A student organization called Politech, based out of Texas Tech University, went out on its home campus a few weeks ago to see how politically and culturally savvy students were in a video called “Politically Challenged: Texas Tech Edition.”
The video quickly went viral, with upward of 1 million views on YouTube. The group asked students from a variety of majors questions such as “Who won the Civil War?” and “Who is the vice president?” The students interviewed couldn’t answer most political questions, but they did know to whom Brad Pitt is married.
While the video is upbeat in tempo and the students appear to be having a good time, for many it seemed to be a confirmation of just how stupid millennials are, and I have a problem with that.
It is reminiscent of the Jimmy Kimmel videos that attempt to catch people unaware with questions that are not often asked on subjects that are not often thought about. The Jimmy Kimmel videos even had similar questions about Joe Biden (the answer to “Who is the vice president?” in case you weren’t sure).
Of course these videos wouldn’t show the people who got the questions right, only the seven or eight who got them wrong and couldn’t answer. Moreover, on Texas Tech’s campus of just fewer than 40,000, I find it hard to believe all of the people interviewed don’t know who the vice president is.
These sorts of videos promote a sense of superiority that I react very strongly against. I don’t like walking around feeling like I’m smarter than most, and I don’t like people feeling superior to me because it prevents growth and creates barriers between groups of people.
And it seemed quite a few of the students in the video actually knew the answers to the questions, even though they had trouble recalling the answers initially.
Making other people feel stupid excludes them from learning and stunts the growth of an individual to cater to the entertainment of an audience.
It promotes the idea that younger people are inherently more culturally and politically clueless, which is not true. If we want to look at basic numbers, 75 percent of the freshmen admitted to Texas Tech were in the top 50 percent of their high school classes, according to collegedata.com .
The average GPA of an IU freshman is 3.62.
I don’t think the video was necessarily made to humiliate other students but to simply see how much people knew. But the reaction to the video is wrong. College students are not focused on who the vice president is. Generally saying young people and millennials are stupid because they can’t answer questions on things they are not focused on is demonstrative of poor critical analysis on the part of the viewers.
College students are not stupid. There is a desire to learn on campus. There is intelligence on campus.
And we all know who won the Civil War, so relax.
ewenning@indiana.edu
