This is either striking a blow for civility and even civilization or a return to the Stone Age, depending on your viewpoint: the University of Chicago Law School has switched off wireless Internet access while students are sitting in class.
The school’s decision, by the dean of the law school, Saul Levmore, was emailed to students, faculty and alumni in late March, and posted on the school’s Website April 11. The move has caught the ear, or eye, of a wide array of pundits and bloggers.
The brief statement https://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1329 on the school’s Website says that after school officials discovered they could turn Internet access on and off for wireless users, they decided to move forward with the ban. The goal is to have “students and faculty focused on the exchange of ideas in a thorough, engaging manner,” according to quote attributed to Levmore. “Many students have expressed support for the decision to remove wireless access in classrooms,” according to the statement.
A story by the “Chicago Daily Law Bulletin,” and posted https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/cdlb-reclaim-classrooms/index.html on the law school’s Website, captures the reaction of many in the headline: “U of C Law School Takes Classrooms Out of the Internet Age.” The story notes that the problem of Internet entertainment in class has plagued other professors, and students, at other law schools, and probably throughout higher education.
The Bulletin article quotes extensively from an email written by Levmore to students and faculty explaining his decision: “Remarkably, [Internet] usage appears to be contagious if not epidemic” during law classes. “Several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes and within 20 minutes, an entire row is shoe shopping. Half the time a student is called on, the question needs to be repeated,” Levmore added.
In the school’s official statement, Levmore compared the classroom relationship of teacher and student to a one-on-one conversation that needs to be preserved from interruptions, distractions, diversions, and rudeness.
“When a student visits my office, neither the student nor I would dream of surfing the web or e-mailing while communicating with one another,” he says in the posted statement. “That is the level of attention and engagement we should expect in the classroom.”
It all sounds a bit prissy. But another law blog, AboveTheLaw.com, which has been covering the story since late March, posted https://abovethelaw.com/2008/04/xxx_internet_in_the_classroom.php a memo from the associate dean of students for the American University Washington College of Law: “It has been brought to my attention that several students in the second-year part-time division were viewing pornography online during a recent class[emphasis in original], in plain view of a portion of the class and with no attempt to disguise their behavior. This conduct not only reflects poorly on the students involved but also may serve to create a sexually hostile environment….”
The dean later reported that it was one student who, while agreeing that the picture in question could have been interpreted as being in poor taste, insisted it was not pornographic. An ideal prelude to a law school argument on what constitutes porn.
It’s unclear from the University of Chicago statement how the school is actually preventing access. Did it physically remove the access points? Or keep them in place and block Internet, or even intranet, during class time, which would require an authentication system? Do they simply flip the power switch to off? Does each room have a dedicated access point, or does each access point serve several rooms? If the latter, what happens if a professor in an adjacent room wants or needs the students to have Internet access?
No matter how it’s done, it wouldn’t stop students from using, or least trying to use, a cellular card and their own ISP to access the Internet.
A brief article in the “National Law Journal” https://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1208256429396 says Levmore has received inquiries from 10 other law schools that are interested in this technology “solution” to what they clearly see as a problem.
In a comment at still another site https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/04/chicago-pulls-i.html, a poster identified only as 3L said the decision was “reactionary” and the real solution was greater network access not less.
“If professors want to solve this problem, they should make detailed lecture notes and lecture audio available online (in a password-protected database) so students don’t have to worry about feverishly taking notes in class,” 3L wrote. “That way students would be free to think in class rather than being secretaries who are scared of failing to type everything the professor says….” In other words, they’d write less and think more.
In a letter to law school alumni, Levmore suggested the decision was a matter of etiquette: “We need to think of Internet business as inappropriate in the classroom, much as everyone recognizes the need to shut off cell phones and to refrain from ostentatious newspaper reading in class or at business meetings or at Thanksgiving Dinner,” he wrote.
