Fifteen years ago, when I graduated from Pomona College, there were landlines in the dorm rooms, a paper directory with everyone’s number, and a thriving culture of friendly prank calls. Almost no one used laptops in class, in part because there was no Wi-Fi. The launch of Facebook was a couple years off. And if a Google search for a peer’s name yielded anything I was unaware of it—though I published scores of news and opinion articles for student publications across four years, the only ones that potential employers ever saw were the literal newsprint clippings that I mailed to them.

I never realized how good that I had it. Or so I kept thinking when I returned to the Claremont Colleges this week. I was there for a panel discussion on campus speech that couldn’t have been more timely—days before, protesters tried to shut down an appearance by Heather Mac Donald, the Manhattan Institute scholar who authored The War on Cops and regularly criticizes the Black Lives Matter movement. But the couple days that I spent wandering around campus, talking with perhaps three dozen students, left me more preoccupied with something I hadn’t fully appreciated. Silicon Valley innovations have changed nearly every community in America. Yet I wonder if residential colleges aren’t among the most profoundly changed. I wonder if social media and surveillance culture especially affect young learners. I wonder if the cost of making mistakes now feels too high to risk them as often.