Late last June, I spent a week living at New York University (NYU), one of about 50 college students from around the country participating in a summer program sponsored by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History. The theme of the week was Abraham Lincoln and his legacy on the bicentennial of his birth; as a group, we were put through a sort of “Abraham Lincoln boot camp,” congregating each morning in NYU’s King Juan Carlos Center for that day’s lecture on Lincoln.

Next to us, less than a block away, another group was gathering in similar fashion. The focus of their rapt attention, however, was considerably more alive than Lincoln, though one could be forgiven for assuming otherwise based on his customary pallor: Robert Pattinson, star of the Twilight series of preteen vampire romance flicks, who was in the East Village filming scenes for the upcoming movie “Remember Me.”

Anyway, there we were, 50 college-aged students with time to kill and the entire Big Apple at our disposal. So naturally, we all spent a disproportionate amount of our free time browsing the racks at the Strand bookstore — presumably, a haven from the enraptured gaggle of Twilight acolytes crowding Washington Square Park. Until, that is, that Thursday afternoon, when word spread quickly that something wonderful had happened: Robert Pattinson had been hit by a cab outside the Strand.

Unfortunately, Pattinson had only been grazed and was unhurt. But the incident highlighted a disturbing phenomenon. In the aforementioned instance, the near-calamity/blessing was caused by a crazed horde of fans, who eyewitnesses claimed was struck when his security guards were attempting to ferry him across the street, trying to “fend off a crowd of teenaged girls” who had become “hysterical” upon catching a glimpse of their wan heartthrob. Last week, an equally sad, yet only slightly less crazed, horde of female fans gathered to see two supporting actors from the Twilight series at the Mall of Georgia, almost stampeding the Wheel reporter sent to cover their appearance.

Clearly, Twilight is tapping into something primal in our cultural zeitgeist — something distressing. Chaos like that which has accompanied the release of the second movie in the Twilight saga hasn’t been seen in mainstream setting since this summer’s town hall protests/riots against health-care reform; unlike the latter, however, the former mania doesn’t come from even a misguided sense of civic engagement.

Indeed, the most disturbing aspect of Twilight’s allure is that its underlying message is one of passivity. The message it imparts in its target audience (middle-school females) is that seeking self-knowledge, empowerment, adventure and inner-strength are over-rated; what’s really important is finding an “Edward” who will blissfully render any budding impulse toward self-sufficency obsolete. The female lead is a cipher; her sole purpose in author Stephenie Meyer’s Mormon fable is to attract and adore Pattinson’s character, who it just so happens sparkles when exposed to sunlight. The merchandising for the films speak to this aspect of the franchise; a popular T-shirt slogan, harkening back to Pattinson’s Edward Cullen character, declares: “Edward can bite my pillows, break my headboard and bruise my body any day.”

The author, however, can only carry so much blame. Anyone who’s been at all tuned into popular media in the past year could tell you that we’re in a vampire phase. And, really, the only difference between Twilight and other vampire-based oeuvres, going back to the trailblazing works of Lord Byron and Bram Stoker, is one of degrees; there may be less sex and physical violence in Meyer’s books, but aside from that the characters conform to the gender conventions of the genre.

Peer pressure and cultural inertia, though, are rather lame excuses for being sucked into such a pathetic fad. The leaden romantic tropes and the submissive heroines of those antediluvian works may have appealed and spoken to Victorian-era audiences — but one could be forgiven for hoping that, by the 21st century, we could have outgrown those narrow conventions.

Editorials editor Asher Smith is a College junior from Great Neck, N.Y.