back Talk — back to School

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

My autobiography is pretty short. When I was five, I figured out how to read. When I was six, I went to school. And that’s been pretty much it so far. I’m still available when the Yankees need me for center field, but in the meantime, every year this time, the same edgy impatience settles on me, the same delight in seeing all those young people again, the next swarms who still don’t know how good this year or these next four years will be. It’s time to go back to school.

Well, but oops. This sure isn’t your typical back to school season, is it? They’re back and we’re glad to see them, and a little unsettled by them at the same time. What happens next? I’m writing this on our first day of classes at ASU — campus eerily quiet as we go into our distinctive hybrid mode — and, by the time you read this, you’ll know a lot better than I do now how these weeks play out. Surprising stuff happens and weird problems present themselves (a shortage of plexiglass! thousands of gallons of sanitizer, and we can’t find a building where it’s safe to store that much flammable liquid!). I find myself saying to colleagues, ok, chill: we’re setting out to do something nobody has ever done in all of human history, so sure, it’s going to get a little weird. To quote Garry Trudeau’s character Raoul Duke: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” A lot of folks have had to turn pro this year.

I won’t try to be a prophet about these weeks, but I deeply believe that when one’s most uncertain, that’s the best time to take a deep breath and look at the horizon. What might we see there?

For the last 30 years, we’ve lived on the threshold of the digital age. I sent my first email in August 1989, bought my first book on Amazon in 1996, and turned my first nose up at an iPhone in 2007: that’s our history. (I now use an iPhone and miss my Blackberry!) But in all that time, we’ve peered around the door, nervously looking to see what’s going on. We’ve still lived and thought and acted as though the world hasn’t really changed. The digital is...nice, cool, convenient, helpful. It’s a supplement to real life.

So sure, it made perfect sense that we went to the office to work, went down the hall for meetings, and spent an hour in traffic each way. It made perfect sense that we “subscribed” to the same “journals” as before and indeed priced them traditionally with a little something extra for the digital version. And never mind that getting people together in the same place at the same time was vastly the most expensive thing about higher education — that was still the absolute norm and gold standard. “Online education” was second tier and the people who disagreed were self-evidently clueless, vaporing on about how the superstar lecturer on a screen could replace all those ink-stained wretches who used to correct pages. Life marched on: more office buildings, more highways, more cars, more of everything and some expensive technology besides.

Of course there are places where the future has gone on inventing itself. I wouldn’t be a loyal Sun Devil if I didn’t think that ASU was one of the places where the future arrived a little early. Our online

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But now is the moment to take that deep breath and take that plunge. The question for our moment as a civilization is this: can we finally take the steps to imagine and create a world where the human connections of the digital become a primary and central form of life? Not the only one — no, of course not. The f2f world is indeed inescapable and central — but it’s time to recognize that the digital world is every bit as real a source of powerful human connections and now finally essential to the effective working of that f2f world. We can all leverage our efforts better and smarter because we can take the digital possibilities really for granted.

We did a survey of our ASU Library staff mid-pandemic and learned that their views are profoundly bimodal. About a third of our people took everything in stride, shrugged, and made the whole “work remotely” thing work for them. About a third were delighted: no commute, better sleep, better relationship with family, more productive. And about a third were going nuts: families snapping at each other, too many distractions, a sense of losing control.

We read those survey results and said, “that’s our world.” Let’s be realistic about it. We, the human beings actually on the planet, are now finally figuring out how to make choices about how to balance the opportunities and threats of these worlds. Some people will work well in one space, others better in the other: and we’ll sort out the division of labor, the way we used to sort out jobs where people traveled all the time and jobs where people went to the same office every day. This highly disruptive moment of pandemic will make us face the creative possibility of remaking the way we think about everything we do. What works best f2f? What works best virtually? Who’s good at which worlds at which stage of their lives? continued on page 93