The Lost Generation?

My father was born into poverty in a Brooklyn tenement the day the stock market crashed in 1929. My mother spent her childhood in hunger and terror in the war in Poland, living (she recalls to me now) mostly without shoes – even when on the run through the swamps. Their wounded souls made for an uneasy home life when I was growing up. More than one close friend has asked me how it is I didn’t become a comedian. 

As we were growing up, our mother never told us she had earned a philosophy degree at Hunter College. (I found out by accident when I was in my 20s.) Like a lot of married women in the ‘60s, she was stuck at home taking care of her husband and children and felt her college education not worth mentioning.

Nevertheless, she brought her intellectualism literally to the breakfast table as she read to us from the Stoics, Shakespeare, and Strunk and White, engaging us in discussion of all of it. In retrospect, I think the reason I didn’t become a comedian is because my mother gave us a gift: the understanding that a vibrant life of the mind could save you in the wars. It wouldn’t necessarily bring you food or shelter. But it could bring you a sense of meaning and purpose, a way to process the insults, the vagaries, the otherwise thoughtless cruelty of life.

So it was when I was raising my son that I found myself determined to help him see what a refuge—what a doctor, what a cook, what a lover—the mind could be. As my husband and I were raised without TVs and a cell phone, so we raised our son. We read; we talked; we discussed everything. 

This kind of upbringing plus two academic parents will, of course, breed you an intellectual. While our son was always fascinated by physics and engineering—literally how the world turns—he had a voracious brain. When he was 17 and accepted to the University of Chicago, I burst into tears in relief. What if I had raised him like that and he could not go to where he needed to be?

As I said to him when we went and walked the green on a spring day there, on a post-admission visit, listening to the wildly strange and thrilling conversations of the students hanging out together in the sun, “I gave birth to you, but these are your people. This is your home planet.” 

Never mind the classes, though they did make me envious. (A course on the First Amendment with Geof Stone—as an undergraduate!) The conversations he reported back from dorm dinners with age-mates were positively astonishing. Talking the theology of math, with atheists and Orthodox Jewish students, debating what numerical patterns in the universe mean. Connecting pop culture to esoteric literature and Renaissance music. And always a spirit of helping each other furnish those refuges of their minds.

Then, in his sophomore year, came the pandemic. 

Having taught the history of medicine for over a decade, being married to a med school dean who necessarily works in public health, it wasn’t hard to see early that this was a Big One. We went out to buy masks in late January and I tweeted others ought to do the same. 

I had always told my students in my classes the next big one would be a flu or a new SARS, and it wasn’t because I was a genius; you just had to teach the history of SARS-1, as I did, to know that kind of coronavirus would very likely eventually return. That epidemiologists knew this was why humankind was already on our way to successful vaccine development when it broke out.

In March 2020, as you will probably recall, the universities closed. Our son came home, with a dorm-mate in tow, at my suggestion. (Young people need young people.) The four of us became an intellectual bubble, and that helped us all.

But it was soon wearing. “Distance learning” is an oxymoron and always will be. 

Once it became clear the virus was relatively low-risk for healthy young people, I wanted desperately for them to go back to school, and not just because they were eating crazy amounts of bacon. Obviously we had to avoid surges at the hospitals—situations where people would end up dying unnecessarily of heart attacks and car accidents just because there were not enough medical personnel to attend to them. But it seemed we could deal with localized surges in localized and temporary ways.

And I knew from teaching the history of epidemics how harsh public health measures always result in fierce backlashes. It felt like we had learned nothing from history except the microbiology.

“Send the undergrads and young grad students back, lock the gates, throw pizza and condoms over the walls, and have the professors zoom in if they can’t go in,” I said to anyone who would listen. Needless to say, the University of Chicago provost and president did not. 

When my son and his friend were finally allowed back on campus, they and their classmates were forced to live, eat, and study apart. They were still Zooming to classes. It was stupid. Our son sunk into depression. I suggested he just live at home and Zoom in. (I could then at least make sure he was eating, exercising, getting hugs, and doing other things that help mental health.) The university wouldn’t allow it. My spouse observed we were paying $80,000 a year for minimum security prison. 

By the time our son’s class graduated in 2022, highly atypically only one or two people in his wide circle of University of Chicago friends went on directly to graduate school. The rest wandered the desert. Our son was fortunate to get hired into UC labs, and he spent two years getting the research experience he was denied because of the sharp reactions to Covid. He won a research award, cranked out a few papers, got his name on a couple of patents.

When he applied to grad school, a few of the applications required a DEI statement, and I found myself pissed off at “the system” all over again. My son is an upper-middle-class straight white boy who has enjoyed a largely privileged life. Did he really need to mention his queer friends and my biracial brother to get a Ph.D. in applied physics or molecular engineering? 

How many perfectly qualified people, I had to wonder, were being passed over because they couldn’t play certain ID cards? If the goal was – reasonably – to help those from genuinely underprivileged backgrounds (like all his grandparents had been) to join the academy and diversify the viewpoints to improve knowledge, this appeared to be an ineffective way to carry it out. Also, if that was the point, just be honest about it.

Mind you, as he was applying, it wasn’t an easy time to get into grad school; so many young people whose schooling was delayed by Covid ended up essentially applying for grad school at the same time.

But, though ejected by the kinds of state schools his parents had attended, our son was accepted to PhD programs at Harvard and University of Chicago with full funding made possible through federal grants for science. 

He did his homework and decided Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering was the better fit. He started last fall. His plans were to become a professor. He loves to teach and mentor (and he’s good at it); he loves to do basic and applied research; and, like his parents, he doesn’t mind doing academic administration.

And then. 

And then, having made it through the pandemic shut-downs and the DEI vortex, we wonder today if our son will have his graduate career ended abruptly without a degree because his mentor and his school will lose the necessary funding.

Or will he manage to earn a PhD – because, if all his funding is cancelled and the university can somehow still provide a functional lab with functional faculty, his parents can and will pay for his degree – but there will be no jobs when he graduates?

Because science will have been decimated by the cuts and disruptions being undertaken by the Trump administration. The collateral damage is substantial.

I feel sick in my gut as I wonder if we have seen the peak of humankind’s scientific glory. I wonder if we are seeing the end of the period where a child like me, from parents born into the poverty and hunger of tenements and wars, can access the best education and obtain a PhD or an MD, MBA, JD.

We can certainly blame the left for the excessive backlash against universities, just as we can blame the coronavirus for the excesses that followed. But the blame doesn’t undo the harm. It certainly doesn’t stop it.