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A few years ago in a widely noted essay, William Dorshowitz, then of Yale, warned that

the nation's top colleges were turning our kids into zombies. Now, while D'Wershowitz noted

that many of his students at Yale were, in his

words, bright, thoughtful, and creative kids, most of them seemed content to color within the lines.

Very few, he says, were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of an intellectual

discovery. Everyone dressed, he said, as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment's notice.

Now, I know Yaleis are sad because they're not at NYU, and so naturally they're quite upset.

But I wonder if you might recognize something in Dershowitz's own description of students.

Driven, accomplished, talented, disciplined, successful, and capable.

I suspect you do, or at least you'd like to think that you recognize those descriptions.

And yet, as described by Dershowitz, if you looked beneath the facade of seamless well adjustment,

what you'll often find, he says, are toxic levels of

fear, anxiety, emptiness, aimlessness, and isolation. And in his phrase, the prospect of not

being successful terrified them more than anything else. Or as Mark Schiffman, who was then

professor of humanities at Villanova once termed it,

contemporary students are not majoring in physics or neuroscience, they're majoring in fear. As he

puts it, Hunger Games should be the novel of the generation. Because Hunger Games depicts

...