It's nearing the end of "that week" at Boston University. Faculty members who have made the mistake of driving anywhere near Bay State Road during the week in which our new charges move in have encountered labyrinthine traffic detours, fenders bent by "Grapes of Wrath"-loaded SUVs backing into spaces meant for Smart cars, and chunky middle-aged parents perspiring on their tailgates.
A spate of newspaper and periodical articles has taken up the theme nationally. The finest piece to have appeared this week is Trip Gabriel's New York Times article on overprotective parents who refuse to leave campus &- one couple, he reports in his perceptive article, even audited classes with their daughter before making her drop them! In the article, "Students, Welcome to College; Parents, Go Home," (Aug. 22) Gabriel observes, "As the latest wave of superinvolved parents delivers its children to college, institutions are building into the day, normally one of high emotion, activities meant to punctuate and speed the separation. It is part of an increasingly complex process, in the age of Skype and twice-daily texts home, in which colleges are urging "Velcro parents' to back off so students can develop independence." Anyone who has attended college will wonder why articles such as Gabriel's are needed as a warning to parents who enable their children's habit of texting them about the most mundane problem during the first weeks of school. But a more significant point about the role of technology deserves greater emphasis- that the remarkable digital proficiency a new breed of first-year students possesses makes them not more but less dependent on their parents. In recent years, a new kid has arrived on Commonwealth Avenue: the tech-savvy, BlackBerry-bridled young adult who is more captivated by the achievements of Facebook founder and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg than he is by the angst of Quentin Compson, the alienated freshman in William Faulkner's 1929 novel "The Sound and the Fury" whose family sold the cow pasture to pay his tuition at Harvard.
It is true, as Gabriel's article suggests, that parents too often see freshman week as an event that threatens to turn their private hotlines to their children into what Bell Telephone used to call "party lines." And these parents' warnings to their children about week one may ring even truer in the 21st century: a generation of students familiar with Chatroulette may not be fully prepared for the flood of communication with live strangers that attends freshman week. Imagine (or simply recall) entering a new environment in which you, at the peek of your self-consciousness about your social skills, are introduced to hundreds of new people described as your peers. Freshman week is almost like being spammed in person. But as a college administrator quoted by Gabriel explains, she wants parents to realize that their children are "more comfortable sitting with 400 people they just met."
Yet it is our students' technological know-how that facilitates such comfort. As today's first-year BU students catch a fleeting glimpse of their parents, who, wiping their tears while checking on their loan applications, drive off into the distance, these electronically brilliant young folk turn, like Adam and Eve, to face their new world &- and they tweet to their peers, "Felix Culpa &- the fortunate fall!" Parents barely capable of programming their GPS to get home imagine their children languishing in cinder block dorm rooms infamous for cell phone dead spots. But the new kid on the block has wireless in his room, knows how to upload his paper on the course website, and makes his empty nester parents stay off of his Facebook site. Like a NASA astronaut happy to be leaving the earth's atmosphere even as the engineers in Florida monopolize the earphone in his space helmet, the new kid in the freshman rooming block assembles all of her technological skill in preparation to Skype with aliens if necessary. The BU student, a habitué not at Cheers but at the "genius bar" in the Apple Store, knows when to press the delete button when the latest instant message to phone home arrives.
<em>Dr. Thomas A. Underwood is Curriculum Coordinator &' Senior Lecturer (Master Level) in the CAS Writing Program. He has taught first-year college students for almost 25 years. </em>
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