Younger persons don't have the knowledge and wisdom to assess what previous generations did. Their own thoughts sounds more like pre-conceived, propaganda driven, ready made sentences. (I know because I have been there and only know realize how dumb and manipulable I was, and probably still are. At least now I can see it).

As time passes the environment, morals and the goals of a population can change drastically, and its behavior is attuned by those variables.

Anyone born in the boomer generation would probably have behaved exactly like them, for the good and the bad.

The professors in that article might be speaking like that, making amend to the young, but deep inside every generation thinks to be smarter than the previous and the successive ones.