{"id":838,"date":"2011-04-19T10:36:43","date_gmt":"2011-04-19T15:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/?p=838"},"modified":"2023-01-24T12:27:52","modified_gmt":"2023-01-24T17:27:52","slug":"writing-centers-and-_academically-adrift_-why-we-might-have-to-start-reading-these-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dept.writing.wisc.edu\/blog\/writing-centers-and-_academically-adrift_-why-we-might-have-to-start-reading-these-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Centers and Academically Adrift: Why We Might Have to Start Reading These Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Rebecca Lorimer.<\/strong>
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\nAre college students today academically adrift?<\/p>\n

Perhaps this question might make more sense if I had typed the last word in all caps or added a prolonged shriek sound effect after the question mark. You are correct if you feel an implied \u201cyes\u201d in the question and a not-so-implied eye-roll in my own reaction.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading Academically Adrift<\/em>, the newest installment in the narrative that college students have gone emphatically, tragically awry in their pursuit of higher education. This book-length empirical report follows in the tracks of Mark Bauerlein\u2019s The Dumbest Generation<\/em> and Derek Bok\u2019s Our Underachieving Colleges<\/em> by asking, again, why college students these days are so lazy, busy, distracted, and lacking in their reading, writing, and thinking abilities.<\/p>\n

But here I will attempt to halt my snarky tone. Certainly we should regard such a pattern with fair curiosity\u2014why are administrators, academics, and policy makers so intent on investigating college students\u2019 abilities and the educational context that shapes them? And why is the public so interested? My advisor Deborah Brandt once said that the more books published about a subject, the more anxiety such activity reveals. (I\u2019m sure she doesn\u2019t remember saying that, but I do since she was talking about freshman composition readers.)<\/p>\n

I think a better question is why we should be interested. What are the implications of these books for those of us who teach and tutor writing, especially in the uniquely interdisciplinary and collaborative spaces of writing centers?<\/p>\n

Academically Adrift<\/em>, written by sociologists Richard Arun and Josipa Roksa, has been reviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Ed <\/em><\/a>and Inside Higher Ed<\/em><\/a>, and has entered public conversations via news articles like the recent New York Times <\/em>piece<\/a> on low-achieving business majors. In other words, people are beginning to make claims about college learning based on this book. And when politicians and policy makers also begin to pick up on these claims, this is generally our cue to take interest, since as we\u2019ve learned so well in the last few months, their decisions affect us in very real ways.<\/p>\n

Most relevantly for our work in writing centers, Arun and Roksa claim that,<\/p>\n