"N.Y. Times and Dist. Ed."
Conversations
This e-mail message was originally posted by Russ Hunt and is now copied in its original form from the acw-l archives.
Marcy Bauman wrote:
> Now, while I will agree that face to face classes serve different
> purposes (or maybe serve the same purposes differently) than virtual
> ones, I have to wonder about the phrase "a true campus experience."
> What, exactly, is a true campus experience? Is it the experience my f2f
> students have as they rush from the Detroit suburbs to class and then off
> to their 30+ hours of work? Or is it something a bit more leisurely, a
> bit more pastoral, a bit more expensive, a bit rarer in today's higher ed
> marketplace than people would like to think?
>
> The phrase "a true campus experience" smacks of nostalgia to me, I guess
> . . . I wonder what percentage of *any* student body has a "true campus
> experience."
Well, yeah, I guess nostalgia . . . but here's my take. I went to Wayne State in Detroit back in the late '50s and early '60s; most of my "campus experience" occurred on the Joy Road and Grand River buses in from the far West Side. But still: the center of my life then was the old Student Center on Second, where all the stuff that mattered culturally happened: poetry readings (where I heard, and met, Randall Jarrell), and concerts (where I heard Yusef Lateef the first time, in a tiny room that held maybe 40 people), and TV shows (we used to go around the corner to the WXYZ-TV studio to watch Soupy Sales broadcast -- live -- his noon-hour show for kids). In the late '60s I taught at Roosevelt, in Chicago, where the really important stuff happened in the makeshift theatre on (if I remember right) the fifth floor of the Auditorium Building, or in the cafeteria. I hate to say this (I really hate to say it, because pretty well everything I do as a teacher happens in connection with formal classes), but, damn it, that stuff was more important than classes.
Now I expect that what _The Times_ is talking about is Joe College stuff -- frats and drunks and football. But there really is something that happens (or can happen, or happens for some people) when folks are available to support a reading or a concert or a play or, hell, a stand-up-and-shout argument in the cafeteria (or a rabble-rousing visit by Tom Hayden, which I remember in the second floor lounge at Roosevelt in 1967) that just doesn't happen in distance ed. And it even happens on commuter campuses, or can.
This is why the most important part of my first year curriculum is what I call "Occasions," where students choose a minimum number of "cultural events" (lectures, plays, concerts, readings, gallery openings, ceremonies) to attend and reflect about in writing. If we think only about what we've got to teach, and what's required in our course syllabi, we can ignore this: but IMHO three students attending the opening of an exhibition of masks at the Craft Center is a whole hell of a lot more important than what I'm doing in my class between 2:30 and 3:50 every Tuesday and Thursday. When we can build _that_ into Distance Ed, I'll buy it . . . meantime, I don't want to sneer too aggressively at _The _Times_, even though I know they think it's about beer and hockey (well, hockey here; football there. And Canadian beer here, too).
-- Russ
vol. 4 Iss. 1 Fall 1999