Carlo Rotella: Movies on Campus 4/7

It's coming up on 25 years since I graduated from college, and now I teach at one. The basics of school never change, but the peripherals do. Getting into college has been professionalized, for one thing, and parents are more involved in students' lives.

And, since I use movies in some of my courses, I've noticed that it's getting a lot harder to schedule a screening for class. When I was in college, the professor would say, "This film will be screened in such and such a room on Tuesday evening at 7," and everybody would think, "What a treat! We'll all sit in the dark together and watch a movie for credit!" But now when I say, "We need to schedule this movie screening," my students consult their gadgets and start shaking their heads and saying things like, "Tuesday evening's no good for me. Is there a way I can download the movie and watch it all by myself on a tiny screen with really bad sound at 3 in the morning?"

One reason for this change in attitude has to do with the denser scheduling of young lives. Having been shuttled for years by their parents from karate to piano lessons to soccer, college students naturally segue to supervising their own overstuffed schedules: classes, meetings, practices, volunteering, school work, work out, call mom, process social media, get tanked and sleep with a stranger, call it a day. They have a lot more things to organize than I ever did in college. All I would have put on a calendar, if I had one, were my class schedule and the closing times of bars, and I could keep that much in my head.

Then there's the society-wide tendency over time toward privatizing formerly public behaviors. Technological advances and complementary retreats in quality of life now allow you to eat in your car while watching Saw VI on your phone. Doing that kind of thing tends to make you indifferent to crowds, or even squeamish about them. After a while, the prospect of a movie screening doesn't say "extra bonus fun!" so much as it says "inefficient data transfer, plus germs."

I'm a little surprised to find myself nostalgic about sitting in the dark facing a screen as some kind of antique practice of human togetherness. But I am. Somewhere in the sequence that led from broadcast TV to cable to netflix to hulu, an excursion beyond the limits of your personal tech bubble to watch a movie with others acquired a horse-and-wagon whiff of outmoded sociability, the kind that drifts in the air in barbershops and baseball parks. And somewhere along the way I got old enough--and old-fashioned enough--to begin sentences with, "When I was in college... ."