Zooming Ahead

Joanne Freeman:
Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2:
From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman:
Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman. If you’re new to the podcast each week, along with my colleagues, Brian Balogh, Nathan Connolly, and Ed Ayers, we explore a different part of American history.

Joanne Freeman:
If you are a student, or a teacher, or perhaps even the parent, spouse, or friend of a student or teacher, chances are you’ve heard people talk about what it’s like holding classes over Zoom. A few months ago in a pre-COVID-19 world, if someone said the word Zoom, the first thing that probably came to your mind was a closeup camera angle, or a PBS kids show from the 1970s that has been reverberating through my brain for weeks. But today, the word has become synonymous with an application millions of people are using to learn, teach, and work. The coronavirus has impacted every aspect of our lives, including how we teach and how we learn. Schools of all kinds, from elementary to university, are shut down and it’s hard to know when they’ll reopen. In response to the school shutdowns, some college students have started petitions requesting their tuition be reduced or even refunded.

Joanne Freeman:
So what does this all mean for the future of classroom learning, and where does it fit into the broader history of higher ed? On this episode of BackStory, we’re diving into the topic of teaching. And we’re going to focus specifically on higher education, and how the virtual college classroom fits into the history of higher ed in the United States. But we’re interested in more than just college classrooms. So if you’re a teacher of any kind or for that matter, a student, get in touch with us about how you’re coping with these cataclysmic changes. We’re at BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStory radio. So to dive into the history of college classrooms, Brian reached out to a friend of the show, Jonathan Zimmerman.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
I teach education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joanne Freeman:
Jonathan is the author of the forthcoming book, The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America. He says Zoom and virtual learning are hardly the first time college students and professors have adapted to new technology in the classroom.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
As the universities grew, they invoke new machines, new technologies mainly to try to widen their audience, and to bring in more students. These institutions were started as tiny little places that served almost exclusively white men, and they grew into these enormous behemoths now serving a total of about 20 million people in the United States. And the historic pattern I think that’s relevant here is that at every juncture when we’ve introduced a new machine, radio, television, so-called program learning or teaching machines, and then of course eventually the computer, the main goal has been to bring in other students that formally hadn’t been served by the institution. So those machines were not for students at, for example, the University of Pennsylvania where I teach. They were generally pitched to bringing in other students in more non elite circumstances. What is unique about our moment and in a way radically egalitarian, is that all of us because of the pandemic have been forced onto the machines.

Brian Balogh:
And since students are taking classes in their dining rooms and living rooms through technologies like Zoom, I just want to get your take on this. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of teaching, which is what your book is about, and this kind of learning, which is also what your book is about?

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Well, the book is in some ways about the tensions inherent in this idea called personalized learning, which you hear trotted out a lot now in defense or in support of online initiatives. The idea here is that online teaching and learning is personalized precisely because the student can access it at her or his own will, can download things, and read and write things when it’s convenient for her or him. And in that sense it is highly personalized. Yet at the same time it is highly impersonal insofar as if we see each other at all, it’s in pixels. And a dominant theme in my book, and I think in 20th century, higher education is the demand by students to make teaching and learning more personal.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
So at every juncture as the university gets larger, the students complain that it’s also becoming more impersonal. So just to take one obvious example, the biggest growth in percentile terms is right after the First World War. It’s in the 1920s, for two reasons. Women started going in numbers. And secondly, there was enormous prosperity in the country. But this also created protest interestingly almost immediately at institutions like the university of Michigan where the students say, “Okay, I showed up to this lecture. There were 400 people in a room that could fit 200. And there was a guy up in front mumbling into a microphone that didn’t work. Why am I here?”

Jonathan Zimmerman:
So I think for me the big question now going forward is why do we have to be in the same room? I think that’s been a question throughout the history of the 20th century. And I think that one of the dominant answers you look at, critics of things like educational television, one of the dominant answers was the reason you have to be in the same room is as per Hamilton, the classroom is the room where it happens. That is there is something that you cannot recapitulate something personal, something even spiritual that happens when human beings are in the same room, that you can’t recapitulate via the machines.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Now I understand in fairness to the online learning advocates, there’s a big difference between internet learning and television learning. But nevertheless I think the question is and will be the same. Why do we have to be in the same room?

Brian Balogh:
John, you talk a lot about the personality in teaching. But somehow giant lecture course doesn’t scream personality to me. So what’s the relationship between the importance of personality and the history of teaching at the college level, and these giant lecture classes?

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Well, two things. And it’s ironic because like often in history they’re somewhat perpendicular to each other. One pattern which I alluded to you before is precisely because so many students at places like the University of Michigan find these lecture classes impersonal, they demand other formats. And that’s a big theme in the history of 20th century higher ed. So they demand seminars, and they demand things that were sometimes called preceptorials, or tutorials. They demand freshmen seminars. They demand formats that are more personal than what you’re describing.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
And yet at the same time there are or some lecturers who are described and indeed celebrated as fantastic personalities. And most of them aren’t necessarily familiar to historians because they weren’t famous for their books. They were famous for being great personalities, great entertainers. One of the most famous ones that nobody knows about except really me is the guy named William Lloyd Phelps. And he was a guy at Yale. And all the famous Yalies write acrimonious to him. Sinclair Lewis. They write these testaments, which I found like Phelps is the greatest man I ever met. And why? Because Billy Phelps as he was called, went into a room and filled it up. And by fill it up, I mean he exuded a kind of charisma, which again is difficult to capture, certainly impossible to professionalize. But this is real as what you feel if you go to church or synagogue.

Brian Balogh:
So John, hold on here. Aren’t terms like personality and charisma, isn’t that just an excuse for continuing to hire old white guys?

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Well, look. Because of the way that racial and gender and equality worked in the United States for most of our history, the professors were white guys, and many of them were old. Unless the case now, but for most of our history, that was the case. And yet I would argue, if you look backwards, you’d find that some of the most famously charismatic professors weren’t white guys. W.E.B. Du Bois, if you read the accounts from Atlanta University, from his students, he was enormously charismatic, and also something of a hard ass. They were terrified of him as well. These were not inconsistent. Some of the most charismatic figures were also scary figures, in part because they exuded so much charisma.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
So look, I think, one of the things you often hear about the lecture system is that it favors old white guys. A, because they came up in it. And B, again, because of inequality, people are more likely to perceive their charisma. And I think in some circumstances that’s been true. But I also think we have a strong historical record of lots of female and minority teachers who filled up the room with their charisma every bit as much as the old white guys did.

Brian Balogh:
So in the last, let’s call it 30 years, Americans have become enamored of or re-enamored of markets. And that embrace of the market certainly hasn’t exempted universities. I’d like to know, when did universities start thinking about students as consumers to finish that market metaphor?

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Yes. Well, I think it’s really in the postwar period. And it steps up in the 1980s. David Reesman, who was arguably the most important scholar of American higher education, wrote a book in the early 80s about this move towards consumerism. Look, universities have always had to attend to the bottom line. And they’ve always had to attend to what students want. So that’s not different from say the early 20th century. One of the reasons that University of Michigan started to offer seminars was that the students were complaining about lectures they couldn’t hear or understand. You could argue that that’s a form of consumerism. But I think the term takes on an entirely different meaning when you have 4000 institutions of higher ed, which we now have serving 20 million people. I think to go to with your metaphor, I think the market becomes much more segmented, much more dense. And I think that the universities have to pay a much more granular attention to what it is you’re asking for.

Brian Balogh:
Okay. Jon, let’s come back to where we are right now. I mean, I don’t know where you are in this semester. But I’m about ready to record my last lecture on Zoom. And I’m sure out of the 120 students in my class, at least three will watch it. I’m counting on four parents tuning in as well. I want to ask you what kind of lasting changes you see coming out of this pandemic when it comes to teaching at universities?

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Well, as you know Brian, you and I study the past. And that’s hard enough to do. It’s really hard to predict the future. And generally we don’t. I think I can say though what the key question is going to be. And again, I think it’s going to be, why do we have to be in the same room? And I think it could go in one of two dominant directions. One thing that could happen is people would say, “Look, spring 2020 it was very abrupt and it was disorganized. But higher ed, which is known as this incredibly conservative and slow changing behemoth, managed to adjust fairly well. And suddenly the likes of Brian Balogh were recording their lectures, and students were watching them in their far away homes and it worked.”

Jonathan Zimmerman:
So we’ve seen the future, and this is it. And obviously there were huge imperfections and problems ranging from, students that didn’t have WiFi access to professors that didn’t know how to record their lectures in the first place. But we all work out those kinks. And what we’ll do is we’ll provide a better and certainly more accessible and certainly cheaper kind of education to a wider range of people, which has always been the dream of ed tech.

Brian Balogh:
And to just reiterate one of your earlier points, more personalized, right? You can watch it at the lecture, at the gym, you can tune in whenever you want, parents can watch along with you, et cetera.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Definitely, definitely. And so now instead of watching the Super Bowl, we can watch Brian Balogh’s lecture.

Brian Balogh:
Okay, good. Now, tell me about that other option, which is the one you really believe.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
Well, I think that the other way it could go is people will look at what happened and they’ll say, “This wasn’t actually teaching and learning. This was a facsimile of it. People did teach and learn, but they didn’t do it as well. Because it was so highly impersonal.” Brian, I’ve been doing the same thing that you have, but my classes are smaller. And so I’ve been teaching them synchronously, as we say, over Zoom. And I do think the students have learned something. But I am sure that they have not learned as much as they would have if we were in the classroom. And I think one of the likely outcomes of all of this, which I regard as hugely unfortunate, is that in institutions like where I teach and where you teach, which are very selective elite schools, they will go back to the face to face model. But at schools that are less well-resourced and less elite, they will go even further into online. I think that’s happened already. That happened before the pandemic. That is the less resource and the less status you had in this country, the more likely you were to have online learning. In a way, face to face instruction had become a kind of privilege in its own right.

Jonathan Zimmerman:
In that way I think it’s really important to note that these petitions coming from students asking for tuition refunds have overwhelmingly come from elite schools. Now in some level, that is because those elite schools cost so darn much money. But I think another reason is the students themselves recognize that Zoom learning is not real learning, as one of the petitions said. And they’re saying, “Look, why should we be paying this ridiculous sticker price for education that’s happening in pixels?” I think that’s a reasonable question. But it adds or it leads to an even more reasonable important question, which is if it’s not good enough for kids at Penn, why is it good enough for kids at Delaware Community College? That is, if the particulars are right and there is something inadequate or lesser about this media, why should others have to learn in that medium and we go back to face to face?

Joanne Freeman:
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. His forthcoming book is called The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.

Joanne Freeman:
That’s going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at BackStoryradio.org or send an email to BackStory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter at BackStory Radio. BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 2:
Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.