Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay follows up the arguments presented in my recently published book What’s Happened to the University: A Sociological Explanation of its Infantilisation (Routledge 2016). As a sociology professor, I am interested in the cultural influences that have promoted the infantilization of university students. The aim of the essay is to engage with the question: Why does this generation appear to behave so different? My focus is on the changing forms of socialization of young people and the role of schooling in creating the conditions for the infantilization of the younger generation and the accommodation of universities to these trends. I am particularly concerned about the growing tendency to erode the distinction between secondary and higher education. My aim is to explain the cultural and sociological changes that have led to the demand for safe spaces, trigger warnings, crusade against micro-aggression, and cultural appropriation on campuses. Unlike most commentaries on the subject, I try to explain it by looking at the wider causes of the emergence of these issues. My approach is to explain rather than to blame students for a world that is not of their making. Based on my discussions with students and faculty, I claim that what has changed are the cultural norms and expectations that influence the behavior of young people. My expertise to write this essay is based on almost forty years of research as an academic sociologist. I have published extensively on cultural issues related to the problem of socialization and infantilization. Some of this work was distilled in my book Paranoid Parenting (Alan Lane) and in various monographs. I also draw on my experience as a professor and on discussions that I have with colleagues in the UK, US, and Canada. I have also conducted interviews with students. More specifically I have spent two years studying the changing contours of campus culture and my research will be published next month in the US and the UK.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.014 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".