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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 not referring only to distance learning or to how campus courses use information technologies. It's situated at dot-edu, an emerging place in cyberspace, co-existing with the physical campus, where people engaging with an academic institution are becoming able to do all the activities they want and need to do. I'm working to advance that development because I believe it can become a transformative development for the betterment of all.

That purpose brings me to the business at hand: not to tell all that I think about the digital campus, but to say a bit about my experience that has led to my interest in it. I'm old, born 1939 in Manhattan, a child of depression yuppies — dad, investment banking, & mom, dress design. To the age of 3, I was a minor prince in Gramercy Park. Then I was moved, to my delight, to a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania, where I enjoyed a Rousseauian childhood. While my parents commuted to their work, I was looslely overseen with animals to tend, fences to mend, vegetables to grow, and a large wood to explore with a shallow stream in its middle leading home. At 8, youth began as the family together started to shuffle between farm and city, enabling me to shore up 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 ignorance and the curiosity that came with it. I was relatively adept at covering up what I did not know, and I advanced, not on grounds of achieved excellence, but thanks to perceptions of having strong promise. I didn't hold mastery of conventional learning in much esteem, wanting instead to tackle actual, intractable problems. As I matured, it came together in a knack for thinkin-out-of-the-box while finding a good place within the box.

Hence, through my formal education, I was poor at assigned learning, but ardent in self-directed study, in the classical sense — striving after, concentrating on, favoring, applying myself, giving attention to, being eager, zealous, taking pains, diligent, devoted to. With the bookstore as my curriculum, I studied my way through Princeton, sparked by avid reading in the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset. At first, I flirted with flunking out. My grades were awful, and then not good but getting better, until in my senior year I aced comprehensives and wrote an excellent senior thesis, graduating with high honors and a prize for most improvement from the Woodrow Wilson School, my major.

My senior thesis drew from a wide range of my reading as an undergraduate and from my experience during several summers working in a program called Swiss Holiday, run by the American School in Switzerland, then a small American-style boarding school starting up in Locarno, at the head of Lago Maggiore. My "work" there had two sides, one teaching waterskiing, and the other, in tandem with another "adult" circa 18 to 20, conducting 9 twelve-to-fourteen-year-olds on four 8-day long road trips, around Switzerland, then Austria, southern France, and finally northern Italy, in all questng culture, adventure, and amusement. The experience had effects, as Goethe ssaid in Wilhelm's indenture, "he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise."

At Columbia, I made the verb, to study, the means and goal of my career. I had left Princeton wanting to study the interaction between educatonal experience and the quality of cultural life for the better and the worse. I started at Columbia with no clear idea what that intent would entail or how I might fit it into the channels of expectation established there. After some missteps, I found my footing and my work moved on well both intelllectually and professionally.