We had a big event at the student center today. Activities, games, prizes, music, dancing, free food. I’m one of the organizers, and I can confidently say that it was a great success.
One thing strikes me as curious, though. About 90% of students who came up, struck up conversations, played the games, laughed, won prizes, socialized, etc were international students. And we aren’t a mega attractive destination for international students. It’s not that we have an enormous crowd of them. We have many, many more American students. And they were there but kind of skulking in the background, not approaching, not participating.
We are experiencing a collapse of sociability post-COVID. These American students are hard-working, honest, bright. But they didn’t get to socialize freely in their formative years, and the result is there. Nobody discusses this except people in education because we see it every day. It’s a serious problem, and let nobody claim otherwise.
Clarissa's Blog 
“and let nobody claim otherwise.”
Evidently those three people who downvoted your post before I could upvote it think the opposite. I wonder why.
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I don’t know what it is that people disagree with. I’m describing something I personally observed for several hours today. Everybody who was there with me had the same experience.
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Happens to me a lot on the internet: I relate an *actual experience* that I *actually had* and get a ton of downvotes. The internet is full of people who think we should NOT be telling Our Truth, I guess.
But of course, on Clarissa’s blog, three is the magic number for that *one* really OCD reader who made three accounts just so they/them could downvote things more than once. 😉
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One of the 100 reasons we need to bring back contra-dance as part of normal education and socialization.
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I can’t begin to imagine the discomfort. But it’s a necessary discomfort.
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Tell me about it! I do not like touching people who aren’t family, and I have like fifteen left feet when I try to dance. And still… there’s a *reason* social dancing in large groups is a human universal. Ritualized group interaction, coordination. It’s part of being *human* and almost certainly necessary for the proper healthy social functioning of people in community.
My favorite aunts and uncles were all avid square dancers and bridge-players. I think it kept them sharp. We lost something huge and dreadfully important to civilization when we gave those things up.
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Maybe they could start with the hokey pokey and work their way up?
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It could simply be that domestic students already have their social networks so they don’t need to come to social events organized by their academic departments (which in my experience are kind of cringey anyway). International students are desperate to make friends so they show up to all kinds of events.
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Student center events are the bottom of the barrel when it comes to social events. They’re by definition not cool. The moment I made friends in grad school I stopped going to those things.
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This was happening right where everybody goes to lunch. In front of Starbucks. Everybody goes for coffee and everybody goes to lunch. But it’s one thing to stand in line at Starbucks, staring at your phone and it’s a very different thing to come up to people and start talking.
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Agree in general with your observations. Don’t know if it’s covid or cellphones or both, but younger people really don’t seem to socialize as much and the data bears this observation. Fewer friends, less frequency of dates, increasing age of first sexual experience, etc.
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It’s COVID, #MeToo, BLM. People are afraid to say anything aloud. It’s impossible to connect with others or be spontaneously sociable when anything can be interpreted as a microagression.
I can’t be sincere about what I believe with anybody around me except for one person. It’s hard enough at my age but for young people it must be even worse.
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“domestic students already have their social networks”
That’s probably part of it, but traditionally in the US having a social network has never precluded casual social encounters with those outside of it. Even non-sociable me could chat pleasantly with people I didn’t know at department organized events.
American openness to friendly, casual encounters with strangers has always been one of the defining features of the country. If that’s gone…..
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I don’t think the unsociability of the local students is linked to covid — unless their same age international students came from countries with much more lax covid protocols. IIRC, many countries were much more draconian than the US and for longer periods.
Perhaps international students are a group that already self selects for openness to experience or interest in your department over the median student in their countries or the local students?
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This was the observation I was going to make. Covid restrictions were harsher especially in Africa than in the US. So if these were those types of international students, there’s no way it had to do with COVID than with the other mentioned issues of self selection and a tendency for international students to typically be more open to new campus experiences.
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In which parts of Africa? And how is it possible to implement lockdown measures in a continent where most of the population lives in a communal setting?
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It’s not my department’s event. It’s a large University-wide event. Which doesn’t negate your original point but it’s a big deal that I organized this and I want my accolades. 🙂
Nobody at the university knew we existed before I became Chair and now we are front and center in university life. I’m proud of being able to do this because it’s a gargantuan effort to organize something this big.
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It’s not my department’s event. It’s a large University-wide event. Which doesn’t negate your original point but it’s a big deal that I organized this and I want my accolades. 🙂
Nobody at the university knew we existed before I became Chair and now we are front and center in university life. I’m proud of being able to do this because it’s a gargantuan effort to organize something this big.
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Bingo! I asked both my current (Norway) and last year’s (Germany) high school senior exchange students what they thought might explain this. Each, independently, said that the sample is skewed. The foreign students self-select for being open to new experiences, willing to “give anything a whirl”, etc. If you took a random sample of students in their European home countries, each said the results would resemble the American students.
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Interesting take.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-devouring-mother-of-the-digital
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