The COVID War Kids
The students sat in the hallway outside the classroom on this late January morning, their gently used editions of mass comm staple Media & Culture propped open as they furiously flicked through the pages. Like most college professors, I was prepared for this semester’s first round of textbook pushback. At schools public and private, large and small, faculty had held unproductive meetings and emergency workshops for years regarding Gen Z — a student population whose inability to tackle even the most rudimentary of texts led to a decisively pervasive academic crisis without the headline-grabbing cachet that meets the latest Lib of TikTok.
Since an undergrad at a flashy Southern art school some years ago complained to the Dean because I assigned 7.5 pages of reading a night, Gen Z student behavior had ceased to surprise me. But the members of this new class seemed extra perturbed. As I moved to unlock the room, a female freshman looked up at me with immutable rage. “Why does this book keep talking about COVID? I don’t want to hear it. We lived it. We don’t need to be reminded a million times on every page.”
In truth, I’d had the same thought. The latest edition of the stalwart textbook that had served as an anchor of my own education twenty years ago had devolved into such an embarrassment that I felt bad asking students to spend money on it. Desperately trying to stay hip to the times, the authors filled the pages with the type of COVID allusions, BLM bromides, and ubiquitous references to democracy that clogged Twitter in the pre-Elon days.
But, the students were no longer buying that line. Eight years ago, residence life staff had offered on-campus cry rooms so Gen Z could cope with the President’s surprise 2016 win. By November 2024, the generation’s support propelled Donald Trump back into the White House. Many a time on the political circuit, I’ve heard the allegations from the elders. Gen Z is weak. They really need a war like the rest of us had. However, with the pandemic, they got their war. And, as Gen Z passes the torch, they have proven they handled it better than the rest of us.
Back in 2014, the first waves of BuzzFeed critical theory turned Gen Z into always-online autodidacts and caused an academic tailspin that united members from both sides of the aisle against a trigger-warning-obsessed nanny state mentality poised to topple the fundamental ideals of higher ed. Professors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind rose to bestseller status with its admonitions against Gen Z’s lack of resilience and tendency to see any disruption of their tenuous worldviews as an existential threat. More than an overwhelmingly liberal professorate, the Leviathan of administrative bureaucracy, or the construction spending sprees that led many a mid-tier campus into a financial spiral, the greatest threat to university life was simple: students raised in the Obama Era came to college thinking they already knew everything, and their professors were supposed to bask in their brilliance or face the wrath of a Starbucks-style customer survey come student eval time.
Older Gen Zers reached their nadir as upperclassmen during the height of the 2020 Summer of Floyd and left academia languishing until their final departure in 2023. But a sea change happened seemingly overnight when those who spent their high school years under lockdown reached the top of the undergrad hierarchy. They were more critically minded and less offended. They seemed like an entirely different generation. And according to marketing firm SAGO, they earned the right to a new moniker: Gen C.
Unlike their other under-40 predecessors, Generation COVID has worked through that pesky resilience problem. Capricious economic decline had made them hyperaware of their finances while zapping away the entrenched entitlement. In its place is a resurgence of Gen X skepticism with little tolerance for social justice posturing of the black square kind. While the do-gooders tried to dismiss those who questioned COVID protocols as conspiracy theorists, Gen C saw through the pleas to “Trust the Science,” leading to an epidemic of institutional distrust that culminated in November’s Presidential election.
As Drexel University senior Thomas Russell wrote in the school’s student newspaper, The Triangle, this week about his cohort’s differences from Old Gen Z: “I believed in the causes. I believed it was the Democratic Party that would change America for the better. But when people were being canceled over a dumb tweet from their past, when politicians broke their own COVID restrictions while keeping the rest of us locked down and when tolerance was given only to those who repeated the approved narrative, I changed sides.” Not only has Gen Z willed a political realignment into being, but its religious turn has upended prognosticators' conventional wisdom of an ever-secularizing U.S. — a return to the pews that has greatly benefitted more orthodox religions like Catholicism.
Of course, those who remain in thrall to the latest partisan whims have made Gen C the object of their ire. The New York Times takes umbrage with the youths’ aversion to opening endless bar tabs. On the local front, an apoplectic Redditor in the sub r/nashville chided the lack of “under 30 at the protest,” back in April–a rant so hilarious The Pamphleteer crew continues to reference it long after we forgot to which of the omnipresent anemic demonstrations they were referring.
Despite Gen Z’s bipartisan reputation as uninvolved cyphers perpetually enveloped in the worlds of their phones, they ended up as COVID’s unacknowledged heroes by keeping on living. Contrary to assessments that the pandemic eroded young adults’ social skills, the inescapable restrictions became the authoritarian act that sowed the seeds of an old-fashioned teenage rebellion. However, rather than opt for punny protest signs or social media rants, Gen C created its own parallel way of doing things.
Cultural authorities decried their atrophied attention spans, but the second wave of Gen Z has embraced reading and moviegoing in ways unrivaled since the 1970s. As film festivals and arthouse theaters held emergency pandemic fundraisers while oblivious that their prolonged moralistic adherence to vaccine and masking protocols were the root cause of their fading appeal, Gen C reveled in the TikTok trend of nights on the town decked out in suits for Minions 2, making moviegoing theirs.
Likewise, clueless humanities professors and liberal arts provosts crow about the enrollment cliff set to destroy academia at any minute—although most fail to realize that fealty to restrictions may have had a hand in the threat facing their futures. Long after the COVID Omnibus bill brought Tennessee schools back to normal, the lingering rogue maskers largely resided in soft disciplines like English and history that have utterly fallen out of favor with students during the decade when their practitioners became so radicalized and reliant on totems of self-righteousness like N95s. At a time when this new generation has demonstrated an insatiable interest in the arts and politics, the best-equipped minds in such fields have let their calling fall victim to an unwavering partisanship. They will not recover.
Such explains why the arts sectors still reeling from the pandemic’s effects are those that offered no alternatives. When the club owners who belong to the dubious Music Venue Alliance Nashville kept pandemic rules in place well into mid 2022, Broadway and Bridgestone rebounded easily while their hipper counterparts fell by the wayside. As ballets, symphonies, indie bookstores, and opera houses remained dedicated to COVID restrictionism after the rest of the world moved on, they did little more than accelerate their own irrelevancy. Gen C did not conform to an unexamined life free of arts and culture. It subjected the world to intense scrutiny and found that those who opine on the death of democracy were far too insular and restrictive for their liking.
Five years later, the masks have largely lifted, but Gen C continues to deal with its own brand of PTSD. At a recent academic conference, an English professor expressed confusion over the blowback she met when teaching Sally Rooney’s 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You in a sophomore literature class. According to their instructor, students who adored the novel suddenly went cold when they reached the last few pages set during the early days of the pandemic. They didn’t clamor for a trigger warning or express their outrage. They merely couldn’t see the value in mining a time period for which the authorities they fiercely distrust have yet to issue a mea culpa. And, thanks to Gen C, those who have become accustomed to doing the reckoning are finally left to reckon with a time when it’s too late to apologize.