Tucker Carlson is right that coronavirus will make us rethink online college — partly

My dad, a patriot and veteran who was the first in his family to graduate from college when he took Uncle Sam up on the offer of the GI Bill, recently sent me a clip of a Tucker Carlson monologue on Fox News. In it, the host predicted the ill effects of the coronavirus pandemic would transform American colleges and universities. “He might very well be right,” I emailed back from a safe social distance.

Carlson took on predictable and deserving targets in his monologue: There are too many student loans, too many overpaid administrators and too few opportunities for indebted graduates of middling liberal arts colleges. In this and much else, he is exactly right — but his central point was off the mark.

“Most critically,” Carlson said, “an entire nation has just been shown that it is possible to deliver higher education in an entirely different way. You don’t have to drive to campus, buy textbooks, pay for room and board in order to get an education. You can do the whole thing online.”

If that is the message the nation is getting, it is the wrong one. When the dust settles on this new experiment in remote learning, we will more likely rediscover that the value added by being on campus was never just about the social life and extracurricular activities.

In some subjects, this is more obvious than others. There is no way adequately to replicate lab courses in chemistry or bovine reproduction entirely online. For classes in the physical and life sciences, the physical infrastructure and resources of our typical big state universities are unrivaled by anything we can conjure in the cloud.

However, even in the liberal arts, which seem relatively easy to translate into an online format, much is lost in the process. The value of my education in political science was largely due to the hard-to-quantify opportunities that came from being on campus and in proximity to faculty and other students.

One professor gave me a stack of books to read about America’s founding and agreed to meet with me every Friday afternoon to discuss them. Another worked with me to write an undergraduate thesis and frequently connected with me one-on-one to critique my writing and challenge my thinking.

I argued with other students about constitutional law and political philosophy, read old books and did research in musty stacks at the library. Along the way, I developed skills that employers say they increasingly look for in the workforce: civic awareness and competence in writing, analysis and communication.

An online format can deliver some of this, as distance education has for years, but it is merely the shadow of the substance of the established model of in-person education.

The underlying truth of Carlson’s commentary is that if brick-and-mortar universities are going to be more than finishing schools for the upper class, then they have to be affordable and intellectually serious, and offer classes at a scale small enough to allow for the kind of interactions between teachers and students that develop skills and create opportunities. An on-campus education, when done well, has an advantage over what can be done online because of the relationships that students develop, the skills they hone and the unique flesh and blood experiences they are afforded.

However, if we simply conform to Carlson’s typecasting and pretend that the current remote learning formats that were born of necessity are the same in every way as what has traditionally been done on campus, we will only hasten the fulfillment of his dark prophecy for higher education. This pandemic will change our institutions and society forever, but the value of in-person relationships will remain.

Justin Dyer is professor of political science and director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri.

This story was originally published April 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.