Fellow IA and weblogger Victor Lombardi attended a class at NYU Stern the other day and found it intriguing that no one was using laptops in class.

Let me tell you why.

Fellow IA and weblogger Victor Lombardi attended a class at NYU Stern the other day and found it intriguing that no one was using laptops in class.

Victor now knows why I chose Stern for my MBA. (Well, besides the quality of teaching and the location and the reputation and the good brownies at lunch.) NYU Stern specifically suggests students not bring laptops to class, as they get in the way of discourse and teacher-student interaction.

I’ve encountered this several times at Stern, from the admissions staff who mentioned it to me to the statistics professor (statistics!) who requested we leave our computers at home. In Stern’s collaborative, discussion-oriented courses, burying one’s head in a laptop undermines the sociological aspect that makes a good business-school education—or any education, for that matter—truly powerful.

When was the last time someone spent an hour on a computer engaged in a discussion without clicking into an extraneous application or checking email or sending an instant message? Computers embrace multi-tasking, continually diverting the mind. Educational lectures, on the other hand, hope to dedicate one’s focus, and at business school they intend to foster contemplation and debate. Burying one’s head in a computer is an easy way of ignoring all of that.

I personally know how it feels to be absorbed by a computer, and I prefer to not bring mine to class. (In the courses I have taken where professors encouraged computer use, like decision models and corporate finance, I felt the waxing and waning of my own attention.) Watching myself and my peers occasionally use their laptops in a lecture, I see what is lost: full attention, an interest in discussion, and so forth. It creates drag and diminishes the power of the session.

Columbia Business School prides itself on pervasive Internet access, and Stern itself has wifi all over the school. But being wired isn’t what business school is about. Open-minded, face-to-face human interaction: that’s where the action is. And where the laptops aren’t.