Students and Their Community

From what I gather from Sparky's instructions about this week's blog, we are to write about students and the university community that they are a part of. Let me tell you something I have found to be unabashedly true - there is no place on this earth like a college campus. The excitement of youth mixed with the joy of learning combined with hope for the future makes the college campus a dynamic place to be. There are truly very few places like the campus of an institution of higher learning. That's why folks like me and many of the other students in the higher education administration master's program just can't seem to leave. The aura of a college campus, the sheer ability to be on a college campus - well, it's pretty amazing.

But our college campus community is changing - and, in many ways, already has changed - from the college campus community of our parents' generation, and especially from the college campus community of our grandparents.

Let me explain.

My mom loves to talk about her college days. She went to school at KU (the University of Kansas, the same school I went to for undergrad) and she was there in the middle of the 1970s - a time very ripe with student demonstrations, protests, and activism. Lawrence, Kansas - where KU is located - is the liberal oasis in the conservative state of Kansas (which sometimes drove me crazy, but that is another blog topic for another day) and even today is a hub for the type of student activism that was at its height in my mom's college days. She talks frequently about she and her friends gathering at the Union, pulling up to a table, and sitting there for hours upon hours talking about the latest work they had read in English, or about what the president was doing. A common theme that is constantly repeated as my mom discusses her college days was that there was just so much conversation. So much communication. There were informal debates on the lawns outside of Fraser Hall. Groups of students would congregate on Wescoe Beach (which is not actually a beach, just in case you don't know anything about Kansas geography) and discuss Congress, or popular music, or current events, or the weather for pete's sake. Her college experience of the 1970s was definable by the spoken word. She learned just as much outside the classroom through these conversations, she said, than she did inside the classroom. And often, she points out, the conversations from inside the classroom would trickle out to outside the classroom because students were so engrossed in what they were learning that they could just not stop talking about it.

Psh.

Not exactly my college experience.

It is a new day and age, that's for sure. My college experience was pretty well summed up by a meeting I attended tonight, actually. I walked into the meeting a few minutes early, parked myself in my seat, looked up and saw every student in the room literally attached to their cell phones. Texting, playing games, surfing the Internet - I don't know what they were doing, but they were click-click-clicking away. The room full of students was absolutely silent. Some students had their iPod ear buds tucked in their ears. One was fiddling around on his laptop on Facebook - where students now discuss topics not face-to-face, but through wall posts and group discussion boards. Whereas mom's generation were talkers, we are a dead silent generation.

All of the technology that has infiltrated our society has made us shut our mouths. The atmosphere in the room tonight at my meeting pretty well summed up my four years in college. Walking down campus, I cannot count how many times I was mortified trying to get the attention of one of my friends by yelling their name over and over again, only to be rebuffed and ignored, or so I thought - turns out they just had those stupid iPod ear buds in and couldn't hear me. Wescoe Beach - the center of so much rampant communication when my mom was an undergrad - is silent most of the time. Shoot, why would you want to have a face-to-face conversation if you can just IM someone, or (even worse) poke them on Facebook? Why verbalize feelings when you can let it all out in an E-mail, or why meet up with someone for lunch when you can eat by yourself and text three, four, five of your friends while you do it?

I mentioned earlier that the college campus is a place unlike any other in this world. I still feel that way, I really do, but technology is taking some of the sparkle and the magic out of a college campus. Nowadays (I sound so old...I'm really not intending to, I'm only 23!) students are in a rush to leave the classroom and would be damned to talk about the lecture outside of class. Doesn't that make you a - gasp - geek? And no one wants that. It seems as though we are losing a sense of community on college campuses because life is just so individualized now. Technology is working to make our lives pretty solitary. Maybe not on the surface - I guess you're still communicating, albeit backwards, even if you're texting or Facebooking - but we as a generation are beginning to forget how to socially interact. This is devaluing our sense of community and rusting over the luster and shine of college campuses.

I will step off my soapbox now. But I will leave you with a closing thought. What if we all put down our iPods and iPads or whatever they call it all now and just talked to each other? I bet our sense of community would skyrocket. Now that is an experiment I am willing to try.