Renowned author Professor Mark Bauerlein presented the third Portsmouth Abbey School Dom Luke Childs lecture of the 2016-17 academic year to students and faculty on December 9, 2016. His talk focused on "five things to do in college." Mr. Bauerlein urged students to find time each day to be "unplugged" from distractions, especially from the lure of social media and electronics; to form a close relationship with at least one professor early in the college experience; to read a daily newspaper in its traditional form; to become comfortable speaking with people of all generations; and to write first drafts of college papers by hand - using pen and paper - along with many other bits of valuable advice.
Mr. Bauerlein has taught English at Emory University since 1989 and is a senior editor of First Things journal. He serves, in addition, as Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah. He earned his doctorate in English from UCLA in 1988, having completed a thesis on Whitman.
Between 2003 and 2005, Mr. Bauerlein served as director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. While there, he contributed to an NEA study, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America." His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997), The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (1997). He is also the author of the 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), which won the Nautilus Book Award. On his experiences that led him to write The Dumbest Generation, he said "...in my limited experience as a teacher, I've noticed in the last ten years that students are no less intelligent, no less ambitious, but there are two big differences: Reading habits have slipped, along with general knowledge. You can quote me on this: You guys don't know anything." He recently co-edited a collection of essays entitled The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, published in 2015.
Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard and The Times Literary Supplement.
View Mr. Bauerlein's Lecture here.