Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, is author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future (or Don’t Trust Anyone under 30).

The controversial claim of the title may have attracted the full house, or it may have been the theme’s popularity in campus and class discussions this year: 91¶ĚĘÓƵ’s Common Read is The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr.

Whatever the reason, the Feb. 5 talk was the most popular Writers Read event in recent history, according to , chair of the who invited Bauerlein to campus.

Attendees ranged from undergrads to 91¶ĚĘÓƵ and James Madison University faculty to community members, and the post-lecture discussion, in which Bauerlein fielded questions from among the diverse audience, was brought to a close, Medley said, in the midst of continued debate.

Bauerlein painted a world where young people today are sucked into time-consuming superficial social interactions with members of their peer group – mediated by text messenging, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other digital forms of communicating – rather than with older people who can provide more thoughtful interactions and deepen them intellectually.

As additional fodder for thought, Bauerlein pointed to the proliferation of teen-centered TV shows, rather than ones centering on adult interactions, as he recalled seeing during his youthful era in the 1960s.

He cited statistics of young people exchanging 3,500 text messages per month and accessing nine hours of media per day. Given that they only have six hours of leisure time daily, they are obviously accessing more than one form of media simultaneously, he said.

This led Bauerlein to ponder the importance of maintaining the study of the humanities in colleges and universities, guided by teachers who “lead students into a more educated, deeper experience” of objects truly worthy of their thoughtful, focused attention. Those objects may be works of art or music or literature, but all require quiet time to digest, time that today’s young people often don’t have and wouldn’t know what to do with, he said.

Young peoples’ habits of speedy consumption of information in a shallow manner “is a deep threat to the humanities,” he said.

He objected to multi-tasking when studying a subject: “The attention has to be complete; you have to clear out all other distractions.” If young people would learn to quietly focus, he said, they will flourish as human beings.

, associate dean of students/director of housing and residence life, and , associate professor of , gave prepared responses to Bauerlein’s talk, offering additional examples from their personal and work contexts of the validity of his observations.

James Ward, a professor of religion at James Madison University who has also taught at 91¶ĚĘÓƵ, commented during the question-and answer-period that his students spend so much time staring without expression into their devices that he feels they have developed a blank facial affect when he searches their faces for responses to the material he has presented in class.

Several members of the audience questioned some aspects of Bauerlein’s talk. One, who identified herself as a writing teacher, pointed out that immersion in digital gaming for hours can be highly thought-provocative, necessitating creative responses to other gamers. Another, who looked to be from a generation or two older than Bauerlein’s, questioned whether the “good old days” of young people watching TV shows like the Lone Ranger and Howdy Doody were any better than what youths watch today.

Chances are those words elicited some kind of emotion.

If you’re under 30, you may have just looked up or away from your digital device and rolled your eyes.

If you’re over 30, your facial expression might be an unbidden, but half-amused grimace accompanied by a bit of nodding.

If you’d like to hear and engage with the author in person, whether to take issue with his stance, and/or to soak up the intellectual discourse of one of the eminent thinkers of the day, you’re in luck.

Author Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, will speak at 91¶ĚĘÓƵ Thursday, Feb. 5, on “The Humanities in the Digital Age.” Bauerlein’s talk will begin at 6:30 p.m. in Strite Conference Room in the Campus Center, followed by a discussion with the audience, including formal responses by , professor of , and , director of residence life.

Bauerlein will also speak at Friday’s 10 a.m. chapel in Lehman Auditorium on “From Atheism to Catholocism.” A talk-back with refreshments follows in Common Grounds from 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Bauerlein has taught at Emory University since 1989, with a break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director of the Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. He has published numerous scholarly works, including an acclaimed account of a 1906 race riot in Atlanta, Negrophobia. In addition, his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, where his blog eloquently promotes the humanities.

For a preview of his visit– and to develop a sense of Bauerlein’s wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation with and among great texts as an enlivened source of consolation, wisdom and revelation – read ,” published in the magazine First Things (in one sentence, he quotes Sartre, Faulkner and Nietzche, in that order).

That essay, and Bauerlein’s unique perspective about the relevance of the humanities in the digital age are reasons why , professor of , is pleased to welcome him to campus. Both Bauerlein’s book and academic studies are closely linked to this year’s campus Common Read selection, Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

At a time when study of the humanities are under attack, Bauerlein is an ally of the many professors on college campuses who “are eager to give students exposure to great texts, images, sounds and ideas,” says Medley, who notes that it’s not the digital devices themselves that are the problem, but the time-consuming and intense nature of the peer-to-peer relationships they enable. “If we can lure them away from their addicting digital devices, we think we can get them hooked.”

Bauerlein’s lecture is the fourth event in a year-long exploration of the effects of the digital age on education. He joins two other scholars, both from University of Virginia, who have lectured on this theme: Siva Vaidhyanathan, professor of media studies and author of “The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), and Dan Willingham, professor of psychology and author of “When Can You Trust the Experts? How to Tell Good Science from Bad In Education.”