Editorial
Send the Webcast Back to the Stone Age

When faculty gathered last week to discuss declining class attendance, they didn’t voice the reasons most commonly given by students for not showing up. Not surprisingly, professors were hardly eager to admit to giving boring lectures to students that are paying to hear them.

Instead, some of the panel placed the blame on Webcasts. This may draw laughs about stodgy professors unwilling to change with the times. But fuddy-duddyism aside, it is becomingly increasingly clear that Webcasts are contributing to the academic ennui of campus.

Webcasts are a concession to student apathy. The broadcasts are essentially an admission of defeat by an academic institution, acknowldging that it is okay to skip class. Webcasts are clearly not the only cause of student apathy, but the current degree of indifference to education could never exist in an environment that did not in some way condone the practice.

Being at a school like UC Berkeley is a privilege that a very small percentage of the population enjoys. After working so hard to earn our spots here, actively participating in class should play a central role in our lives for the few short years we have here.

Especially at an institution with such a rich tradition of scholarship and research, class should never be a burden to be negotiated or something to be squeezed in a schedule. It is not a random coincidence that most classes at UC Berkeley take place between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.. Relying on Webcast demeans the role of both student and professor by putting a class lecture on the same footing as a Tivo-ed episode of “Flavor of Love.”

Attending class with a person qualified enough to teach here is exactly how we should be filling our days. College, more than any other time in our lives, is intended to be a time of exploration, an environment that provides and facilitates the essential leisure of attending class. Students think they are so busy that they don’t have time to actually attend class are missing out on an opportunity that simply has no parallel in the hustle and bustle of the real world.

Those prone to not attending class counter that many students are clearly able avoid physically attending class and pass or even ace a course; if they are equally able to excel with the use of Webcasts, then what is the difference from a traditional course? The weakness of this argument is that it is is only true in so far as passing classes is the only goal of being at a university.

Not even the coldest and most hardened of cynics would argue that our years here are equivalent to the grade point average and unit totals we accumulate. But the logical progression of the Webcast line of thinking undeniably discounts the intangible value of personal interaction.

This may seem overly sentimental or unrealistic, but taking the time for things like personal interaction is inseparable from what it means to be in college. College is precisely the time when taking the time to attend classes or go to office hours should be valuable in its own right. Unless you become a professor, it is highly unlikely that your future job will demand that you consider the finer points of Aristotle’s ethics or the thought process behind Rheimann’s methods. And unless you dispute that knowledge makes one a better person, this is an opportunity that should hardly be avoided.

So ultimately, the Webcast discussion is more than just a technological witch hunt. UC Berkeley does, after all, have large and sometimes alienating lectures with the occasional disinterested professor. But linking emerging technologies to declining attendance is part of a bigger and well-justified concern about how students view their own education. Services like Webcasts encourage students to see tuition checks as little more than access fees for a job.

We can’t allow ourselves into think this way so early in our lives. If all that we hope for in college is the distant and cold experience of skipping back and forth between a lecture and a game of solitaire, then we have bigger problems to consider.

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