The Oregon Extension invites college students to a temporary retreat from the rush, the noise, the technologically driven interruptions and media distractions that comprise the background texture of life in the twenty-first century. In the rolling mountain landscape of southern Oregon, serious students can join others like them, from campuses around the country, who wish to slow their pace in order to live, to study and to relate to one another more deliberately, with their energies fully engaged.
The community of Lincoln, built in the 1920s for timber-fallers and mill-wrights, offers a rustic setting in which students can ask their deepest questions, read gripping, challenging books, wrestle with big ideas in writing, and converse honestly and animatedly with others who share their excitement for learning. About twenty-five students and four faculty members approach learning one subject at a time, shifting every few weeks from group discussion of common reading to individual study and writing guided by daily tutorials with a faculty advisor. Students participate with faculty in the daily work of running the place. With their cabin-mates they strive to create home environments that feel safe and nurture honesty and mutual concern. Along the way, we all learn how difficult and how desirable relationships can be when human beings strive to be real. At the heart of this communal academic activity is our ongoing search for intellectual insights and spiritual traditions to nurture us in a pluralistic, consumerist world
These are profound aspirations. The permanent residents of the Oregon Extension, who have hosted a thousand college students over the past quarter-century, want to create a setting that contributes to achieving them. To disrupt our dependency on our “gear,” we ask (as many of our former students have recommended) that our students leave certain items behind. These include TVs and DVD players, and music systems without earphones. We seek students who are committed to learning what it means to “stay put” for these fifteen weeks, so we ask them to leave their automobiles home as well. We welcome personal computers, but request that students not use them for DVDs or publicly audible music except on weekends.
At the suggestion of our students, we have also in recent years placed limitations on the use of cell phones. Students are welcome to bring their phones, as an aid to travel, but we ask them to ‘check’ their phones with us when they arrive. We store the cell phones safely, and return them to our students for use during our week-end town trips and during our trip to San Francisco. Public phones and email are available on campus, and the OE has limited web access for necessary functions like college registration, travel reservations or required research. Students are welcome to take their laptops into Ashland on weekends, where they’ll find free access to high-speed internet connections.
We understand that the cell phone has become a virtual appendage, so it may be difficult to imagine living without it. We can report that at the end of each semester, our students – even those who at first hesitated to apply to the OE because they couldn’t imagine being without a cell phone – endorse this policy enthusiastically. They say it is the single most important factor in bringing a quieter spirit and a more satisfying academic focus to their lives. As they prepare to leave, at semester’s end, some express regret that they must return to a world where unlimited cell phone use is virtually unavoidable.
We who live year-around at Lincoln are citizens of this world as much as our students. We realize that we are asking students temporarily to relinquish items that seem necessary to life itself. Experience has taught us that, in the end, our students will wholeheartedly endorse these restrictions as essential to the quality of their experience – intellectual, social and spiritual – at the Oregon Extension. But we also make certain of these technologies available in measured and communally enriching ways. Students can listen to tapes and CDs on the music system installed in the Cookhouse common room. (We encourage students to bring their musical instruments.) A TV and DVD player take up a corner of the same room, for weekend viewing. Weekend shuttles take students down the mountain to Ashland for theater, coffee shops and restaurants, recreation, shopping and church. We transport students for medical appointments and other necessary business. We provide transportation to and from airports and bus or train stations, and on adventures to San Francisco, the Oregon Coast and backpacking sites. For those without computers, our lab offers a dozen word processors. Our home in the Cascades provides numerous opportunities for outdoor individual and group activities, and a playing field and gym are nearby.
While many off-campus programs offer a passport to international travel and exposure to centers of world culture, the Oregon Extension invites you to find your place in a mountain hamlet out of the mainstream. It is not a better program than the rest, but one that meets different needs. Join us if you want to stay put for a while, take part in the ongoing human conversation about the meaning of it all, and engage with others like yourself in the struggle to know, to care and to believe. In this momentary break from the frenzied pace of the twenty-first century, perhaps we will see our lives, our relationships, our faith, and the life of the world just a bit more clearly.
