Our new house is a three-block walk from the University of Portland, and I’m discovering there are some interesting aspects to living near an institution of higher learning. There are the drunken students slowly and volubly making their way the few blocks back to campus from the Twilight Room (The #8-rated dive bar in the nation. Really. Look it up.) Having done something similar frequently during my own dissolute youth, that sort of thing doesn’t bother me, though it can be entertaining. Turns out that drunk college students aren’t nearly as funny or erudite as I used to think I was back in the day. Who knew?
I walk on the UP campus frequently, and now and again I’ll stop to watch the students. My first reaction is to realize how young they all look…no surprise, I suppose, because that’s exactly what they are. Most are between 18-22, and when I look at them, it’s easy to feel old. Very old. I’m close to the age of their parents. As I watch them walk by, I’m reminded just how things have changed. My college years were pre-Internet, pre-cell phones, and pre-PCs. My high school graduation present was an electric typewriter, which turned out to be just about the best gift ever. I wore that thing out over four years, and it saved my bacon more times than I care to remember. Computers were limited to mainframes that some of the professors and a few computer science students used. To everyone else, they were abstract concepts, and confusing ones at that. For History majors like myself, it was a typewriter or nothing, and no one could decipher my hopelessly illegible handwriting.
Erin and I went to an Oregon-UP baseball game on campus yesterday afternoon. As we were leaving to walk home, we noticed a student sitting in the stands using a MacBook Pro. Seeing that brought home just how much the world has changed in the 33 years since I graduated. She was very likely on UP’s wireless network, which meant that, while sitting in the stands at a baseball game, she was connected to virtually anyone or any piece of information in the world.
Today’s college students live in a world where connectivity is taken for granted, where even fax machines are becoming obsolete and land lines are passe. I suspect if I asked one of them about rotary-dial telephones I’d get a deer-caught-in-the-headlights stare. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like a museum piece.
I wonder what their futures will hold, what problems they’ll face and what wonders of technology will become available to them. Simply looking at the pace of innovation over the last 20-25 years, it’s not a stretch to hypothesize that the world when they’re my age will be a very different, perhaps almost unrecognizable place.
As I watch today’s college students on their way to wherever it is they’re going, I wonder if they’ll inherit (or be able to create) a world where peace is the rule, or whether mankind’s seemingly innate drive to kill and destroy itself will continue unabated. Will they find a cure for cancer? Will they manage to stop, perhaps even reverse, global climate change and its effects? Will they learn, unlike previous generations, that we’re more alike than different? Will they grant others the right to think, believe, live, and love as they see fit? Will they decide it makes more sense to spend money on butter than guns?
I hope I’ll be around to see what happens down the road. At the very least, while being on campus can make me feel old, there’s also an almost palpable sense that all things are possible, that nothing has been ruled out yet. The future and its accompanying events may intervene, and who knows what that future holds? That said, it’s not hard not to see the possibilities when I look at the 18-22 year old kids who are on the verge of inheriting the world.
I’ve heard it said that the way to remain young is to surround yourself with young people. If that’s true, then Erin and I are in the perfect place.
