Walk into any college campus and you will find students with strong opinions. They can reference trending debates, quote viral lines and take positions with remarkable confidence. On the surface, this looks like a politically awakened generation. But if you look closer, the picture may be less reassuring.
What passes for political awareness is actually curated exposure, shaped by the invisible hand of algorithms. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube and X do not merely host opinions; they organise, amplify and, most crucially, filter them. Students encounter politics not as a field of inquiry, but as a stream of emotionally charged fragments: short videos, punchy commentary, simplified binaries. As a result, we have a generation that is highly connected, constantly updated and yet often underprepared to interrogate what it consumes.
Ironically, in this environment, exposure masquerades as understanding. Visibility becomes a substitute for depth. A student who has watched dozens of political clips may feel informed, but the engagement is largely passive—absorbing rather than questioning, reacting rather than reasoning. The danger is not that students are apolitical; it is that they are mis-politicised. And today I’m convinced that it is an educational failure.
For decades, campuses served as laboratories of democracy. Political engagement was not outsourced to screens; it was lived, contested, argued and refined in real time. Student unions, debates, informal discussions in corridors and canteens; these were not distractions from education, but extensions of it. They exposed students to ideological diversity, forced them to defend positions and, perhaps most importantly, taught them to encounter dissent without retreating into echo chambers.
Sadly, that ecosystem has weakened today. In many institutions, campus politics has either been over-regulated into irrelevance or reduced to occasional spectacle. What has quietly disappeared is the everyday culture of structured disagreement. In its place, students have migrated to digital spaces where expression is easy, but accountability is absent.
When political engagement shifts from campus forums to algorithm-driven platforms, something vital gets lost. There is no requirement to listen, no obligation to respond thoughtfully, no consequence for intellectual inconsistency. One can endorse contradictory positions across different posts without ever being challenged. The discipline of argument—the slow, uncomfortable process of refining one’s views through dialogue—gives way to the instant gratification of affirmation.
What are the implications? Without spaces that demand rigour, students will likely become politically reactive rather than reflective. They may be mobilised quickly, but often on shallow grounds. They may even feel intensely, but do not always think deeply. And in the absence of intellectual scaffolding, political choices can drift towards personality, spectacle and sentiment rather than ideas, institutions and policy.
To read this as a generational failing would be a mistake. The responsibility lies squarely with educational institutions that have gradually abdicated their role in civic formation. In the rush to prioritise employability, technical skills and measurable outcomes, universities have narrowed their understanding of what it means to educate. Citizenship, once a central aim of higher learning, has been pushed to the margins. Political discussion is often seen as risky, messy or even undesirable. The safer route is silence.
But silence is not neutral. It creates a vacuum. And vacuums do not remain empty for long. They are filled by the loudest, most accessible and least accountable sources of information. When universities retreat from shaping political understanding, algorithms will take over that role by default.
I’m not suggesting reintroducing partisan politics into campuses in a crude or confrontational way. The goal is not to turn students into foot soldiers of competing ideologies. Instead, I recommend that campuses be repoliticised intellectually. This means reclaiming the university as a space where ideas can be tested without fear, disagreement is normalised and evidence matters more than volume. It requires creating forums, formal and informal, where students can engage with public issues beyond the constraints of syllabi and examinations. It means encouraging interdisciplinary conversations that connect politics with history, economics, sociology and ethics. Students must be able to justify what they believe.
Of course, such an environment does not emerge automatically. It has to be cultivated deliberately by institutions and educators who are willing to embrace complexity rather than avoid it. Faculty must be equipped not just to teach content but also to moderate discussion, challenge assumptions, and guide students through the difficult terrain of public reasoning. Administrations must recognise that a politically engaged campus, when grounded in dialogue and respect, is not a threat to order but a sign of intellectual vitality.
A discerning public would realise that the stakes are higher than they appear. A society’s democratic health depends not only on its institutions, but on the quality of thinking its citizens bring to them. Universities occupy a crucial position in shaping that thinking. When they succeed, they produce graduates who can navigate complexity, resist manipulation and engage with difference constructively. When they fail, they leave students vulnerable to the seductions of simplification and the pull of unexamined belief.
We often celebrate the fact that young people today are more expressive, more connected and more willing to engage with public issues than previous generations. There is truth in that. But expression without examination is fragile. Connectivity without criticality is shallow.
So, the task before us is not to make students more political; they already are. It is to make them more thoughtful in how they are political. Campuses must claim that responsibility. Otherwise, social media and algorithms will. They will do it without the patience, rigour or accountability that education demands. The result? We will still have a generation that speaks loudly about politics, but far fewer who truly understand it.
John J Kennedy | Former Professor and Dean, Christ (Deemed) University, Bengaluru
(Views are personal)