Why the residential liberal arts college is still a good idea, even in the world of cyberspace 

BY RONALD R. THOMAS

Certain sites possess special meaning for all of us -- invoking states of mind, inspiring extraordinary acts and achievements, fostering certain sentiments or ideas, and creating an atmosphere that makes us feel at home.

The residential liberal arts college is an idea deeply invested in this quality of human experience. Colleges like Trinity represent utopias of a kind; invented places where people gather to live and learn and work together for a time. The best of these great colleges are national treasures, a new take on an old tradition, as distinctively American an invention as jazz or baseball.

            John Dewey, the great American philosopher and theorist of education, maintained that education, properly understood, is not preparation for a future life; it is the process of living itself. A campus like Trinity’s provides a place for that kind of education to happen. For those who invest themselves fully in it, our campus offers an environment for creatively living and learning together in a community of inspired scholars, scientists, and artists surrounded by arresting architecture and beautiful spaces. Situated in the capital city of Hartford, our campus has also distinguished itself as the great liberal arts college in a city, recognizing Hartford as an important cultural and curricular place of its own as well as the setting in which the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of civic engagement can be explored and realized.

             To enhance the power of this place, we have invested in a major campus master planning effort, committing in excess of $100 million to new construction, restoration, landscaping, way finding, fencing, lighting, parking, and signage. “The Long Walk” itself, thought of in this context, is another phrase for education as the process of living, for the unending journey leading toward truth and wisdom. Together with our partners in the city, we have extended that journey into our community, with more than $200 million invested in the Learning Corridor and our surrounding neighborhood.

            And yet something called cyberspace has become the watchword of our digital age. We hear everywhere talk of virtual environments on the information highway. “Bricks and mortar” is sometimes used as a term of derision to describe unsophisticated Luddites of the past who haven’t recognized the modern turn to technology and remain sentimentally attached to “real” space. Some futurist educational philosophers now prophesy that on-line education and the virtual campus will render obsolete traditional college campuses, turning them into mausoleums of the past, as extinct as the ancient cities of the Mayan civilization or the pagan temples of Greece or Rome. Libraries will be held in the hand and carried around like mobile phones. Information of all kinds will be instantly accessible at any time or place, searchable, findable and downloadable in your own home. The Long Walk will be replaced by a microchip, the faculty by content providers, the quadrangle by the Web. Universities founded on this principle already exist and have begun to realize this brave new educational world. In less than a decade, some have already enrolled more students through their Web pages than we at Trinity have passed through our gates in nearly two centuries. The name of the most famous of these, the University of Phoenix, refers not to a place in Arizona, but to the mythic figure rising out of the ashes of its doomed and destroyed predecessors.

            What has happened to the ideal of education as the “process of living” in this virtual world of “distributed learning”? Is that, too, an idea doomed for extinction? To be sure, technology has fundamentally transformed the way we live and learn even at a place like Trinity. We can already access libraries around the world with the touch of a button, communicate with a faculty member from our dorm room (or from a foreign site) in an instant, research a paper on-line and submit it by e-mail. Technology has and surely will continue to transform everything we do and the places we inhabit, and we at Trinity are committed to taking a leadership role in that process. We must have clicks as well as bricks.

           At the same time, we are no less committed to the notion that learning is for living, and that learning takes place most effectively not on line, but among and with other people, in conversation, through debate, at lunch, over coffee, in class, through an internship, on the playing field, in the bookstore, and even on the Long Walk. If education is understood not merely as the accessing of information, but as engaging in the process of living, as testing the boundaries of knowledge and the quality of an idea against life’s hard facts, of examining ourselves in relation to and in the reflection of someone else, then the liberal arts campus is a place that must and will endure.

            Place matters. A place has its own life and history, its own spirit. That is why so many colleges like ours have made so much of foreign study in foreign places to complement the experience of living and learning on a college campus. How much more intimate will be our students’ knowledge of Buddhist traditions once they have spent a semester studying it with Tibetan nuns in a monastery in Kathmandu? What better grasp will our students have of the Italian Renaissance after spending the semester in Rome, visiting the Sistine Chapel, talking with its restorers and examining its frescoes firsthand?

         The French call it terroir -- the quality of the earth and climate and atmosphere of a particular place that is transferred to the grapes that grow in that place and is magically but unmistakably expressed in the wine those grapes produce, giving it a particular designation and a name. Our terroir at Trinity is the Long Walk, and the places of wisdom that it connects us to in our ongoing quest for truth. There is still some walking to be done there, and challenges for us to meet about what it means to be a residential liberal arts college in the age to come. For great college campuses like Trinity’s the predictions of our demise are not just greatly exaggerated, as Hartford’s own Mark Twain put it; they are fundamentally misplaced. Our Long Walk remains before us.