The student and the screen

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The student and the screen

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7:05 a.m. Big screen clicks on: "Morning, honeybuns, it's show time!" That voice you stole from your sweetheart does seem to help a little, but still you have to struggle to pull yourself out of uneasy dreams.

My university is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year. "Looking Backward, Looking Forward"--that sort of thing. We even have a new president at the helm seeking consensus far and wide on what our future should be. "Shared vision," he likes to call it. Well, fair enough, the man wants consensus; it seems only right to give him a hand. But I can't help wondering: do we really truly get to choose this future? Or is it choosing us? Do you understand what I'm asking? Is anyone at all steering this ship? Or is it hurtling downstream while we talk about "consensus"?

7:15 a.m. You unzip some cereal. Talk to the Coffee-Buddy. And step over to the big screen, where you trash a bunch of junk mail and listen to a message from your sweetheart in Seattle, who can hardly wait for your date tonight.

So what can we say about the future of public universities? Well, for one thing, almost everyone that matters in my state seems to accept the notion that the golden age of university funding is over. Finished. Goodbye. They ask us to be "realists": the student population is going to soar, but the money won't be there for them. Why won't it be there? Because it's needed elsewhere. In the 50s and 60s, the people in this state put their faith in universities; now, supposedly, we believe in prisons.

7:25 a.m. You catch the news highlights while you slurp down the last of your cereal. They say it's going to be a nice day; maybe later you'll screen on the bay and take a look. You pour a cup of coffee, drop a Cheercap, and tap into PAL: it's got some overnight stuff for you on the job market in media analysis; PAL's also managed to find one more story on Dana, a computer superstar even back in sixth grade and your secret crush that year too, who's fighting a retroporn bust now in Encinitas. Big deal. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. What does it matter to them? They're dead, right? PAL's got a banjo concert for you in Amsterdam, but you're not in the mood. Instead, you get hung up for way too long on movie previews, and it's past time for school, but you can't resist blowing another half-hour on Hyperscooby.

What else do we know? We know there's a mad race to wire up education: the Tech Rush of the 90s. The one thing money is available for these days on campus is any scheme to get education onto a screen. Obviously, there's some hope, at higher levels, that this whole training-the-workforce business can be made more cost-effective (our new president here at SDSU has been known to talk about education in terms of "product" and "market share"). Distance learning these days is a growth industry, and "virtual universities" are being touted as the higher education of the 21st century.

10:00 a.m. Reluctantly, you tap off Scoob, tap on your Study Pilot, and start the grind. Getting the worst out of the way first, you plod through your Norton English comp unit, then power through the Macmillan Intro to Marketing. It's the unit on advertising: at least you get to see some decent visuals. But it's still cheesy. One of your chatmates is doing her degree at Chrysler, and they get Microsoft Marketing, which everybody says kicks ass. At noon you reward yourself with a couple of Zip Tarts, a Phyto-Coke, and a little more Hyperscooby.

But not everything hi-tech is cheap, even in the long run. Are we dreaming of cozy, real-time, two-way-video, interactive network classes where we get to pick the brains of top scholars around the world in our field of study? Forget it. As always, it's mass production that brings the costs down--even in cyberspace.

1:00 p.m. You down a couple of SynTabz with another Blue Coke and take your Xerox Western Civ quiz. 84. You didn't exactly ace it but you're looking at a comfortable B so far. While you're on the subject, you call up the lecture on Ancient Greece: mostly voice-over but it's still boring as hell. Ten good minutes on the Peloponnesian War though: all the impalings you could ask for, and an outstanding decap that's incredibly real.

The Internet, of course, is a bargain. And on-line student discussion groups are certainly cheap enough, though high-dialogue rap sessions with TAs are going to be somewhat more costly. But when it comes to courses themselves, what will be most cost-effective will be for universities to buy high-structure academic product from providers: first-year French from Houghton Mifflin, Microbiology lab simulations from Warner-Lambert.

3:10 p.m. With fresh coffee, a bag of chips, and a couple more SynTabz, you're ready to do the research for your marketing paper. You keep a pretty good lock on the screen and tap off by four, because you still haven't tapped in at work yet: a paid internship in media analysis. It's just grunt work for Viacom--boring as shit. You're going to give it two hours today--which ends up seeming like a whole lot longer because you're getting just a tad screensick at this point.

The number of professors will be vastly reduced in relation to the student population; and, of these professors, many will find it very rewarding to work for corporate providers, who will be able to offer high salaries, seductive amenities, and little or no student contact. The most prestigious professors of all will be those who have the new Double Doctorates: one half in, say, neuroscience or history, and the other in educational technology.

6:10 p.m. You knock off the big screen, pick some dinner off the shelf, and do a little housework on your NotePad while you eat. You pay a couple of bills, buy some underwear, and make a couple of reservations for Civil War! at Disneyland next fall (which is going to mean some serious coaxing because your sweetheart is kind of paranoid about real-space stuff). Still on the pad, you reserve a place on Chi Ep's virtual river-rafting trip next month (they're buying the DreamWorks package; people say it kicks ass), keep trying to locate an old flame from junior high, and manage to get in a little Hyperscooby while you're at it.

With instruction on line, and non-simulatable labs moved out to industry, campuses as we know them are likely to play less and less central roles. The notion of a university campus as a cultural center will become outmoded, as culture becomes, at one and the same time, everywhere and nowhere.

Finally, as we try to see into the future, let us note that so-called "corporate universities" have been proliferating (there were over a thousand in 1996), while universities themselves are being run more like corporations and in intimate collaboration with the business community. More and more these days, universities have been openly putting their academic resources up for sale--turning tricks, as it were, on the corporate market. Everyone is expected to participate: deans, department chairs, and the teaching faculty themselves. Ability to bring in the big money promises to replace publishing as a qualification for academic success.

7:00 p.m. You catch a couple of sitcoms that you missed last night. Of course, what you're supposed to be doing is putting in a half-hour each on your Marketing and Sosh discussion groups. They're making a big deal about Sosh tonight because Feinberg's going to be on line: the guy who holds the Finger Lickin' Chicken Chair in Social Psychology. Some other time. You give Marketing twenty minutes, blow off Sosh, and tap in to your own chat group which has been into some heavy spiritual stuff in the last few days. Like how everybody is going to be uploaded out of their body into AI heaven. Somebody says, "Hey, you can just live in Hyperscooby forever. And you'll never have to barf again either." Sounds outstanding. You have to tap off, though, to meet with your on-line keyboard-banjo group. The four of you are working on "Wildwood Flower"--a cinch when you've got the right software.

Afterwards, you see it's getting on towards eleven so you buff up on the sweat machine for a while, shower off, and get yourself dressed up and looking good. Very quickly you check what's on tap for tomorrow. Sosh and Accounting. Not too thrilling. At least Sosh is going to be an on-line field trip: to the new state penitentiary on Montezuma Mesa. That should be kind of interesting; maybe there'll be a riot or something. Eleven o'clock. You turn on the videocam, stick a Limb-O patch on your forearm, put that new SDSU/VIACOM pennant up on the wall behind you, and wait for your sweetheart to show up on the screen. As soon as you get a decent job, you're going to have 3D, which will be outstanding. Meanwhile, it's been one long day and you're ready for some romance.

Sound good? God, I hope not. May I, then, offer some notes toward an alternative future for universities?

1. First, understand that I'm not arguing "against technology," whatever that might mean. What I am saying is that computer screens make a sad substitute for the classroom, the field experience, or the lab (unless, of course, it's a computer lab). What the new educational technology does offer, however, is a set of resources to support classroom learning, and a very useful means of communication and research (I'm only too pleased to see this essay made available on the World Wide Web).

2. The classroom itself is irreplaceable (but that means the live classroom, not just rows of students staring at yet another giant screen, with some little Wizard of Oz techno-prof hunched over the console). Understand, though, that I'm making no plea for the status quo. When printing came in, medieval university teachers were freed from having to spend class time reading a text aloud. Now we're in a parallel situation. Teachers and students alike need to ask themselves: "Is what we're doing in the classroom something that could be done just as well or better on a screen?" If the answer is "yes," then we know somebody's screwing up.

3. What is it then that the classroom can become? A privileged space.

Clearly, a growing number of people are spending more and more of their time, at work and at play, in front of a screen. The curve just keeps going up. So what can we anticipate? Does it look like screen time is going to max out some time soon? Or would you have to say that at this point, there appears to be no end in sight? Every day, it seems, one more thing that people do gets moved out of real space and into cyberspace.

But now consider the classroom. And consider that, in contrast to that mediated tranced-out half-world we seem to be moving into, the classroom offers a learning environment that is whole, rich, resonant, multi-dimensional, alive, and full of surprises: real people in real time and real space. Just imagine what it would be like if education had always happened on a screen, and then someone came along and invented the classroom. What a revolution that would be!

The classroom as a privileged space. But teachers and students alike, I'm suggesting, need to learn how to make better use of this space. Discussion has to be real discussion. Lecture has its place, certainly, but a lecture session has to be, not the Land of the Living Dead, not some bored and boring spiel that's being given for the umpteenth time to a roomful of comatose students, but, instead, a mode of teaching that's fully present, class centered, open to the moment, energizing, and alive. But beyond "lecture" and "discussion," teachers and students need to look for new classroom learning modes that use the full potential of real people in real time and real space.

4. And just why is it that we need to do this? Why not go for the cheap and convenient alternative ("Earn a college degree in the privacy of your own home!")? What's wrong with simply plugging people into Wal-Mart Philosophy 101 and letting it go at that?

The answer, of course, is that we have something to protect: human wholeness, presence, depth, and balance; and real (not virtual) community. We need to recognize that the live classroom--whatever its subject: astronomy, engineering, psychology, history--has the potential to do far more than feed standardized packets of information to a workforce in training. But of course. From an administrative point of view, that's part of what's wrong with it. Isn't that one big reason why live learning is in danger now that an alternative has become available? The classroom, coercive as it may often be, has never--short of full-on brainwashing programs--been that efficient at producing standardized worker units; live classrooms tend to be too quirky, too individual, too unpredictable. Whereas the well-publicized "individual freedom" of interactive learning programs and CD-ROMs is typically the illusion of freedom in a closed, finite, fully administered situation.

5. The medium of education, from preschool to graduate school, is its deepest content. Whatever else the screen teaches, it teaches itself; in a sense, it turns us into itself. Consider then that this world of the screen, into which we are rapidly disappearing, is a world where things are disposable, leveled out, abstracted from themselves, and, all too often, trivialized. In order to be everywhere, the screen must be nowhere. The screen has its virtues, but presence, wholeness, depth, and balance are not among them. (Only artists have even a prayer of transcending its limits, but Laurie Anderson and B.B. King and Paul Taylor are not, I'm afraid, going to be designing the courses at SDSU/VIACOM.)

6. Schools themselves are privileged spaces. Not just the classroom but the campus. Something happens when you walk on a campus, whether it's Santa Cruz up in the woods or the formidable Institut d'Anglais Charles V in a converted factory building on a shabby side-street in Paris. Underneath all the bullshit, the mindless routine, and the tawdry concerns, a campus wants to be the place where knowledge and understanding are primary not secondary , where ideas compete only with each other, where a truth that dismays or embarrasses is always preferable to a comforting (or profitable) falsehood. It's not the barroom, the board room, the war room, the TV studio, or the senate chamber. It's not a Website, and it's for sure not that huckster heaven: the Web itself.

I can think and read at home; I can write at a coffee house on the boulevard; I can learn anywhere at all. But a campus is the geographical site of a common enterprise; it's a set of purposes that have been spatialized; it's a place that governs the way we engage with each other when we're there, that represents what we're doing. On a campus, furthermore, things don't just happen and then fade off. They reverberate; they interact; they synergize. And when you come to a campus to study chemistry or music or child development or comparative literature, you're not just picking up info or getting some training; you're entering a social and physical environment that will affect you multi-dimensionally, on every level, so that the educational surplus , the overflow, can be as important--or even more far more important--than the narrower, more or less official "learning outcomes" themselves.

This identity that a campus has permeates its walls and flavors the coffee. It acts on you physically in ways that people often can't begin to comprehend until they've left it behind them. But, for all of this to happen, a campus has to be a real place. A place . With its own character, its own smells, its own worn and weathered surfaces (its time dimension made visible), its own complex array of spaces, its own tricky social geography . . .

Does this all sound "elitist," in comparison to the "democracy" of the electronic media? On the contrary, I would suggest that, it is precisely in the brave new electronically mediated world we seem to be moving toward, that campuses will return to their elitist role. It is the privileged folk at Stanford and Yale, preparing to assume "creative" leadership positions, who will be participating in small, expensive real-space seminars, partying together, drinking coffee with their professors, rubbing shoulders with visiting scholars, spending evenings at colloquia, concerts, meetings, bullsessions, plus having access to state-of-the-art technology. They'll get what we think of as education; it's the millions of students being "trained for the workforce" who will be getting their academic fast-food from a screen, with--if they're lucky--a few anonymous, overworked TAs staffing the e-mail query desk.

7. What to do? Resist. Inside and outside universities, we're too content to be bystanders. We need to look ahead, see where things seem to be going, make choices. Many of us may welcome the information access and the communication possibilities that the new electronic media provide. But we need to ask ourselves: how much of our lives do we want to transfer to the screen? And, in particular, how much of what it means to be human do we want to risk by giving up live education in order to achieve convenience, economy , and control?

We need, I'm saying, a counter-movement. Well, no, not a counter-movement if that implies mere opposition to something. (The soul of vegetarianism, I discovered a long time ago, is not resistance to meat; it's the love of what vegetarians understand to be food.) Of course, we need to fight this rush to substitute the screen for the classroom. But that's--I almost want to say, incidental. We need something more. From preschool to graduate school, we need a flowering of real education. We need to celebrate and exploit its human dimension. Now more than ever.

(In memory of Nick Nichols)

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