I spent over an hour last night on a Zoom call with friends from college; we've been doing this approximately weekly for the last few months of lockdown. It's been an important part of keeping my spirits up; I think it also connects to the debates about reopening campuses.

That is, these calls (and similar calls by lots of groups of classmates, and other groups from other schools) work because of the relationships we formed the better part of 30 years ago. Those are as important to me as any of the formal education I got in the classroom.

As faculty, I think we all too often underrate this part of the college experience, but especially in the smaller private residential college world, this is a HUGE part of what we do. We're not selling facts, we're selling relationships.

I think this drives a lot of disconnect between faculty and student perceptions of the importance of being on campus. I hear a lot of "If classes are going to be mostly online anyway, why would students even want to come to campus?"

The answer, of course, is "To be with their friends." Those relationships, once made, can endure for decades (see my Zoom calls), but they're MADE through shared in-person experiences.

When that gets brought up, a lot of faculty dismiss it, saying that the safety measures needed for re-opening will destroy that relationship-building so don't bother. Some even make it a negative, saying that drive for relationships will undercut all safety, so we should close.

I think that fundamentally misunderstands the dynamic, though: relationships get built through shared experiences, and those don't HAVE to be positive. In fact, a lot of college is weird and stressful, and for many that just strengthens bonds between classmates.

That relationship-building can be compatible with sensible safety measures, if designed and implemented properly (i.e., by student-life experts NOT faculty). Masks and some social distance can be like dining-hall food and midnight fire alarms.

The key thing is that the hardship is SHARED, so 30-odd years from now, the students of today can get together and bore their kids by re-telling stories of the dumb shit they go up to in the Plague Year for the umpteenth time.

That's why it's worth going to some lengths to find ways to bring students back to campus. It's not (just) that we need the money from tuition, room, and board, it's because those in-person relationships are as important as the classroom and laboratory experiences.

This is not a call to throw safety completely aside, mind-- sensible and practical precautions are essential, and any student or faculty member who isn't comfortable with in-person classes should absolutely have remote options.

But faculty discussions that treat the residential part of the college student experience as some ancillary and easily-discarded side benefit are badly misunderstanding what we really do in this business.