The Paradox of the Registrar's Window

It's been said that truth is stranger than fiction. I have often found this to be so. There are, for example, frogs with six legs living in Minnesota and a human family with seven 'twin' babies in Iowa. There are homeless citizens living in towns with 'hog hotels,' cow genes alive in pigs and existing life forms with no life chances at all. I have also found that if we substitute the notion of reality for truth, we are faced with the equally logical assertion that reality is stranger than fiction. From here, it is easy to reflect on the possibility that reality, like truth, can itself be a fiction, and fiction, in turn, reality. What, after all, is a rumor, a hologram or 'Memorex'?

What all this suggests, then, is that things can be (and probably usually are) other than they appear. In the marketplace, for example, we are continually promised the 'real thing,' but just where is it and what is it? Is it embodied in the millionth identical hamburger sold and presumably eaten, in the karioke experience, in a xeroxed (or cloned) original, in a digitized image? If all of these things simultaneously are the 'real thing,' we are well on our way to becoming two-dimensional creatures; we are, it would seem, living without context. We are slowly and deliberately stripping ourselves (and being stripped) of a sense of time, place, history and cultural meaning along with the need to relate to these deep and cross-cutting dimensions. Where is our grounding, our connection to the earth, to the company of women (and men), and to the food, stories and dances thick with geography and community? Or, having rendered these things fictions, are we 'really' little more than a personalized assortment of "fleeting signifiers and black holes of meaning" (Gabriel and Lang 1995:67)?

We are surrounded by the virtual, and the virtual, in both its physical and electronic forms, is becoming credible and comfortable. This leaves us (or me anyway) with a great and unsettling set of postmodern-type questions -- where is it that we exist and do we (or can we) belong to anything beyond our increasingly individualized and commodified selves; just what do we know and how have we come to know it? I don't propose to answer these questions. I merely want to look at them in the context of a recent experience, one which I've come to call the 'paradox of the registrar's window.'

I work at a land grant university and have for many years. It is the size of a small city, catering to and shaping the physical and intellectual needs of some 45,000 people, the majority of whom are between the ages of 18 and 30. It is a place that lays claim to high energy, self-exploration, creative application and continual change, a place that forecasts the future.

I serve as an academic advisor to many of these city-dwellers. I am one of a large number of people who help students select their courses, negotiate the bureaucracy, identify opportunities and evaluate program and career options. It will, however, soon be possible for students to do this themselves, electronically. The university has purchased a 'Degree Navigator' package from a Canadian company. This computer program will allow students to navigate through four years of undergraduate education by selecting course options that appear on color-coded islands floating in a featureless sea of blue. (Contrary to the organic imagery, an island's color, shape and location are both arbitrary and static.) Each island represents a type-requirement needed to earn a degree in a particular discipline. Select (and complete) an appropriate course(s) from the stack of courses endemic to an island and the requirement is satisfied. Need to know course prerequisites?; click the mouse and a flow chart will appear. Want to know how existing course credits satisfy the requirements of yet another major?; strike a key and a new island formation will appear. There is no longer a need to look such things up in the academic programs book or the course descriptions catalogue; there is little reason to phone a departmental secretary or academic advisor. Indeed, these resources and services may soon grow obsolete, saving paper, time and taxpayer dollars in the process. In addition, students will have access to their degree status any time of day or night, any day of the week, or week of the year. They will no longer be constrained by natural rhythms, weather conditions, work schedules, personal handicaps or interpersonal misunderstandings. An omnipresent tool will configure and standardize the academic experience for everyone -- for everyone, that is, with access to a computer. What could be simpler, fairer or more efficient?

As an advisor, I was asked to preview my department's program on 'Degree Navigator' and to verify that its requirements were accurately installed and unambiguous. For this, I was invited to the administration building, the nerve center of the university, and to an office at the center of a huge warehouse-like room full of moveable cubicles. Unlike the cubicles, the office to which I went was a permanent space. It was a 12' x 12' room defined by floor to ceiling walls constructed of plaster board. It had a door that shut and four real windows with off-white window shades all drawn down. Within it was the usual utilitarian office furnishings and, of course, a computer. It was here that the revolutionary 'Degree Navigator' was being operation-alized. But for me, it was the room itself, and most especially the windows, not the computer program, that was truly remarkable.

What is a window? As I have come to understand it, a window is a device for selectively minimizing boundaries, for bridging, rather than denying or disappearing environments. Most obviously, windows keep us connected to the natural world, to a place in space, to a physical reality of which we remain a part. Windows let air and sunshine in; they keep wind, rain and snowflakes out. But either way, they keep us, who are 'in here,' mindful of what goes on 'out there.'

The windows in this office were fictions. They had form but no function. They opened to be sure, but they were solely cosmetic like the decorative shutters on houses, or the pocket flaps on jackets -- a reminder, perhaps, of things past, but still commodifiable. They looked out (I know because I peeked) onto a blank, beige wall and a xerox machine, both representations of a lifeless, but easily reproduced, reality. (Is this not a contradiction in terms?) They let nothing in, not just because the shades were drawn, but because there was, in effect, no outside to let in, only inside -- only artificial light and recycled air.

These false windows, ironically, were not unlike the all-seeing "Windows" that preside over our computer screens. The latter give us limitless access to timeless, textureless, toneless images and information with which to know more about (but not experience) reality. Through them, we are able to 'see' the very same things where ever we happen to be, any time of day or night, any day of the week, and any week of the year. As a consequence, everywhere is transformed into no where in particular, and, ultimately, into nowhere at all. The franchised main streets in Anytown, USA, the interstates that connect them and the suburban lawns that decorate them make this all quite clear.

For all the apparent bridging of environments, we are growing dangerously disconnected from where we physically exist and because of this, less and less exists there. Certainly in this sense reality is disappearing. In point of fact, I asked (admittedly with perverse intent) the woman who worked in the room with the false windows whether it was still raining outside? (It had been when I arrived.) She allowed that she had no idea and she showed little interest in the possibility. She, of course, is not alone.

Domestic turkeys, it is said, are being bred so stupid that they don't know enough to come in out of the rain; they mill about and drown. (They can also no longer have sex being now so adept at making meat, but that's another story.) Metaphorically, if not literally, fewer and fewer of us know when it's raining or have reason to care. We are no longer farmers or sailors or community members whose work and shared identity are dependent on (and integrated within) an immediate and elemental environment. Like domestic turkeys, we had better stay inside. Any concern we may have over our risk of drowning is overridden by the control we wield in our windowed but windowless rooms. We are absolved of ecological limits and any need to live within them. Is this arrangement properly called fiction or reality? Without belaboring the obvious (or not so obvious, as the case may be), a freezing rain, an occurrence scientifically attributed to El Nino, shut down my computer three times as I sat struggling with this essay.

With the introduction of 'Degree Navigator,' advisors have voiced concern not for their jobs, though this, too, is an issue, but for the integrity of the undergraduate education. The latter, they argue, is far more than a collection of discipline-bound requirements and menus of course options. Typically, 80-90 credits will satisfy basic course work requirements. The remaining 30-40 credits necessary for graduation are electives -- discretionary course work designed to enlarge one's awareness, citizenship and personhood.

Electives, like education itself, are fitted to individuals -- individuals with real backgrounds, personalities, differential talents and response times. Implementing alternative strategies to accommodate these differences, is not at all the same thing as regularizing their expression. The former makes them resources while the latter makes them disappear. Such simplification may be efficient, but it is hardly effective when superimposed upon living organisms and an, as yet, organic system. Likewise, fairness can not disassociate individuals from themselves or keep them only within themselves. It is fairness (not sameness) that sustains diversity. The proof is in the living. Life is dependent on diversity and diversity on context. Good advisors know that education can not proceed without time-consuming human contact, caring, respect and trust.

'Degree Navigator,' its advocates say, will not prevent students from consulting their advisors or from examining and valuing their complex and often inconsistent expectations and feelings. In this they are only superficially correct; for as the processes of acquiring an education grow more mechanical, more standardized, more product and less process oriented, the time and space available for such visits and experiential learning collapse. Students, pushed through their paces by bureaucratic efficiency, will have less tolerance for messy, open-ended questions, less time to be unsure, less incentive to 'see' beyond themselves, and less practice in publicly engaged (and engaging) interaction. They will learn to navigate oblivion, sailing from one soulless island to another.

As advisors, teachers, parents and citizens we can not let this happen. We need to educate ourselves and our students in ways that will not let technology and electronic illusion remove our (and their) sense of connection to an organic place and an embodied reality. For our sanity and long-term survival, we must remain aware of what's under our feet and outside our windows, so that rain continues to have meaning and we can live our lives knowing and caring when it rains.

Gabriel, Yiannis and Tim Lang. 1995. The Unmanageable Consumer: Contemporary Consumption and its Fragmentation. Sage Publications: London.

To be alive means to continually risk something of ourselves, physically and spiritually. This is the process by which we grow wiser. It is through exposure, not insulation, that we encounter ourselves and come to know in a more fluid and dynamic way who we are and where we are. Experience, not convenience, is the source of our creativity.

Return to the Index of Synapse 43, Spring 1998