If you possess sufficient curiosity, free time, and facility with Google, you can find and read any number of articles I wrote for my high school and college newspapers. I wish you wouldn’t.

You see, they are, to the extent that I can recall, terrible. They are whiny and bitter. The writing is dreadful and the views expressed in them neither original nor even mildly interesting. They rot with inanities and clichés, and, if pressed, I will disown them all, except maybe the one in which I urge my high school English department to add golden-age science fiction to the curriculum. I stand by that.

I’m lucky they were published before the viral Internet, when it was still possible to maintain some control over one’s audience. Today any undergrad with an inflammatory opinion can make a splash, and they may never get dry. Just ask the Harvard student Sandra Korn, whose ill-conceived and almost purely rhetorical piece on “Academic Justice” was the talk of conservative blogs. Or the latest kid genius of punditry, Princeton freshman Tal Fortgang, whose screed about white privilege was appropriate for the sandbox of his school’s conservative paper, but which Time magazine regrettably saw fit to repurpose for national publication. I feel bad for these kids—more for Korn than Fortgang, who eventually sought his undeserved fame.

I also feel bad for Belle Knox, the Duke freshman who told the world how proud she is to be a porn star (once someone else had already spilled the beans). And for Suzy Lee Weiss, who, in her adolescent rage, penned an op-ed decrying affirmative action for preventing her entry into the college of her choice. The moral paralytics who edit the Wall Street Journal op-ed section had no qualms about milking young Weiss’s naïveté for pageviews. The New York Times, for its part, seems to have lowered the bar for NYU junior Zachary Fine’s attempted takedown of pluralism, an essay that fits easily within, and adds nothing to, the style of reaction with which Allan Bloom made his name. It is an example of how quickly we forget: Fine appears to believe that the millennial generation—we still haven’t gotten enough of it— is uniquely encumbered by moral and aesthetic relativism. Because of, you know, the Internet. Somehow this made the grade at America’s most august purveyor of opinion.

I feel bad for these youngest of writers because no one should care what they think about weighty issues of public life, yet now they are in the unenviable position of defending their undercooked ideas, not to mention their juvenile prose, before audiences they are not ready to encounter. Knox’s manifesto got a surprising amount of ink—from myself included—considering that it is unreadable.