Harvard spends a great deal of effort to obfuscate its decision-making. This past week, Harvard sent out a series of opaque emails that only doubled down on its efforts to do so in the time of COVID-19: “With more time to prepare, we are confident we can create a better, more engaging experience for the fall should many of our activities need to be conducted remotely. Rather than seeking to approximate the on-campus experience online, we can focus our efforts on developing the best possible remote educational experience.”
On the one hand, Harvard suggests that it already knows that Zoom University has been, for many students like myself, terrible. On the other hand, Harvard appears to be under the delusion that, in the next few months, it will be able to create a workable alternative to in-person classes which ensures “that all our students, whatever their situations may be, have enriching and successful experiences.” The email is a clumsy attempt to tell students, “It won’t be as bad as you think!” Let me be very blunt: Harvard is misleading its students. Based on my understanding of what college is and what it isn’t, no amount of communications expertise will convince me that Zoom classes in the fall will be any better than they have been in the spring. The Harvard administration needs not only to acknowledge that a virtual semester won’t in the least “approximate” an in-person experience, but also to reflect that understanding in their policies for the fall semester.
Essential Elements of the College Experience
Harvard is well aware that college is more than a vehicle for academic training. Our provost Alan Garber writes, “We also recognize that a Harvard education is much more than what happens in the classroom. It takes place during office hours with faculty, meetings of peer study groups, mealtimes with friends, and serendipitous interactions among our diverse and intergenerational community.” The university should not merely give lip service to this critical fact.
Indeed, physical proximity is extremely important. Take Ed Glaeser, a superstar in the Harvard economics department. Even he — an economist — can tell you the value of proximity. Glaeser writes, “The success of our dense metropolitan areas, and the success even of our cities … is something of a paradox. We live in an age in which it is effortless to electronically communicate across the planet … and yet, in so many ways, cities are more important, more vibrant, more productive than ever.” Glaeser argues that cities are the engines of progress in the modern world. The key to their success is the same reason why Google and the rest of the software industry are so keen on building campuses for their workers to interact.
At Harvard too, bringing people into proximity with one another enhances productivity. It creates a network effect of interaction that, in a convex fashion, enhances innovation. Similar to how densification is a primary characteristic of an efficient modern world, the “serendipitous interactions” and face-to-face communication for hours on end in a dorm room make us vastly better off.
Academic and commercial success are not all that’s at stake. I am not going to argue that Harvard should put underage and barely-of-age kids on a campus in the midst of a pandemic just so that they could party, but I would be remiss to not acknowledge the importance of social interaction to the college experience. What I mean by social interaction here is, on a basic level, meeting and hanging out with friends, some of whom we will have for life. Many may justify the expense of college on purely educational and economic grounds — for those people, consider that the founders of Google and Facebook met at Stanford and Harvard, respectively — but mostly, we come away from college having had a lot of fun with some amazing new people. I hate to quote a Yale song, but there is a reason why Yale students sing the unofficial alma mater “Bright College Years”: to celebrate the same relationships that are much more difficult to cultivate during an online education.
The Tyranny of Zoom University
As a college student going through this unfortunate semester, let me provide some insight into what makes online classes so bad.
First, it is nearly impossible to hold students to even a modest level of accountability. For example, a student in my government seminar sets up his laptop right in front of his PlayStation. His eyes look just above the camera while his hands are out of view. On a good day, people cannot notice; however, on a bad day, I might have a hard time holding in my laughter as his gaze barely settles on his computer screen once or twice during the entire few hours. On the worst day, he got up and accidentally placed his controller on his seat in full view. The teacher does not try to correct the behavior.
Distractions abound at home, but even if a student stays disciplined, his experience is made worse by the others. This behavior is just a fraction of the coming problems: online examination is a scandal in waiting. How can a school that reads us the honor code before every final exam close its eyes to the impending disaster of online cheating? A classroom provides a form of discipline only available with physical proximity.
Second, the reason why video calls in general are so pernicious is that the slight artifacts of video conferencing — the lag, the robot voices, et cetera — make us feel even more disconnected than if we never called at all. Research shows that when it comes to communication, we count on slight facial gestures and queues that are lost in the video encoding. Birthday wishes between my roommates are usually enthusiastically given and received — a real fun time to reflect on friendship — but this year, we mostly sat in silence, trying to make out each other’s smiles through the pixelation. Consider that fact when Harvard says that it is trying to “reimagine” Harvard traditions to make them work online.
Research also tells us that video calls are more fatiguing than in-person meetings. I can attest to the fact that my two-hour seminars, which felt just a little long on campus, now feel like an eternity. According to INSEAD professor Gianpiero Petriglieri, that silence may be a part of the problem: “Silence creates a natural rhythm in a real-life conversation. However, when it happens in a video call, you become anxious about the technology.” Indeed, I recall my friend giving an extended presentation to a professor, constantly stopping to make sure that the professor could hear him. The anxiety is exhausting. If you think it’s hard for students to stay focused during in-person classes, online classes make the problem considerably worse. If the school opts for a full semester of Zoom classes, I imagine that the quality of work will go down, classroom discussion will be lifeless, and there will be widespread academic malaise.
Lying or Incompetence?
Consider this: If an overworked telephone salesman gives you incorrect specifications for his product, you might be inclined to give him a pass for not listening too carefully during his training. But when Alexander Graham Bell himself tells you incorrect information about the phone he’s just invented, he’s probably lying to you. Harvard is the Alexander Graham Bell of distance education.
Harvard has a great deal of experience in the realm of distance education. In 1949, Harvard Extension School began offering courses on the radio. These courses were a hit, and they eventually were broadcast every weekday on the TV station WGBH. Harvard became as competent and knowledgeable in the area of distance learning as any university in the country, and today, Harvard Extension School uses Zoom conference calls and video lectures year-round. Harvard has been working at online education for years. So how could Harvard, in good conscience, tell us that the college’s fall offerings will be a generational improvement over the spring’s?
I am not arguing that Harvard should not go online in the fall, even as many of our peer institutions pledge not to do so. I am arguing that the college’s representation of the costs of online learning is misleading at best and downright dishonest at worst. Harvard administrators are trying to make students believe that online classes — bad as they are — are a workable alternative, perhaps even good enough to give us letter grades again. It is up to us to tell them that we won’t stand for a decision that downplays the vast inferiority of Zoom University.
Image Credit: Flickr / Rebecca Pollard