Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Students get front-porch lessons
Clinton School dean moves term’s elections course outside
LITTLE ROCK — Four presidents around the turn of the 20th century won their offices after drawing thousands of people — sometimes hundreds of thousands — to their front porches.
The front porch also will be where Skip Rutherford and a dozen of his students will complete this semester, attending his 2020 Elections Seminar in their school-issued folding chairs, spread at least 6 feet apart, in front of people’s homes.
Rutherford, dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service, is playing the role of the candidate — sort of — while lecturing through a white mask emblazoned with red elephants and blue donkeys. He stands before students with a bull horn to get his message out. It also helps amplify his voice outdoors while he wears his mask.
“Politics followed the front porch,” he told students on the first day of the class.
It was always in the Midwest: Ohio and Indiana. And it was James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley and Warren Harding, each drawing more people than the previous until Harding drew 600,000 people to his Marion, Ohio, home in the wake of the 1918 global flu pandemic during the 1920 election cycle.
The current coronavirus pandemic is why Rutherford and his students are outside, where virus transmission diminishes in the superior ventilation compared with the indoor classroom.
With about 5,600 active cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in the state and more than 900 known deaths associated with the virus, kindergarten-through-12th-grade schools and colleges are grappling with directives to open their campuses to instruction. Mostly that has involved masks, robust sanitizing, building barriers between students, and rearranging schedules and rooms — efforts that reimagine indoor learning spaces.
Rutherford’s outdoor classroom for the first few sessions is in the small covered pavilion on the Clinton School’s north side. It’s next to the Arkansas River Trail, where people pulling their bikes out of the trunks of cars or just on strolls stop to watch for a moment as Rutherford lectures about polling and asks students for their ever-changing thoughts on who’s going to win the presidency this November.
A lecture outdoors is hardly a novel idea. “Open-air schools” popped up across the world in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of tuberculosis. Such schools looked like incomplete constructions. In Chicago, according to the Chicago Tribune, they were buildings without windows, doors or heat.
More outdoors time and classroom space was a part of how many schools responded to the 1918 influenza pandemic, though many schools in urban areas simply closed.
The idea of holding class outside has returned in some places during the current pandemic.
Instrumental music classes are taking place outdoors at some colleges — like Arkansas State University, Arkansas Tech University and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock — so students can be farther apart, officials for the universities said.
Reed College in Portland, Ore., has three tents for outdoor classes, the KGW8 television station reported last week. Eckerd College in Florida announced that it would hold some outdoor classes.
Each session of the Clinton School 2020 Elections Seminar, so far, has faced the threat of rain but avoided it. In any case, the Clinton School has the covered pavilion. Rutherford also has “a lot” of offers from colleagues to use their front porches for his class. He plans to take them up on it for future classes this semester but must ensure coverage from the elements, if needed.
Having class in person, even outside, is a reprieve from months of on-screen learning for students like Cassidy Mitchell.
“I’m actually driving from Batesville” to attend Rutherford’s weekly Wednesday lecture at 8:30 a.m., she said.
She’s 23, and it’s her last year of the Master of Public Service program, and all of her other classes are online. Mitchell said she loves school and she’d study her entire life if she could.
“I wanted to be here,” she said.
Mitchell could stay home. The course has online elements for those who can’t make it if they, say, must isolate or quarantine. The course has 13 students, and most attend the lecture in person.
This year is different, after a more recent history of arenaheld political rallies and a shift to back patios.
“The front porch is such an icon in America, and now with this pandemic it’s coming back,” Rutherford said.
The influenza outbreak in 1918 was followed by more front porch construction, and Rutherford believes it will be again.
Epidemics have a history of changing home architecture, according to Architecture Digest. Closets were constructed to make rooms easier to clean, second-floor “sleeping porches” became popular for those infected with tuberculosis, and white kitchen tiles and linoleum provided a sense of cleanliness.
Rutherford said he sees more people on their front porches than he used to in his Heights neighborhood of Little Rock. They greet one another from a distance on their porches.
And now the 2020 elections are taking place on a virtual front porch, Rutherford said. Rather than from stages inside arenas, politicians are campaigning from spaces more personal to them and inviting everyone to watch.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden accepted his party’s nomination from his hometown, with a crowd of supporters parked outside and waving flags.
President Donald Trump accepted his Republican Party reelection nomination from the White House’s “back porch,” as Rutherford called it. In Trump’s case, many contended that his use of the government-provided home for election purposes was a violation of the federal Hatch Act, which prohibits nearly all public employees from using public time or resources for campaigning.
“We’ve become another front porch campaign,” Rutherford said on the first day of class. “Both of these campaigns had to turn on a dime.”
In a similar vein of innovation, his students should plan to have class on actual front porches later in the semester. Rutherford told students that they should bring their folding chairs, which they’ve been assigned for the term, and offered another bit of advice.
“Please sit in the same place every time,” he said, “in the event we have to do contact tracing.”
The current coronavirus pandemic is why Rutherford and his students are outside, where virus transmission diminishes in the superior ventilation compared with the indoor classroom.