The Mission

Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission

Wired: Cell Phones and the Love of Learning (Winter 2006)

Alumni who visit the College often remark about the changes in the campus landscape, notably the Testa Science Center and the newest residence halls. But I wonder if the single most visible change in the last five years has been the rather peculiar sight of students out in public with a phone attached to their ear. By a slim margin, more students own a cell phone than a personal computer, and both exceed 90 percent.

I say peculiar, because the cell phone collapses the distinction between public and private in ways that are sometimes disorienting. I remember seeing two friends walking together in Rome several years back, both chatting away on their cell phones and presumably not with one another. With nothing better to do one day in Chicago this summer, I looked down on a busy intersection to see how many pedestrians were otherwise engaged. Not counting those hands-free devices, there was at least one cell phone user in every group crossing the street over a 15-minute span. The cell phone phenomenon is remarkable for being so commonplace.

The availability of communication whenever and wherever does raise questions which have some bearing on our educational mission. Our Student Life staff indicates that parents are increasingly and more directly involved in the lives of their sons and daughters during their college years, a turn of events not caused by the cell phone, but no doubt facilitated by it. Together with e-mail and text messaging, maintaining connections is obviously both fast and easy. At the risk of being a crank, I am led to ask how the habits encouraged by our instantaneous modes of communication affect the dispositions of mind and heart suitable for a liberal education, among them patience and thoughtful deliberation and fruitful solitude. Besides maximizing the possibilities for “engagement” of various sorts, is there not also a necessary place for dis-engagement during these years of study and personal growth? Can we realistically expect that our students will become attached to the rarer qualities of the human spirit without a certain detachment from the insistent distractions and interruptions of our cell phone generation?

For all that has been made possible by our technology, then, one has reason to worry about the future of this kind of education apart from a deliberate slowing of the pace and a more judicious use of the means at our disposal. This is not a question of turning back the clock, but of cultivating a thoughtful awareness of both the possibilities and perils of our wired world.