Still looking for a graduation gift? Here's one that might get thrown back.

An Emory University professor has published a book whose title alone might seem insulting to anyone donning a cap and gown this commencement season: "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)."

No, Emory didn't hire Andy Rooney.

The author is an English professor, Mark Bauerlein, a 49-year-old baby boomer who believes young people spend too much time texting, cellphoning and obsessing over social-networking sites and not enough time pursuing traditional routes of learning.

"Some of my students are offended when I tell them they're lazy and deficient," he said. "But some of them know it's true."

Bauerlein says he doesn't mean today's young people are less intelligent. They're just inundated by digital distractions.

He noticed it when he would enter the Emory library and see students staring into every available computer screen on the main floor, sometimes working, but more often e-mailing and Facebooking. When he went upstairs to the stacks, it was as lonely as a morgue.

Bauerlein gathered supporting data when he took a leave from Emory a few years ago to become research director for the National Endowment for the Arts. He worked on a national survey of participation in the arts finding, among other things, that 18- to 24-year-olds were reading dramatically less than they had a decade before.

The culprit: digital gadgetry.

"If you went to the Emory quad and watched some of these students texting and checking their cellphone messages," Bauerlein said, "you'd think they were vice presidents of Fortune 500 companies."

Emory is no stranger to controversial academic ideas. In the 1960s, religion professor Thomas Altizer enraged Christians with a theory that was memorably plastered on the cover of Time magazine with the words: "Is God Dead?"

So far, Bauerlein's 264-page volume has not provoked that kind of outcry.

The book, published last week, has been touted in mainline media like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Lou Dobbs, who interviewed Bauerlein on his radio show, seemed to bless the book's premise.

The reception online has been another matter.

When The Boston Globe ran a multimedia presentation on its Web site, more than 1,200 responses were posted. Some of the comments were thoughtful, but many amounted to a generational mud-wrestling match.

"Standard Baby Boomer judgmentalism," one person wrote.

"Mr. overgeneralize for book $$," sneered "dumb 23 year old."

In fact, Bauerlein's arguments moved one reader to make a decision about higher education: "I'll be crossing Emory off my 'colleges to apply to' list."

In case you're wondering, the professor is tenured.