There is not a single "whatever," no "you knows." This is a "like" free zone.

With five students speaking to their peers, there is not a single "whatever," no "you knows." This is a "like" free zone, with only two tiny "I means" in total.

But then, they're being graded. Once that's done, the discussion starts to sound a bit more typical.

"Isn't it, like," one student asks, "you know, sort of, redundant?"

It is this dialect that, across campus, is making Smith College president Ruth Simmons wrinkle her nose in distaste: "It's minimalist, it's reductionist, it's repetitive, it's imprecise, it's inarticulate, it's vernacular," she says, and then, as if she hasn't made it clear, "It drives me crazy."

"Mallspeak," she calls it. Others say "teenbonics" or "verbal garbage." In a "whatever" generation, it's littering college campuses, and schools are on a cleanup mission.

Much as they began to focus more on writing a few years ago, colleges are now demanding that students learn how to speak well. For years, they disdained it as too vocational - speaking effectively was something students at elite colleges were supposed to have mastered coming in.

But then alumni began reporting back their horror at the way graduates spoke in job interviews, or remarking how unprepared they felt to express themselves in the working world. The point is simple: Prestigious degrees won't do students much good if they can't project professionalism and poise in a job interview.

So last year, Smith introduced "Speaking Across the Curriculum," demanding students do more oral presentations whether in science or literature courses. At Mount Holyoke, classes are marked with an "S" to indicate an emphasis on speaking, and the school has a new speaking center where students, and faculty, can visit with speaking assistants and speaking mentors. They videotape and critique students who watch themselves replace commas with "you knows," and introduce quotations with "goes" or "like."

the blame often lands on television, where characters speak in slang, declarative statements often end with a question mark, and even mild profanity has become more common.

There is also less programmatic therapy. "There are some students," Simmons says, "I just grab them by the shoulders and say, `Do not say " like " one more time."'

Some would dispute whether the state of American conversation has really declined so much, or whether this is simply the age-old complaint of the older generation about the younger. But others say they worry more and more that language once limited to teenagers is now heard from those in their 20s and 30s.

"Where will we be in another 30 years?" Simmons asks.

Perhaps predictably, the blame often lands on television, where characters speak in slang, declarative statements often end with a question mark, and even mild profanity has become more common.

"There is a certain cult of inarticulateness," says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at MIT and author of "The Language Instinct." "Nobody wants to be the teacher's pet. What the `likes' and `you knows' do is make the speaker sound less emphatic and less dominant. They both bring you down to the same level as everyone else."

More television usually means less reading, and less exposure to the full range and precision of vocabulary. Meanwhile, education itself has become less structured.

"School has become less formal over the years, so people don't feel as pressured to be as articulate as they were in the olden days," says Carrie Alme, a 19-year-old sophomore and speaking mentor at Mount Holyoke. "A more casual atmosphere can be more conducive to learning in some ways, but the result is, students don't have much experience in speaking in high school."

At several colleges, the new emphasis on speaking came out of discussions on how to redefine the curriculum around "essential skills." At Mount Holyoke and MIT, formal alumni surveys cited a demand for students with better speaking skills.

"We think we haven't educated them well if they can't write well. Why shouldn't we have the same concerns about speaking well?"

Randy Bartlett, a Smith professor of economics who was one of the first to suggest an emphasis on speaking when Smith reviewed its curriculum two years ago, recalls eagerly anticipating a student who was about to present what, in writing, had been a persuasive and powerful research project. But what came out in class was the oral equivalent of scuffing her feet across the floor.

"Here was this intelligent woman with intelligent ideas, and it all came out in monotone, almost mumbling," Bartlett says. "All those intelligent ideas lost their importance. Her voice was saying, you don't have to pay much attention to me."

Bad speaking, professors say, reflects and projects bad thinking. Learning to speak effectively, then, is learning to think effectively.

"We think we haven't educated them well if they can't write well," Bartlett says. "Why shouldn't we have the same concerns about speaking well?"

Colleges worry that if students can't speak effectively, they can't be effective participants in a democracy. And in that fear, they have company outside academia.

In July, long before Capitol Hill had ever heard Monica S. Lewinsky's taped voice say, "I mean, this is like, you know, he's like a normal person," Senator Robert Byrd complained on the Senate floor about the "pernicious" plague of the vernacular on American discourse.

The West Virginia Democrat mockingly imagined whether Abraham Lincoln could have rallied the nation's determination if the Gettysburg address began, "Four score, and like, seven years ago, you know, our forefathers, uh, brought forth, you know...."

But professors warn that it's more than just teaching students how to give public speeches. And they allow that there is a time and a place for the vernacular.

"We don't want to be stuffy about insisting on a standard of proper oratory," says Lee Bowie, director of the Speaking, Arguing, and Writing program at Mount Holyoke. "The point is, there are rhetorical choices, and so-called proper English and high oratory should be one of them. The reason people use the vernacular is that they haven't learned a range of rhetorical choices. Once people can choose a voice for the occasion, the vernacular doesn't look like so much a problem, but an option."

To define goals, they look, again, to the Senate floor. What colleges don't want, Bowie said, is to encourage the kind of "Crossfire" machismo that has been displayed too often in the impeachment debates.

"But if you look at the [former Arkansas senator] Dale Bumpers model," he says, "he really did bring home the effectiveness of classical rhetoric, what some of the standard moves are, how effective it is to craft an address that is responsive to the precise audience you're talking to."

As Byrd said, ridding speech of verbal trash alone won't make a good leader - "that requires great thoughts as well as a clear and stirring delivery." But, he added, "leaving it in can surely blight the path to greatness - you know."