Whose property is it anyway?

The explosion in distance education is raising all sorts of questions, including whether the courses belong to the professors who develop them or to their employers, the universities.

Virtually everyone who has gone to college has had the good fortune to take at least one course from a charismatic professor with the ability to make even the most mundane material mesmerizing.

Such professors, who often become legendary figures on their campuses, are highly valued by their institutions. Not only do students flock to their courses, but at institutional events they draw crowds of alumni and thus help their university with fund-raising. And if they are mediagenic, like the late Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, they can become television personalities whose visibility raises not only their own profile, but that of their home institution-drawing a bumper crop of applicants to the school. Frequently sought after by other institutions, these faculty members often draw top salaries, and they gain substantial additional income from writing popular books and articles in general circulation magazines, as well as from appearances on television.

Now, with the explosion of the Internet and the accompanying growth in distance learning, a new world of opportunity has opened for such professors. These star faculty members are positioned to profit handsomely from courses distributed around the globe by for-profit firms, by their own universities, or even by other institutions of higher education. This development has raised a host of complex questions for the academic community such as:

Does an institution have a right to share in the revenue from a course designed by a faculty member, but distributed outside its walls by others?

Does a professor even have the right to contract with an outside entity for dissemination of a course without his institution's prior approval?

If the professor's university, rather than an outside firm, distributes the course, is the professor entitled to a share of the "profit" and, if so, what is an appropriate percentage?

And who owns the course anyway-the professor or the university?

Universities and faculty members are just beginning to grapple with these and related issues, which fall in the arcane areas of intellectual property and contract law. "This is a culture shock we weren't ready for, and that is making it contentious," says Doug Lichtman, assistant professor of law at the University of Chicago and an expert on intellectual property law.

Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College of Columbia University, says that the key question facing universities in the evolving electronic environment is "who owns what gets produced." Levine points to the controversial case of Harvard Law School Professor Arthur Miller as a harbinger of what lies ahead.

The basic facts of the Miller case are these: Miller videotaped 11 lectures for a course on civil procedure given by the Concord University School of Law, an online degree-granting institution set up by the Washington Post Company's Kaplan Educational Centers. Harvard was not pleased to learn of Miller's relationship with another institution and has asked the professor to end it.

Some of Miller's faculty colleagues have said Harvard fears that the law professor's action could lead to a wave of for-profit corporations offering huge amounts of money to Harvard faculty members to teach online, thus making a Harvard education widely available and potentially reducing its value to traditional students. The law school has taken steps to prevent this by adding a provision to its faculty manual requiring that any faculty member who wants to do work for an Internet-based institution must receive prior approval from the dean, followed by approval from the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing body.

Harvard's concerns about the Miller case are well founded, says Columbia's Levine. If Miller, rather than Harvard, owns the course on civil procedure, "then higher education is in desperate straits," argues Levine, because it will lead to an upheaval in the power relationships in higher education, with professors assuming the dominant role.

Changing Times

Even if the university owns the course, a major transformation in the relationship between star faculty members and their employers may be inevitable because virtual universities can reach much larger audiences than a traditional institution, and that means there will be large sums of money available to sign up noted teachers. Levine predicts that "leading faculty will become the equivalent of stars" and eventually such professors will have at their disposal talent agencies that put together multimillion dollar packages that include a book deal, a TV show, a consulting contract with a software provider, and a distance learning course distributed by a for-profit corporation.

"When--not if--this occurs, it will be analogous to the fall of the studio system in Hollywood," says Levine. Where once the studios were dominant, now it is the actors who are the driving force. Similarly, says Levine, "the professor's name will become far more important than that of the university at which they are working at any given moment," just as Julia Roberts's name on a movie marquee is far more of a draw to audiences than the fact that Disney has produced the film in which she stars.