The Importance of a Campus

As have many universities, Northwestern recently moved all of its courses online for the rest of the academic year. The below essay by Aaron Barlow of CUNY City Tech, reposted from the AAUP's Academe Blog with permission, describes the response of his students to the prospect of distance teaching, and the value they place on the interactions of campus life:

ACADEME BLOG

The blog of Academe magazine

Students and the Campus

March 13, 2020

BY AARON BARLOW

When I told my students on Wednesday that we would indeed be moving all of our activities online for the rest of the semester, they groaned. I was a little surprised. I thought they would like the idea that they could finish their classes from home. I believed that they would imagine online college easier, and that it is just as good as the classroom experience.

Putting aside the normal pandering, saying such things as how much they will miss their professors and each other, my students made a number of very good points. They said that the act of going to school is important to them, that it structures their lives in a way that even synchronous online classes could never match. They said that the physical interactions with professors and other students energize them, making their studies more interesting even when they have to slog through dense material or those courses that don’t interest them at all.

They were most upset over loss of the lab hours (this was before it was announced that many labs would continue on campus), a Hospitality Management student looking at his hands and saying the heart of his education beats in the kitchen, its blood flowing to his hands through those of the chefs instructing him there. And, speaking of blood, a student in a Biology course was almost in tears: her next lab was to be the dissection of a sheep brain, something she had really been looking forward to. Anatomy and Physiology students in each of my afternoon classes complained that they had been about to start work with human skeletons, something they keenly anticipated.

Most of all, though, the students were worried about the loss of each other.

Ours is an urban campus, one without the amenities of residential colleges with their fancy student unions and posh lounges. When I walk down from 10^th-floor classrooms to my 5^th-floor office, I have to step around students lunching or reading on the stairs or leaning into the alcoves on the landings studying the streets below or focused on their phones. The campus isn’t made for hanging out or for raucous impromptu discussions or other informal gatherings. If anything, it was built for the changing ideas of urban efficiency as each building arose—but with a universal ignorance of comfort. Yet the students learn to love their experience on campus to a degree that surprised me on Wednesday.

Each semester, I talk to my classes about the importance of the bull session to education, nostalgically looking back to my own undergraduate days and trying to alert students to an aspect of education that I thought was disappearing—at least, on campuses such as ours. Only when we were discussing the closing of our classrooms and the move to remote education for the rest of the semester did I fully realize how completely they have unconsciously recreated what I thought was gone. They use fast-food joints, gyms and other venues around campus to replace what we used our dorm lounges for. They form bonds with each other that we on the faculty rarely see, not surprising on a campus where 17,000 students are constantly moving in and out and anonymity can sometimes seem the norm.

Of course, I knew some of this. I’ve been watching friendships grow in the classroom for years. What I didn’t understand was how important the students themselves recognize it to be, students from all over the world and speaking more languages than any of us can imagine.

These students are in college where they interact directly with other students and with faculty precisely because they understand the value of that interaction. They are “Americans of all nations,” as Walt Whitman may have described them over a century and a half ago, and they want to integrate into American society (even while keeping their ancestral identities—but that’s another story). They know the value of face-to-face education and have enrolled at City Tech (New York City College of Technology, one of the schools of the City University of New York) to gain from that aspect of education while they grow in technical expertise in Entertainment Technology, Radiation Technology, Nursing, Computers, Engineering and all of the other majors that will be, they hope, their entries into the American middle class.

The same is true of students all over the country, of course. But it’s something we forget in face of the relentless pressure to move education more and more into the digital realm and away from traditional campus structures. We forget just how much our students know about the education they are receiving.

Though I fear that the mass migration of courses online for the rest of this semester will be an opportunity for EdTech advocates to push us all further in that direction, what I saw on Wednesday made me think that the opposite effect may be stronger. Students will want to be back in the classroom and will resist more than ever the forces pushing them to accept education only online. They know what they want and it is not the simply digital.

To cheer them up on Wednesday, I ended both classes by playing Fred Waring’s 1947 version of “Dry Bones” in honor of those students studying human anatomy. They left with smiles.

I hope to see them back on campus, smiling once more, as soon as possible.