<i>It seems like there must be some kind of materialist, structural explanation for this.</i>

That’s exactly what I’m thinking, trying to work through. I’m starting to think of everything in US culture now as an echo of an experiment in first-world ever-more-totally-free marketism. The cultural deformations that come of letting an unalloyed employment market, no safety net, run individuals’ lives. 

It certainly runs mine… The subtext of the piece is the fact that I feel myself totally bound up in this system too…

My perception of the university system here in the US, coming from the UK as well, is that it is already far more hierarchical and that the pressures are immense, but for no purpose other than maintaining the pressure and the hierarchy. Intense anxiety about grades – when we are already in a graduate program and therefore don’t need ‘good grades’ to get us up to another step, the perception that even as graduates we have nothing worth saying until we have been here 6 years, the deference to professors and older students that manifests itself in exaggerated rituals of obsequiousness. But most of all the constant back stabbing of fellow students. Faced with the terror of failing, the students are set up and encouraged to fight among themselves, constantly putting each other down, and going in for a kind of competitive self-exhaustion where only the one who has slept the least, anguished the most and had the most dramatic breakdown is considered worthy. I find it a little revolting, not to mention highly counter-productive. But when constantly scrabbling for a place in the pecking order, the students have barely enough time for a life, let alone to engage with the rest of the world. Added to this, there is a culture of cynicism, that really is just another fear of standing out from the crowd or of laying oneself too open to attacks.

Very few of my peers even read a newspaper, or get off campus more than once a week. They wouldn’t know what to protest about, let alone have the energy – or the desire – to do anything about it. I find it a little worrying that these people are anthropologists, and therefore presumably meant to be studying human culture and relationships, and yet no so little about the world outside of the ivory tower.

I thought your post (and the discussion that followed) was very interesting, in part because this past year – I TA’ed for the first time in Fall of last year – has been my first real exposure to American undergraduates. I was surprised by how incredibly insecure many of them are: reluctant to ask questions for fear of appearing stupid, considering it presumptuous to criticize the authors they’re reading because they are “only undergraduates,” looking to university to give them knowledge rather than provide a framework for their own thinking. It seems like there must be some kind of materialist, structural explanation for this.

Thanks for the gracious link…