The Place of Learning

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Washington, my favorite place to study was the Graduate Reading Room in the Henry Suzzallo Library. It was, and remains, a place that inspires feelings of awe and even reverence: a huge space framed by soaring Gothic arches and a vaulted ceiling, stained glass windows, wonderful stonework, and an almost palpable silence. One felt tiny in there, and had a sense that even daring to cough or chancing to drop a pencil constituted some kind of offense against the gods of learning. It may be too much, but only by a little, to say that this space was imbued with a sense of the sacred. The many long hours I spent there, conjugating Greek verbs or writing history papers in longhand, strike me even now—more than thirty years later—as having been glimpses of the eternal carved out of space and time.

It is, of course, no accident that learning should have been identified with a profound sense of place, and of sacred place at that. After all, the universities of the Middle Ages grew directly from schools that were attached to great cathedrals, where lectio divina, the deep reading of the Bible, was the order of the day. As scholars began to gather in university towns, those towns became in turn places of intellectual pilgrimage. Great libraries, repositories of written wisdom, emerged to supply the raw materials for the “schoolmen” to ply their craft. Cities like Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Bologna became the places of learning, for if one wished to gain access to the riches of the preserved literary past, as well as to the fruits of the best minds of the day, one had to travel there.

Today, of course, the context of learning has changed profoundly. A substantial portion not only of the the world’s information, but of its best scholarship, can be readily found floating through the ether, and can be easily brought to one’s desktop, thanks to the prodigious achievements of information technology. One can roll out of bed in Kuala Lumpur, boot up a computer, and take a rigorous course, complete with personal feedback, from an eminent scholar at M.I.T. or Harvard or Duke. Both information and scholarship are well on the way to being ubiquitous. The awed sense of place that I experienced as a student—and which has been replicated over the years in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris—may quickly become as unfamiliar as writing with quill pens.

So what will become of the notion of a place of learning? Has place utterly lost its place to a new environment of scholarly ubiquity? Some might argue that learning is inherently communitarian and collaborative, and that therefore we need shared physical space to foster the kinds of relationships implied by the educational enterprise. But those who regularly teach on line—and who do it well—tell me that in many ways the opportunity for community building increases in that environment. I remember a discussion of “distance learning” in which someone said “We’ve had distance learning for hundreds of years: it’s called the lecture. Technology can enable us to create ‘proximity learning.’”

If one no longer needs to visit a physical place or space to gain access to higher learning, or to a scholarly community, if privilege has shifted to virtual space, what of the college campus? Why should someone come to Greeley, Colorado, or Austin, Texas, or Cambridge, Massachusetts? I think this question will be asked with increasing frequency. And I suspect that the answer has to do with yet another emerging paradigm: we know now, much better than we once did, that effective learning is connected to life. The purpose, the end, of learning, is not mere learning, but living. The physical space of a campus, in a city, is no longer the exclusive repository of information, nor the only place to find scholarly expertise. But it is the place of engagement, the place where the privileges and obligations of educated citizenship can play out as a community of students reaches out and learns in, learns from, and contributes to the life of a larger community. It is a place where one encounters “the Other,” not merely as a text revealing different perspectives, but in the flesh. It is the place where one is forced to reckon with the implications of knowledge for how one lives life.