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On the digital campus

I'm Robbie McClintock, a retired professor working to further the digital campus, an important emergent transformation in higher education.

A campus situates the activities of academic life, and by digital campus, I have in mind the many academic places on the internet where increasingly higher education finds a place. Alma Mater has her URL, a “uniform resource locator,” the gate to her domain, her website, her digital campus where much academic life takes place.

Her websites may seem static; they represent the distinctive structure and established constituencies of academic life. Before the late 1980s, colleges and universities had no websites. Through the 1990’s, an online presence was springing up everywhere with nascent capacities offering visitors copies or recapitulations of printed catalogs, schedules, news releases, and public documents. Text was plentiful, pictures scarce, and interaction nearly non-existent. To get things done, people went in person to where they had always done them.

Within the stable structure and function of academic life, digital capacities quietly grew, but their expanding powers were not widely perceived or understood. Cultural lag hid the digital campus until Covid closed physical campuses, chaotically sucking online capacities into full historical view, revealing big differences from one place to the next. Examined closely, academic websites vary in their ability to use ongoing infrastructural developments to support academic life. Much work must be done to bring academe up to the state of its art, and a line from the least to the most developed points to further possibilities to which all can aspire.

Should we ask whether academic life is beginning to experience a change of phase? Are the promotional websites of the dot-edus becoming digital places where faculty, students, staff, alumni, parents, and the general public can actually do most activities they believe Alma Mater is the place for doing? How can and should the constraints and affordances for engaging in the academic life change by adding the digital campus to the material campus traditional in higher education? What synergies and dysfunctions might arise? What pedagogical, political, social, economic, and cultural choices would confront those affected by these emerging actualities?

These are large questions that merit multiple informed responses, and I intend to include my views among them in the form of a book, The Digital Campus: What it does, How it works, Who it serves, Where it flourishes, and Why it is important. I have worked throughout a long career as a student of educational and cultural history and as an innovator with digital technologies seeking to strengthen the agency people have in forming the lives they live. All this work and the concerns that have motivated it prepare me well to address the emergence of the digital campus.

Biographical highlights

• Born in 1939 in New York City, I did well in good schools—Buckley (1948-53), Deerfield Academy (1953-57), Princeton (1957-61), Columbia (MA 1963, PhD 1968) — forming an interest in cultural history in relation to educational theory and practice.
• I had a long professorial career: Johns Hopkins (1965-67), Teachers College, Columbia (assist 1967-71, assoc 1971-81, full 1981-2001, chair 2001-11, and emeritus 2011-on). Two key concerns on which I professed: Educators should pay close attention to the work of major past thinkers (e.g., Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Dante, Erasmus, Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber); media and communications as agents of change in education and culture.
• I have been creative and successful in generating externally funded research and development projects to advance the use of digital technologies in academic situations, K-12 and post-secondary. I directed the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College (1982-2002) and served as a senior research scholar in the office of Columbia’s Vice-Provost (1994-2001). Additionally, I developed projects through the New Laboratory for Teaching and Learning at the Dalton School and at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. All this work had a common purpose: improving persons' educational experience by enabling them to interact in small groups with high-quality cultural assets through networked multimedia.
• I have had sustained roles in academic governance, particularly with respect to technology and education, as Chair of the Department of Communication, Computing, and Technology in Education at TC (1982-2002), as head of the Coordinating Committee on the PhD in Education at Columbia (1996-2011), and as one of the organizers and a member of its Board of Directors for the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning.
• Over the span of my career, I have expressed my ideas and concerns in diverse texts. In them, I have dealt with many topics, drawing on an extensive intellectual background. As a writer, I aspire to be clear and engaging while respecting the complexity and difficulty of the matters I address. I think we live in a culture in which we vastly overproduce cultural materials and consume them with a serious deficiency of attention. I feel a responsibility to resist those conditions by writing for readers who will pay close attention to texts they believe will have importance over an extended period.

Here are citations with links to the full texts of a selection of my writing.

• "Machines and Vitalists: Reflections on the Ideology of Cybernetics," The American Scholar (35:2, Spring 1966, pp. 249-58). Link). A heady start, this essay came out in a special issue on "The Electronic Revolution" along with contributions by Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Lynn White, Jr., Jacob Bronowski, Herbert A. Simon, Richard Hoggart, and so on. I made a point about human intelligence that's still relevant to the gush of wonder about AI.
• Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator (New York: Teachers College Press, 1971, xviii, 649 pp. Link) A full intellectual biography of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. The book culminated my studies of Ortega from 1960 to 1971 and it was named the "Outstanding Education Book of 1971" by School and Society."
• "Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction," Teachers College Record (73:2, December 1971, pp. 161-205). Link). This historical essay developed my concern that educators pay too little attention to self-motivated study as the energizing impetus for a person's educational development. It is still widely cited in discussions of the importance of the study by educational theorists.
• "The Dynamics of Decline: Why Education Can No Longer Be Liberal" Phi Delta Kappan (60:9, May 1979, pp. 636–640). Link). It gave my version of how and why liberal education has weakened.
• "Into the Starting Gate: On Computing and the Curriculum." Teachers College Record (88:2, Winter 1986, pp. 191–215). Link). I asked whether and how, where, when, and why interacting with cultural resources in digital form would have different constraints and affordances than interacting with material resources. The Digital Campuswill essentially revisit this concern 40 years later.
• From 1986 to 2001, I worked through ups and downs by developing large-scale projects to demonstrate how networked multimedia communications could enable a humane transformation in the spectrum of educational possibility.
It began with a major proposal to IBM, The Cumulative Curriculum: Multi-Media and the Making of a New Educational System, a 200+ page request for $5.4 million plus equipment over 5 years (Link). IBM vetted this proposal favorably but stopped it and all other external commitments owing to a serious downturn in its business. The failed proposal had a significant rationale and a productive afterlife.
I recast the ideas behind it in an eBook, Power and Pedagogy: Transforming Education through Information Technology (Institute for Learning Technologies, 1992, Link).
A private donor funded a part of the IBM proposal as the Dalton Technology Plan ($3.4 million, 1991-94. Link), that drew considerable public attention.
In turn, that work became the springboard for The Eiffel Project: New York City's Small Schools Partnership Technology Learning Challenge (Link), which won a national Challenge Grant for a 5-year, $7.1 million project, plus $11 million in matching effort. Work through it established sophisticated local area networks in and among selected schools throughout NYC (1996-2000).
Finally (1998-2001), the NYC Board of Education’s Taskforce on Teaching and Learning in Cyberspace advanced a huge project (circa $11 billion) to create a city-wide network and equip all NYC students and teachers, grades 4-12, with specially designed laptops for use at home and school. I wrote the pedagogical rationale for it, Smart Cities, New York: Electronic Education for the New Millennium (ILT, Link). The Board issued an RFP and two coalitions of major computer, publishing, and consulting companies formed and swiftly vanished among the financial expectations destroyed by the dotcom crisis.

Smart Cities was wildly ahead of its time. Sobered, I stopped writing proposals and turned back to reflective themes of pedagogical thought and practice.

• Homeless in the House of Intellect: Formative Justice and Education as an Academic Study (New York: Laboratory for Liberal Learning, 2005, 111 pp. Link). How might the study of education, if situated among the arts and sciences, differ from its study in professional schools?
• Enough: A Pedagogical Speculation (New York: Collaboratory for Liberal Learning, 2012, 284 pp. Link) A wish fulfillment about how my views might appear to a friendly critic in 2162.
• “Dewey in His Skivvies: The Trouble with Reconstruction” (Educational Theory, 67:5, 2017, pp. 545-575. Link)</a>. This essay served as the stimulus for six further contributions assessing how John Dewey’s thinking should influence current educational philosophy.
• Formative Justice (New York: The Reflective Commons, 2019, 138 pp. Link) What do people seek in trying to form and educate themselves?

Now at 85, unexpectedly hale with life, energy, and intellect, I feel called to look again at how digital technologies may affect the spectrum of possible experience. According to Moore’s Law, digital capacities have been doubling in 1-to-2-year intervals. This suggests the digital infrastructure has altered greatly since I left off 25 years ago. Are old pipe dreams becoming possible objectives of intentional action? That’s the question I plan to address in The Digital Campus.

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Robbie McClintock

4 Green Leaf Court

Princeton, NJ, 08540-5046

(646) 464-4531 (phone & text)

rom2@tc.columbia.edu (email)

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