An Appeal to My Alma Mater

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When Maggie Li Zhang enrolled in a college class where students were told to take notes and read on paper rather than on a screen, she felt anxious and alienated. Zhang and her peers had spent part of high school distance learning during the pandemic. During her first year at Pomona College, in Southern California, she had felt most engaged in a philosophy course where the professor treated a shared Google Doc as the focus of every class, transcribing discussions in real time on-screen and enabling students to post comments.
So the 'tech-free' class that she took the following semester disoriented her. 'When someone writes something you think: Should I be taking notes too?' she told me in an email. But gradually, she realized that exercising her own judgments about what to write down, and annotating course readings with ink, helped her think more deeply and connect with the most difficult material. 'I like to get my finger oil on the pages,' she told me. Only then does a text 'become ripe enough for me to enter.' Now, she said, she feels 'far more alienated' in classes that allow screens.
Zhang, who will be a senior in the fall, is among a growing cohort of students at Pomona College who are trying to alter how technology affects campus life. I attended Pomona from 1998 to 2002; I wanted to learn more about these efforts and the students' outlook on technology, so I recently emailed or spoke with 10 of them. One student wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for more classes where electronic devices are banned. Another co-founded a 'Luddite Club' that holds a weekly tech-free hangout. Another now carries a flip phone rather than a smartphone on campus. Some Pomona professors with similar concerns are limiting or banning electronic devices in their classes and trying to curtail student use of ChatGPT. It all adds up to more concern over technology than I have ever seen at the college.
These Pomona students and professors are hardly unique in reacting to a new reality. A generation ago, the prevailing assumption among college-bound teenagers was that their undergraduate education would only benefit from cutting-edge technology. Campus tour guides touted high-speed internet in every dorm as a selling point. Now that cheap laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi, and ChatGPT are all ubiquitous—and now that more people have come to see technology as detrimental to students' academic and social life—countermeasures are emerging on various campuses. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that sales of old-fashioned blue books for written exams had increased over the past year by more than 30 percent at Texas A&M University and nearly 50 percent at the University of Florida, while rising 80 percent at UC Berkeley over the past two years. And professors at schools such as the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland are banning laptops in class.
The pervasiveness of technology on campuses poses a distinct threat to small residential liberal-arts colleges. Pomona, like its closest peer institutions, spends lots of time, money, and effort to house nearly 95 percent of 1,600 students on campus, feed them in dining halls, and teach them in tiny groups, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 8 to 1. That costly model is worth it, boosters insist, because young people are best educated in a closely knit community where everyone learns from one another in and outside the classroom. Such a model ceases to work if many of the people physically present in common spaces absent their minds to cyberspace (a topic that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored in the high-school context).
At the same time, Pomona is better suited than most institutions to scale back technology's place in campus life. With a $3 billion endowment, a small campus, and lots of administrators paid to shape campus culture, it has ample resources and a natural setting to formalize experiments as varied as, say, nudging students during orientation to get flip phones, forging a tech-free culture at one of its dining halls, creating tech-free dorms akin to its substance-free options––something that tiny St. John's College in Maryland is attempting––and publicizing and studying the tech-free classes of faculty members who choose that approach.
Doing so would differentiate Pomona from competitors. Aside from outliers such as Deep Springs College and some small religious institutions—Wyoming Catholic College has banned phones since 2007, and Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio launched a scholarship for students who give up smartphones until they earn their degree—vanishingly few colleges have committed to thoughtful limits on technology.
[Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now]
My hope is that Pomona or another liberal-arts college recasts itself from a place that brags about how much tech its incoming students will be able to access––'there are over 160 technology enhanced learning spaces at Pomona,' the school website states––to a place that also brags about spaces that it has created as tech refuges. 'In a time of fierce competition for students, this might be something for a daring and visionary college president to propose,' Susan McWilliams Barndt, a Pomona politics professor, told me. McWilliams has never allowed laptops or other devices in her classes; she has also won Pomona's most prestigious teaching prize every time she's been eligible. 'There may not be a million college-bound teens across this country who want to attend such a school,' she said, 'but I bet there are enough to sustain a vibrant campus or two.'
So far, Pomona's leadership has not aligned itself with the professors and students who see the status quo as worse than what came before it. 'I have done a little asking around today and I was not able to find any initiative around limiting technology,' the college's new chief communications officer, Katharine Laidlaw, wrote to me. 'But let's keep in touch. I could absolutely see how this could become a values-based experiment at Pomona.'
Pomona would face a number of obstacles in trying to make itself less tech-dependent. The Americans With Disabilities Act requires allowing eligible students to use tools such as note-taking software, closed captioning, and other apps that live on devices. But Oona Eisenstadt, a religious-studies professor at Pomona who has taught tech-free classes for 21 years, told me that, although she is eager to follow the law (and even go beyond it) to accommodate her students, students who require devices in class are rare. If a student really needed a laptop to take notes, she added, she would consider banning the entire class from taking notes, rather than allowing the computer. 'That would feel tough at the beginning,' she said, but it 'might force us into even more presence.'
Ensuring access to course materials is another concern. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics and law, told me that she is thinking of returning to in-class exams because of 'a distinct change' in the essays her students submit. 'It depressed me to see how often students went first to AI just to see what it spit out, and how so much of its logic and claims still made their way into their essays,' she said. She wants to ban laptops in class too––but her students use digital course materials, which she provides to spare them from spending money on pricey physical texts. 'I don't know how to balance equity and access with the benefits of a tech-free classroom,' she lamented. Subsidies for professors struggling with that trade-off is the sort of experiment the college could fund.
Students will, of course, need to be conversant in recent technological advances to excel in many fields, and some courses will always require tech in the classroom. But just as my generation has made good use of technology, including the iPhone and ChatGPT, without having been exposed to it in college, today's students, if taught to think critically for four years, can surely teach themselves how to use chatbots and more on their own time. In fact, I expect that in the very near future, if not this coming fall, most students will arrive at Pomona already adept at using AI; they will benefit even more from the college teaching them how to think deeply without it.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that so many students who don't need tech in a given course want to use it. 'In any given class I can look around and see LinkedIn pages, emails, chess games,' Kaitlyn Ulalisa, a sophomore who grew up near Milwaukee, wrote to me. In high school, Ulalisa herself used to spend hours every day scrolling on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Without them, she felt that she 'had no idea what was going on' with her peers. At Pomona, a place small enough to walk around campus and see what's going on, she deleted the apps from her phone again. Inspired by a New York Times article about a Luddite Club started by a group of teens in Brooklyn, she and a friend created a campus chapter. They meet every Friday to socialize without technology. Still, she said, for many college students, going off TikTok and Instagram seems like social death, because their main source of social capital is online.
[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]
Accounts like hers suggest that students might benefit from being forced off of their devices, at least in particular campus spaces. But Michael Steinberger, a Pomona economics professor, told me he worries that an overly heavy-handed approach might deprive students of the chance to learn for themselves. 'What I hope that we can teach our students is why they should choose not to open their phone in the dining hall,' he said. 'Why they might choose to forgo technology and write notes by hand. Why they should practice cutting off technology and lean in to in-person networking to support their own mental health, and why they should practice the discipline of choosing this for themselves. If we limit the tech, but don't teach the why, then we don't prepare our students as robustly as we might.'
Philosophically, I usually prefer the sort of hands-off approach that Steinberger is advocating. But I wonder if, having never experienced what it's like to, say, break bread in a dining hall where no one is looking at a device, students possess enough data to make informed decisions. Perhaps heavy-handed limits on tech, at least early in college, would leave them better informed about trade-offs and better equipped to make their own choices in the future.
What else would it mean for a college-wide experiment in limited tech to succeed? Administrators would ideally measure academic outcomes, effects on social life, even the standing of the college and its ability to attract excellent students. Improvements along all metrics would be ideal. But failures needn't mean wasted effort if the college publicly shares what works and what doesn't. A successful college-wide initiative should also take care to avoid undermining the academic freedom of professors, who must retain all the flexibility they currently enjoy to make their own decisions about how to teach their classes. Some will no doubt continue with tech-heavy teaching methods.
Others will keep trying alternatives. Elijah Quetin, a visiting instructor in physics and astronomy at Pomona, told me about a creative low-tech experiment that he already has planned. Over the summer, Quetin and six students (three of them from the Luddite Club) will spend a few weeks on a ranch near the American River; during the day, they will perform physical labor—repairing fencing, laying irrigation pipes, tending to sheep and goats—and in the evening, they'll undertake an advanced course in applied mathematics inside a barn. 'We're trying to see if we can do a whole-semester course in just two weeks with no infrastructure,' he said. He called the trip 'an answer to a growing demand I'm hearing directly from students' to spend more time in the real world. It is also, he said, part of a larger challenge to 'the mass-production model of higher ed,' managed by digital tools 'instead of human labor and care.'
Even in a best-case scenario, where administrators and professors discover new ways to offer students a better education, Pomona is just one tiny college. It could easily succeed as academia writ large keeps struggling. 'My fear,' Gary Smith, an economics professor, wrote to me, 'is that education will become even more skewed with some students at elite schools with small classes learning critical thinking and communication skills, while most students at schools with large classes will cheat themselves by using LLMs'—large language models—'to cheat their way through school.'
But successful experiments at prominent liberal-arts colleges are better, for everyone, than nothing. While I, too, would lament a growing gap among college graduates, I fear a worse outcome: that all colleges will fail to teach critical thinking and communication as well as they once did, and that a decline in those skills will degrade society as a whole. If any school provides proof of concept for a better way, it might scale. Peer institutions might follow; the rest of academia might slowly adopt better practices. Some early beneficiaries of the better approach would meanwhile fulfill the charge long etched in Pomona's concrete gates: to bear their added riches in trust for mankind.
Article originally published at The Atlantic