Twilight sucks the intelligence out of college students

What was the last book you read? I just finished re-reading Truman Capote's Breakfast At Tiffany's for the third time, but I think I'm in the minority. Usually, when I ask my peers this question, they either answer "Twilight" or "I don't read books." It's cool - I read Twilight too. It was hard to put down, but not because it was a well-written, thought-provoking piece of literature. From an English major's perspective, it was actually just downright horrible. (And don't even get me started on the statement about not reading at all.) However, I feel as if this little phenomenon of trashy, fanatical, pop-fiction being on the college best-seller lists is unique to our generation. While Stephanie Meyer's The Host is currently on the New York Times' Hardcover Fiction best-seller list, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling was, ironically, in the exact same spot in 1999 (#8), the lists from the same week in 1959, 1969, and 1979 are drastically different. (Breakfast At Tiffany's was #16 in 1959.) Lolita, Doctor Zhivago, The Stories of John Cheever -all of these pale in comparison to our current escapist fixations. I am certainly not alone in my observations. Ron Charles of The Washington Post reported Sunday on the issue of college students being more familiar with painstakingly beautiful, albeit manic-depressive vampires as opposed to any modern day J.D. Salingers. The shift has been attributed to everything from the intensifying capitalist mentality of the 1980s to the fact that college students nowadays are more conservative, both economically and politically, than their counterparts 40 years ago. However, Roger Kimball of the New Criterion puts the blame on colleges themselves-and quite frankly, so do I-citing that colleges today are "intellectually stultifying, politically correct" and "anesthetizing." To be completely honest, my AP classes in high school were ten times more challenging than any course I have taken in college thus far. My AP classes introduced me to new ideas, new theories, new people, new events-things I had never encountered before and that I found fascinating and that I wanted to continue to explore on my own. However, I found that when I arrived at Georgia State University, I did not receive credit where credit was due. For example, my AP English exam gave me credit for English 1101 and 1102 at Georgia State, where the advanced ideas such as how many sentences belong in a paragraph and how to write a thesis statement are covered. In AP English, however, I was studying the likes of Homer, Austen, Conrad, Melville and Chopin. What a wonderful surprise for me when I learned I would get to study them all over again in the British, American, and World Literature courses that I was required to take as an English major. Simply put, being a college student has been disappointing. I arrived hungry for more and, instead, received a watered down version of what I had already covered in high school (which, by the way, was free). Of course, I've only attended Georgia State. I'm sure I would feel differently if I were enrolled in classes at, say, Yale or even Emory but, as I'm sure is true for many students here at Georgia State, I simply can't afford to go somewhere more intellectually challenging. How disappointing. How unfair. So, for those of us who simply exist during college just to put in the appropriate amount of time to earn a degree, are we wasting what little money we did put aside to "invest" in an education? What are we really doing here? It's very frustrating to put forth so much for something so utterly meaningless. Since college isn't teaching students anything anymore, we're all being forced to go to graduate or professional schools in order to really get anywhere, which means more time and, most importantly for most of us at Georgia State, more money. (And I'm not even going to divulge into the state of the job market right now, which is affecting graduates from schools much more prestigious than ours.) Of course, where there's a will there's a way, and I've continued to passionately devour knowledge on my own throughout my life as a college student. I read books like Twilight during Spring Break as a way to relax and escape for a little while. But I feel as if that's not the case for the majority of 20-something year old college students - for most of us, it seems as if that's about as much as we could handle anyway.

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