OpinionJanuary 28, 1996

Tom Bell, the University of Idaho interim president, gives legislators sound advice when he warns that, for all the shining advantages of going to college by computer, there are still some benefits to on-campus learning that no computer can match.

The computer is a tool not a school. The computer is the best writing tool, the best research tool, the best calculator ever invented. But you can no more totally remove the face-to-face teaching from education than you could rationally run a legislature by having all the lawmakers stay home and legislate on-line. Lawmakers understand that. Just as there is no substitute for a seasoned professor challenging students in person, there is no substitute for legislators socializing and brainstorming together in an environment less restricted than one of those little screens. Legislating totally by computer or getting an education totally by computer is like love with a blow-up doll. It's just not the same thing.

However, in one sense, Bell is an odd one to be preaching the rational doctrine that "the living and learning experience of a resident campus gives students access to quality professors and leaders." The UI is one of the many universities in the land that have gone over the mad edge into a numbing overemphasis on real and make-work research at the expense of teaching by quality professors.

Access to "quality professors"? In reality, the UI gives undergraduates access to teaching assistants of uneven quality and a chance to admire many professors from afar as they bury themselves in research.

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Nonetheless, his point about computers is dead on. We sometimes tend in this society to resist technology at first and then to go overboard in the opposite direction and treat it as some sort of total replacement for human beings.

But you cannot become a truly educated person all by yourself studying in a box. Education and edification involve working and playing with other human beings. If you develop no people skills you are not equipped to live on this planet full of people.

If members of the Idaho Legislature see the computer as a chance to get by on the cheap and avoid building some buildings and hiring some real teachers, then they have been locked too long in that little marble center of the universe in which they work.

B.H.

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