pencilchat

  The Value of Chit-Chat in Higher Education Remember the “good ol’ days?” How often did you walk down a hallway of your academic unit and pass a student, faculty or staff member, or administrator and have a short conversation about the new course you were teaching, asked for advice about applying to graduate school, talked about the upcoming faculty-staff-student barbeque, or discussed a pending sporting event between rivals? We have all taken part in these chit-chats, whether distracting or welcoming. Do you remember having these interactions with colleagues and students on our campuses? You may not, as these chit-chats often occurred before the pandemic forced most of us to work from home. While these seemingly insignificant, occasional, and spontaneous hallway encounters may have taken up a relatively small part of our days, the chit-chat in higher education has suddenly vanished, become elusive, and is nowhere to be found in the back-to-back Zoom or Teams meetings. Chit-chat seems