get cool, get smart, get weird, and get feisty. Commit to the liberal arts not for the career flexibility or some vague notion about spiritual fulfillment under capitalism. Get serious and get into it because it’s fun to read something ridiculous on a Monday at seven a.m. and have something fresh and cruel and completely you to say about it by Friday afternoon. Live a little, people. Do something horrible.