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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. By digital campus, I'm referring to a place in cyberspace co-existing with the physical campus familiar in higher education. I want to call attention to emergent places in cyberspace, digital campuses, where people engage in the full range of activities characteristic of higher education and academic life.

That purpose brings me to the business at hand: not to tell all that I think about the digital campus as an ideal type, but to say a bit about my intellectual life leading me to become interested in it. I'm old, born in New York New York, a child of depression yuppies — dad, investment banking, & mom, dress design, to the age of 3 I was as a minor prince in Gramercy Park. I was then moved, to my delight, to a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I enjoyed a Rousseauian childhood, looslely overseen while my parents commuted to their work. At 8, I began to shuffle between country and city beginning my formal education in elite schools — Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68).

In retrospect, all that went quickly. As an only child of older parents, I spent much time alone among adults, acquiring an ease inspeaking with them, observant of both insights and imitations, forming my own views in a thoughtful reserve. I was cognizant of my own ignorance, and that of others, and without much alienation, I would fit in in many situations while rarely feeling a sense of belonging.

In school, I preferred sports to academics, doing just well enough on the scholastic escalator to keep advancing on the path I believed to be my choice. I had a strong sense of my own ignorances and was relatively adept at covering them up and I advanced on grounds of achieved excellence but thanks to generally perceived promise. I didn't hold mastery of conventional learning in much esteem, wanting instead to tackle the actual, intractable problems. As I matured, it came together in a knack for thinking out of the box while finding a good place within the box.

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.

To begin, consider place. A place interests us because it situates human experience, because of what happens, what takes place there. Place enables living interaction.

At the fringe, there are exceptions, but it is fair to say that each college and university, and other educational institutions, has a campus, a physical place, buildings and grounds, which situates each institution and the people and activities that constitute it in space and time. Each particular campus differs from all the others, but they have common features and uses. If we have studied or worked at one campus, we will understand a good deal about how any one of the other ones function.

Physical arrangements enabling academic life to take place took elemental form in medevil cities 6 centuries ago, continuously developing since then.