Convocation: Mark Bauerlein

Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University where he has taught since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw studies about culture and American life. He earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. His publications include Whitman and the American Idiom (1991), Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997), The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief (1997), Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001), Civil Rights Chronicle: The African American Struggle for Freedom (2003), and A Handbook of Literary Terms (2004). Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book attracted national buzz even in advance of its publication. Bauerlein’s provocative, deeply researched book finds ignorance in abundance and the Internet an all too enticing web of social networking that further insulates youth from their intellectual development. He contends that the technology that was supposed to make young adults more astute, diversify their tastes, and improve their minds had the opposite effect. The title of the book, and the title of his presentation, is "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future."