Students at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria gathered inside a lecture hall recently to hear me talk about race relations in America. But after making a few remarks about polarization and efforts to “roll back the clock” on civil rights, I cut short my verbal doom-scroll and wandered into the audience.
The students were roughly 18 to 23. Gen Z, the zoomers. With their mastery of laptops and smartphones, this generation is said to put a premium on “proactive learning,” preferring interactive educational experiences “versus passively sitting and listening to a professor lecture for hours,” as the Annie E. Casey Foundation put it in a 2023 report on Gen Z.
The young people were also consuming phenomenal amounts of information, so much so fast that many of them were suffering from loneliness, depression and anxiety attacks.
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I decided to turn my talk into an interactive exchange, letting Gen Z have its say. They could even pick on a favorite villain, the “greedy boomer,” as some Gen Zers and millennials refer to my generation, for making a mess of the world they stand to inherit.
To my surprise, this group was not looking to cast blame so much as find solutions. They were contemplative and even optimistic, despite real fears and frustrations.
A terrorist attack on Israel and Israel’s terrorizing retribution on Gaza were in the news — and very much on the Gen Z minds. Could the conflict be discussed without triggering more acrimony, as the subject had on so many other campuses?
A hand went up.
“There are two sides to it,” a student said, “and a lot of misinformed students make other students feel really scared.” The student said she was thinking about going into politics to help bring about peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.
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“It’s not all about changing people’s minds; it’s about bringing different perspectives in a respectful way,” the student said. “I can have an opinion, you can have an opinion, and at the end of the day we can say we heard each other, without being scared about what somebody might do if they disagree.”
“I’d like to piggyback on that,” another student politely chimed in. “I’ve been to that region, and I have seen both sides, and it’s not black-and-white at all. But what I took away from it is that everyone in this room is a lot more like those poor people on the ground than you are to that millionaire on Capitol Hill, or any of the other ‘leaders’ who are ordering or allowing the killings. Here we are on the other side of the world, have never met an Israeli or a Palestinian, and both sides are cheering on the deaths of people just like us: ‘Kill them, kill them all.’ It’s become too easy for us to lose our humanity.”
I had been invited to NOVA to give the annual Joseph Windham Lecture on Race Relations, named for an admired and respected history professor who was also my brother-in-law. He died in 2014, having made a fine art of interacting with students at a school he loved.
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NOVA is the second-largest community college in the nation, with 75,000 students from 180 countries. And I doubt you would have heard a more respectful discussion about Israel and Gaza had you been on the campuses of Harvard, Cornell, Columbia or the University of Pennsylvania.
Another hand went up. A student saw more danger on the horizon — artificial intelligence, a technology that Gen Zers were beginning to use with relative ease.
“We are reaching a point where we are being replaced, where people’s ideas will not be their own,” the student said. “Ideas will be driven by technology, and we will lose the human factor in things like writing. AI will take over and make human beings lazier in everyday life. We will lose our determination.”
“I respectfully disagree,” a classmate replied. “There is something special about the human creation that cannot be re-created by machine. I’m a writer and an artist and I use AI to help improve my creations. I don’t use it to replace my work. I think we are either more informed or more misinformed than ever before, but I don’t think AI will replace us.”
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Unless the more misinformed prevail, I fretted aloud.
For some of the students, the preoccupation of the day was a more typical concern: upcoming midterm exams.
“You feel a lot of stress, but it’s not the same for everybody,” a student said. “You have one side saying, ‘Oh my God, I’m not going to make it.’ On the other side, it’s like, ‘Oh, this feels like a challenge, but I will manage to get through.’”
The stakes are high. More Gen Zers are opting for the more affordable two-year community colleges with an eye toward getting into the job market faster. Or getting a better job instead of working two jobs to help support family members.
Having access to a supportive community college such as NOVA, where an international student body tends to coalesce around a common struggle to make it against the odds, added to the students’ sense of optimism about their future.
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“A lot of people are feeling like our country is a mess because we are really experiencing a lot of change — some good, some bad,” a student said. “But on the whole, I’m proud to be an American because this country has a lot of opportunities that I am grateful for. America is good people. We’re a nation of smart, hard workers, and kind people, and I don’t think that just because we are experiencing change and some of it is negative is a reason for us to lose hope and faith in this nation.”
Given the enormous challenges awaiting Gen Z — climate catastrophes, rogue AI, threats to democracy and more — that kind of faith and optimism won’t just be helpful. It will be necessary.
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