This morning, I spoke with four alumni from the University of Chicago, the institution where I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees close to fifty years ago. The experience was instructive and pleasant.
Fifty alumni signed on to a Zoom meeting. The meeting leaders then randomly paired the participants into two-person breakout rooms to talk privately for ten minutes. When the time was up, the moderators returned us to the full meeting, then paired us up randomly again. Rinse and repeat four times.
We were geographically dispersed. I’m in the northwest corner of the country next to the Salish Sea and close to the Canadian border. I first spoke with a fellow in New York whose partner is a nurse at one of the Columbia hospitals; then a Chicago architectural history graduate student locked in her parent’s apartment in a northern Chicago suburb; next a recent business and econ graduate only 160 miles south of me in the Washington State capital, Olympia; and finally, a sociology graduate student on a fellowship at Oxford in Britain.
Our experiences were widely disparate. The young woman in the Chicago suburb had not been outside in two weeks. I made her jealous by telling her about the goose sitting on her clutch of eggs on the island in the middle of the pond that Albert The Imperious Border Collie walks me around each morning and evening. The guy in New York discussed toilet paper shortages and supply-chain interruptions with me.
In breakout with the sociology grad at Oxford, we discussed the implications of the pandemic for broadband connections for the disadvantaged. I am optimistic— the network infrastructure has already been significantly strengthened in the past two months of increased network traffic. Comcast has offered two months of free broadband here. These signs generate optimism in me that we will soon see a TVA-like initiative for broadband connections. She was less enthusiastic, perhaps from her more global perspective.
For the architectural history student, I acted professorial and turned to my shelf to pull out a copy of the bible of software design patterns, which was inspired by the building architect, Christopher Alexander, who happens to be from the era she is studying. She, in turn, gave me a reference to blob architecture, which is an architectural term derived from the software term, Binary Large Object, the subject of Big Data analysis. A cross-disciplinary moment.
The business and econ major in Olympia and I discussed lobbying the Washington State legislature in Olympia for continued support for public libraries.
The pandemic bringing a diverse group closer together.