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Hello. . . .

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On the digital campus

Hello,

I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further the digital campus, an important emergent transformation in higher education. Perceiving dispersed parts of it, we form many partial views, diffusing its importance and novelty. Let's seek clarity about what the digital campus does, how it works, who it serves, where it flourishes, and why it is important.

As an emerging actuality, the digital campus has many instances, each a large, historical undertaking taking place through continuous metamorphosis. It has no mastermind, no genial inventor; the digital campus appears as an encompassing infrastructure within which the character, spectrum, and limit of a person's educational agency takes place. I want to help make more fully evident the change in pedagogical possibility arising through the digital campus.

Many different participant-observers will contribute distinctive interpretations of these emerging developments. My personal experience and developed intellectual skills enable me to illuminate the advent of the digital campus, attuned to the historical implications of it for educational experience. I believe these historical implications are important and want to further their development in theory and practice as fully as I can.

I was born in 1939 in New York City. In retrospect, much of life seems to have moved quickly. Through childhood and youth, I shuffled for periods, long and short, back and forth, between a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania and the Upper East Side of New York City, throughout benefiting from formal education in elite schools—Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68). I came of age came fast, as well, owing to a job market then so different from now. In 1965, I became an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, and in 1967, I joined the faculty at Columbia. Then I completed my PhD in 1968.

Substantively, by the start of my 30s, I had published extensively and launched a budding career as a public intellectual. I had read my way through Princeton, sparked by the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset, an interest that developed into my dissertation and then into a large, well-received first book, Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, published in 1971. I interpreted Ortega as a many-sided educator, first aiming at the renovation of Spanish public life and then seeking Jacques Barzun, co-sponsor of the dissertation, observed that the work had a prophetic tone, not as a criticism to be corrected but as a caution to be wary for the vision in it would not come easily.with Lawrence engaged in the free-wheeling study of political and educational thinking from Rousseau forward and an exploration of how modes of communication and material life affected personal and collective self-formation.