Here’s an enormously long 2001 rant by David Brooks on the ethics of college students he observed at the time.

There are a lot of things these future leaders no longer have time for. I was on campus at the height of the election season, and I saw not even one Bush or Gore poster. I asked around about this and was told that most students have no time to read newspapers, follow national politics, or get involved in crusades. One senior told me she had subscribed to The New York Times once, but the papers had just piled up unread in her dorm room. “It’s a basic question of hours in the day,” a student journalist told me. “People are too busy to get involved in larger issues. When I think of all that I have to keep up with, I’m relieved there are no bigger compelling causes.”

I find today’s new generation of young adults fascinating. On the one hand, they seem much more involved in community service than I or most people I know were at the same age. But they seem less interested in current affairs. They are extremely intelligent and well educated, and yet their intellectual engagement seems confined within fairly narrow boundaries. They seem to be about more than money and materialism, and yet they seem accepting of the existing order and willing to get ahead the best they can within the system, rather than interested in questioning the system itself. I don’t have them figured out yet. Not that I have myself completely figured out.