Their Highest Vocation: Social Justice and the Millennial Generation

by Helen Fox

According to polls, today’s «Millennial» college students are the most politically progressive generation in U.S. history. They are deeply concerned about social and economic inequality, they support egalitarian relationships among nations and peoples, and they believe that the government should do whatever it takes to protect the environment. They have a strong desire to «change the world» for the better, and are volunteering in record numbers to do so. Yet Millennials have been educated to be rule-followers, good test-takers, and high academic achievers who feel uncomfortable expressing opinions that go against the norm. Their ease with social media has made their relationships superficial and fleeting. They do not take to the streets, and rarely imagine any radical re-thinking of economic or political systems. Treated as special and entitled by doting parents and teachers, Millennial college students have energy, skills, and heart, but lack historical context, opportunities for critical thinking about complex social problems, and intimate connection to the people they so passionately want to serve. Their Highest Social Justice and the Millennial Generation features the voices of Millennial college student leaders, progressive instructors, academic advisors, and program heads who tell us what today’s college students need and how the university might adapt to meet their challenge.

215 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2011

About the author

Helen Fox lives in London with her husband, a cognitive scientist, and their son. She graduated from Oxford University with a degree in history and modern languages. Before she became a writer, she worked at a primary school and trained and worked as an actress. Eager was her first book.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not too bad... the book did a good job holding to its topic: the millennial generation and its concept of social justice encountering the world of higher education and its emphasis on theory, concept, and practice. After defining this landscape and her perspective on it, however, I felt that the author became too entrenched in these characterizations, which struck me as too broad and monolithic. I would have appreciated more nuances in the rigidly presented claims: all millennial students are uniformly naïve about structured inequalities; the majority of their efforts at solidarity are superficial; the few educators who succeed in imparting the critical thinking skills that millennials are judged to lack do so in a clear and orderly fashion. As this book will be discussed by a faculty reading group early next semester, I'm curious about my colleagues' responses to the book's overwhelming concentration on the student side of things. I'm also hoping that we can take up the questions that Fox highlights but does not seem to clearly answer; particularly, the role that a liberal arts education can play in an action-oriented world that, in her view, has created a generation of students who want to change the world but lack a worldview nuanced enough to truly succeed in this endeavor.