The discipline of presence

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Sport Management Professor Michael White asks his students to form a circle in the middle of the Quad.

They stand beneath the trees, some looking at him, some looking at one another, waiting for whatever comes next, when Michael asks them to close their eyes.

Then he says nothing — and for the longest time the class listens.

To footsteps, to voices, a distant siren somewhere beyond the Quad. Leaves rustle overhead. The students stand close enough to know they are not alone, but there is nothing they are being asked to accomplish. No answer to produce. No notification to check. No screen to look at.

All the professor asks from them is their attention.

Across campus, in a classroom in Dana Auditorium, English Professor Cynthia Nearman is asking for something similar, though in a very different way.

Her students settle into a long, quiet stretch of reading, each absorbed in a novel of their choosing. Not everyone is reading the same book. There is no discussion to prepare for, no analysis to perform. For a while, the room is wrapped in the sound of silence — students simply reading together, making space to stay with a story.

These small exercises, almost comically simple, have become increasingly difficult to ask of young people — all of us, really.

At Guilford, that strain has prompted a larger question: What happens to an education when students can no longer easily give themselves to the thing in front of them?

Artificial intelligence can produce paragraphs, summarize books and solve problems in seconds. Social media is designed to keep us scrolling. The phone, carried everywhere, has become a portal through which almost anything can enter a person’s mind.

The temptation for colleges is to treat all of this as a technology problem.

Guilford is beginning somewhere else.

We’re asking whether attention itself — the ability to listen, concentrate, notice, wonder and remain present — should become part of what we teach.

That makes the project feel less like a new initiative than an old Guilford instinct suddenly given a new name.

Last month Cynthia and Art Professor Mark Dixon ’96 and William R. Rogers Director of Friends Center and Quaker Studies Wess Daniels invited faculty, staff and students to attend a workshop on “attention education.”  The College is partnering with Friends of Attention over the coming months to explore how practices of attention might become more intentional parts of teaching and learning at Guilford — not as a retreat from technology, but as a way of helping students decide when to use it, when to put it down and what deserves their full attention.

On Friday at 2:30 p.m., in Founders Hall, Kristin Lawler, a professor of Sociology at the University of Mount Saint Vincent, will speak to Guilford Faculty and students on attention and care in higher education. An attention workshop will follow from 3:45 to 6 p.m. in Dana Auditorium's Moon Room. 

The timing is not accidental. Colleges everywhere are wrestling with what AI and prolonged social-media use mean for learning, focus and the increasingly fragile art of being with other people.

We like to think Guilford has an advantage that is easy to miss.

We already know a thing or two about silence.

Guilford was founded by Quakers whose tradition places value on sitting together in silence, listening for what might emerge. Those moments of silence before meetings and classes remain part of campus life. The College also has a tradition of gathering in circles, seeking consensus and treating listening as something more than waiting for your turn to speak.

None of this was invented to help students put down their phones.

That may be precisely why it matters.

It might sound radical to some, but silence existed before the smartphone. The circle existed before Zoom. The idea that people might sit together long enough to hear one another existed before anyone worried about ChatGPT writing a first draft.

Guilford’s challenge now is to recover the wisdom in those practices without romanticizing the past.

Because attention is not simply about sitting quietly.

It is what happens when a first-year student spends a day at the lake paired with another student to record what they see.

It is what happens when a student recognizes a classmate’s discomfort without being told. When a student in a laboratory notices something that does not fit the hypothesis.

Or when a professor takes a class outside to refocus inside.

These experiences demand something a screen generally does not: presence.

The goal is not to create students who can live without technology. That world is gone. AI will be part of their workplaces. Phones will remain in their pockets.

The question is whether they will control those tools or allow those tools to control the scarce resource that matters most: where they put their minds.

That is why this feels so particularly Guilford.

Attention connects the College’s traditions of silence, discernment, community and collective inquiry. You cannot really listen to someone without giving them your attention. You cannot learn something difficult without staying with it. You cannot build community without noticing the people around you.

Back in the Quad, Michael White’s students eventually open their eyes.

Nothing dramatic has happened. The campus looks exactly as it did before.

The world has not become quieter.

Guilford is simply asking its students to become better at hearing it.