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Atlantic
9 hours ago
- Atlantic
An Ideal Campus to Tame Technology
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.
New York Times
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Now in College, Luddite Teens Still Don't Want Your Likes
Biruk Watling, a college sophomore wearing a baggy coat and purple fingerless gloves, walked the chilly campus of Temple University in Philadelphia on a recent afternoon to recruit new members to her club. She taped a flier to a pole: 'Join the Luddite Club For Meaningful Connections.' Down the block, she posted another one: 'Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas.' When a student approached, Ms. Watling dove into her pitch. 'Our club promotes conscious consumption of technology,' she said. 'We're for human connection. I'm one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in Brooklyn. Now I'm trying to start it in Philly.' She pulled out a flip phone, mystifying her recruit. 'We use these,' she said. 'This has been the most freeing experience of my life.' If Ms. Watling had a missionary's zeal, it was because she wasn't just promoting a student club, but an approach to modern life that profoundly changed her two years ago, when she helped form the Luddite Club as a high school student in New York. But that was then, back when things were simpler, before she had embarked on the more independent life of a college student and found herself having to navigate QR codes, two-factor-identification logins, dating apps and other digital staples of campus life. The Luddite Club was the subject of an article I wrote in 2022 — a story that, ironically, went viral. It told of how a group of teenage tech skeptics from Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn and a few other schools in the city gathered on weekends in Prospect Park to enjoy some time together away from the machine. They sketched and painted side by side. They read quietly, favoring works by Dostoyevsky, Kerouac and Vonnegut. They sat on logs and groused about how TikTok was dumbing down their generation. Their flip phones were decorated with stickers and nail polish. Readers inspired by their message responded in hundreds of emails and comments. Reporters from Germany, Brazil, Japan and elsewhere flooded my inbox, asking me how to reach these students who were so hard to track down online. Snarky Reddit threads and think pieces sprouted. Ralph Nader endorsed the club in an opinion essay, writing: 'This is a rebellion that needs support and diffusion.' Two years later, I'm still asked about them. People want to know: Did they stay on the Luddite path? Or were they dragged back into the tech abyss? I put those questions to three of the original members — Ms. Watling, Jameson Butler and Logan Lane, the club's founder — when they took some time from their winter school breaks to gather at one of their old hangouts, Central Library in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza. They said they still had disdain for social media platforms and the way they ensnare young people, pushing them to create picture-perfect online identities that have little do with their authentic selves. They said they still relied on flip phones and laptops, rather than smartphones, as their main concessions to an increasingly digital world. And they reported that their movement was growing, with offshoots at high schools and colleges in Seattle, West Palm Beach, Fla., Richmond, Va., South Bend, Ind., and Washington, D.C. The Luddite Club is better organized these days, they said, with an uncluttered website to help spread the word. Ms. Lane, 19, is in the last stages of turning it into a registered nonprofit organization. 'We've even got a mission statement now,' said Ms. Lane, who is studying Russian literature at Oberlin College. 'We like to say we're a team of former screenagers connecting young people to the communities and knowledge to conquer big tech's addictive agendas.' The club also publishes a newsletter, available only in print, called The Luddite Dispatch. An article in the first issue, headlined 'Recent Luddite Wins,' highlighted a recommendation by the United States surgeon general Vivek Murthy that social media platforms should carry warning labels to inform users that they are 'associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.' 'For our next issue, I'm planning to travel to France to this town outside Paris, Seine-Port, that's trying to ban smartphones,' Ms. Lane said. 'I want to see if it's working and if something like that could exist in America. I hope to interview the mayor.' While Ms. Lane had started a branch of the Luddite Club at Oberlin, Ms. Watling, 19, reported that she was having some difficulty getting hers off the ground at Temple, where she is majoring in sociology. 'Sometimes I think I sound a little crazy to Philly people,' she said. 'Because I'm always like, 'I'm alive. You're alive. It's beautiful. That's why we shouldn't be consuming life through technology.'' Unlike her fellow students, who do their banking on their smartphones, Ms. Watling uses A.T.M.s. like a baby boomer. She said her biggest challenge was navigating dating and nightlife. 'Raves are big in Philly, and it's a big part of student life at Temple,' she said. 'You can end up in the middle of nowhere in some abandoned building for the rave everyone's going to. I can't go if I don't know I'll get home safely.' She slowly pulled something from her satchel — a second phone, an Android. 'I own this now with a sense of inner torture,' Ms. Watling said, 'but I have to look out for my well-being as a young woman. It's too risky for me to put my life in the hands of a flip phone.' She stressed that the smartphone was not part of her everyday life: 'I use it only when I need to, mostly for Uber,' she said. 'I've tried Hinge, too, but always delete it.' Another founding club member, Odille Zexter, who wasn't able to make the reunion, agreed in a phone interview that dating apps were a formidable impediment to the Luddite way. 'I've successfully resisted technology since high school, but sometimes I feel left out of things,' Ms. Zexter, who is studying studio art at Bard College, said. 'Dating apps are one of them, because everyone at Bard uses them. Then I remind myself they're just another form of scrolling and social media. That they go against my values.' In a recent art class, Ms. Zexter, 19, explored the Luddite worldview by creating a bronze sculpture of a battered flip phone. 'Flip phones are seen as relics now,' Ms. Zexter said, 'but by freezing mine through sculpture, I wanted to preserve that era people used them, to highlight they're more important now than ever.' Not every original Luddite Club member has been able to adhere to its anti-tech ideals since going off to college. Lola Shub, who is studying creative writing at the State University of New York at Purchase, said in a phone interview that she had walked away from the Luddite path with some ambivalence. 'I started using a smartphone again pretty much the day I started college,' she said. 'I kind of had to. It's really hard to navigate the world without one. But there's been something nice about it, if I'm going to be honest.' The last time we met, sitting side by side on a log in Prospect Park, Ms. Shub told me she had been inspired by 'Into the Wild,' Jon Krakauer's 1996 nonfiction account of a young man who died while trying to live off the grid in the Alaskan wilderness. 'We've all got this theory that we're not just meant to be confined to buildings and work,' she said at the time. 'And that guy was experiencing life. Real life. Social media and phones are not real life.' Now, at 20, she is back in the digital world. 'It's constant access again,' Ms. Shub said. 'It's the relief of knowing I can do things easier. I got Instagram, too, and it's been nice reconnecting with people on it. 'But then you get used to it all, is the problem,' she continued. 'I feel like I'm not trying as hard anymore. When I had the flip phone, I had to put in effort to get to places, to talk to people. Everything was a task. Now it's easy to do things. I guess I still don't like needing the crutch of a smartphone, though I couldn't figure out how to go on without one.' I asked what she thought of 'Into the Wild' these days. 'I still think that book is amazing,' she said. 'I feel the same way about it. I still believe phones are a big problem. I'm always aware now, when I'm hanging out with people, how everyone is just looking at their phone. It's an epidemic. It's sad, really.' She added: 'My life is just in a different place than it was in high school. It sucks I got back into this head space, and maybe I'll go back to a flip phone one day, but I need the smartphone for now.' While many original Luddites have been navigating campus life, Ms. Butler, a high school senior, has become a leader of the club's New York presence. Seated at the library table with a worn copy of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's 'Random Family,' she provided a report. The club had died out at Murrow, she said, shortly after it found itself in the media glare — the attention had obliterated its street cred. But now a new Luddite chapter, with Ms. Butler at the head, is thriving at Brooklyn Tech. To recruit new members, she sits at a table at school fairs next to a poster that reads, 'The Truth Will Set You Free.' Three high school initiates to the Luddite Club had accompanied Ms. Butler to the library: Lucy Jackson, Sasha Jackson and Téa Cuozzo. They sat quietly as the more senior members talked. 'It's sort of the cool kids club now,' Ms. Butler, 18, said. 'It's been great for my high school life socially. No one thinks I'm a freak. We do improv, rap battles and make zines together.' 'Many of us have decided we don't want to be in bed, doom-scrolling and rotting our lives away,' she continued. 'Youth is being wasted on those of us who are constantly on our phones. We're only young once.' Her boyfriend, Winter Jacobson, who was in town from Colorado to visit Ms. Butler, was sitting next to her. He started a Luddite Club at Telluride High School last year. He said it has a dozen members. 'Colorado is very different from New York,' Mr. Jacobson, 17, said. 'There's not as much to do in Telluride. People are reliant on their phones as their connection to the world, so some of my friends think the club is a joke. I'm still trying to spread the message, though.' He took Ms. Butler's hand. 'She inspired me to get a flip phone,' he said, 'because I saw all the superpowers it was giving her.' After the summit, the teens headed to Prospect Park. Trudging across leaves, they traded critiques of the new Bob Dylan movie. On arriving at their old gathering spot, Ms. Lane grew pensive. 'This isn't just a dirt mound to me,' she said. 'We found ourselves here. This is where we took back something that was taken from us.' 'I don't attend the club meetings here now because I'm in college, but this space isn't for me anymore,' she added. 'It's for others to discover. I'm not a kid anymore. I'm about to turn 20.' Ms. Lane has lately become a public face of the movement. In April, she delivered a talk at a symposium examining technology's effects on society at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Speaking before a crowded auditorium, she painted a bleak picture of her pre-Luddite life. 'Like other iPad kids I found myself from the age of 10 longing to be famous on apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok,' she said. 'My phone kept the curated lives of my peers with me wherever I went, following me to the dinner table, to the bus stop, and finally to my bed where I fell asleep groggy and irritable, often at late hours in the night, clutching my device.' Then, at age 14, she had an epiphany. 'Sitting next to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn one afternoon, I felt the sudden urge to throw my iPhone into the water,' she told the MoMA audience. 'I saw no difference between the garbage on my phone and the garbage surfacing in the polluted canal. A few months later, I powered off my phone, put it in a drawer, and I signed off social media for good. Thus began my life as a Luddite.' 'For the youth of today,' she said in closing, 'the developmental experience has been polluted; it's been cheapened. 'Who am I?' becomes 'How do I appear?'' A week after the gathering at the library, I visited Ms. Lane at her workplace. She had taken a winter-semester internship with Light Phone, a startup that manufactures a minimalist phone that allows for texting and calling and not much else. The company occupied part of a cavernous co-working space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Workers in cubicles tapped on laptops and dashed off Slack messages. The boss, Joe Hollier, a shaggy haired man in a Mazzy Star T-shirt, described the demand for his device. 'Our customers are freelance creatives, people with internet-heavy careers, Bible-Belt families, even recovering pornography addicts,' he said. 'Most Light Phone users still use technology, though our design helps them use it as little as they can.' Hunched in her cubicle, Ms. Lane considered office life. 'I've been reading up on work-life balance in America, the reality of corporate jobs,' she said. 'It sounds like you pretty much need to be on all the time. It sounds awful.' Her task that day was to test a new prototype with features like an MP3 player, a voice recorder and a camera. As she demonstrated the device, I couldn't help but notice that she seemed intrigued by these conveniences. But she quickly disabused me of the notion that she was straying from the Luddite path. 'This phone allows for what I'd call a 'neo-Luddite' lifestyle,' she said. 'The thing is, I have my flip phone because I still need to have one, whether that's for school or staying connected with my parents. But I think the dream for me is to be unreachable one day. To have no phone at all.'
