Mark Bauerlein

Mark Weightman Bauerlein (born 1959) is an English professor at Emory University and the author of 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30),^[1][2] which won the Nautilus Book Award. He serves, in addition, as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college in Savannah.^[3]

Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English from UCLA in 1988, having completed a thesis on Whitman, under the supervision of Joseph N. Riddel. He has taught at Emory since 1989.

Between 2003 and 2005, Bauerlein worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, serving as the Director of the Office of Research and Analysis.^[4][5] While there, Bauerlein contributed to an NEA study, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America."^[6]

Bauerlein explains how his experience as a teacher led to his writing of The Dumbest Generation:

Because in my limited experience as a teacher, I’ve noticed in the last 10 years that students are no less intelligent, no less ambitious but there are two big differences: Reading habits have slipped, along with general knowledge. You can quote me on this: You guys don’t know anything.^[7]

In 2012, he announced his conversion to Roman Catholicism.^[8] He has self-described himself as an "educational conservative", while he socially and politically identifies as being "pretty liberal and libertarian", according to an interview conducted by Reason magazine.^[9] Bauerlein has an identical twin brother.^[8]

List of works

• Bauerlein, Mark (1991), Whitman and the American Idiom, Louisiana State University Press.
• ——— (1997), Literary Criticism, An Autopsy, University of Pennsylvania Press.
• ——— (1997), Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief, Duke University Press.
• ——— (2001), Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906, Encounter Books.
• ——— (2008), The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), New York, NY, USA: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin

See also

• Aliteracy

References

1. Bauerlein 2008.
2. Catalog record for The Dumbest Generation at the United States Library of Congress
3. "About Ralston College". Ralston College. Retrieved 9 August 2013.
4. "Bauerlein", Faculty, Emory.
5. Biography (online ed.), National Review, archived from the original on February 23, 2009, retrieved April 26, 2010
6. Reading at Risk (PDF), NEA.
7. Betts, Eric (29 February 2008), "Are We The Dumbest Generation?", The Emory Wheel.
8. Bauerlein, Mark (May 2012) My failed atheism, First Things Journal Retrieved october 23, 2014
9. Hayes, Dan (21 July 2008). "Mark Bauerlein: Why Young Americans Are the Dumbest Generation". Reason. Retrieved 9 August 2013.

External links

• "Bauerlein", Faculty, Emory.
• "Transcript of a conversation with readers", The Boston Globe, May 14, 2008.
• Bauerlein, Mark (2005–2006). "Posts". The Valve, A Literary Organ.
• A film clip The Open Mind — "The Dumbest Generation" (2008) is available for free download at the Internet Archive
• Bauerlein, Mark; Feldman, David (Sep 28, 2008), debate with a recent Emory Goizueta Business School Graduate, CNN.