distances of education, The

Technophiles believe that technology will put professors on the street. Their vision is incoherent, but democratic values provide an alternative.

THE UNIVERSITY HAS A REPUTATION FOR CONSERVATISM. INformation technology is supposed to be a force for revolution. And so the reshaping of the university by means of information technology has the makings of a great drama. Great dramas stir up myths; they reopen ancient controversies and liberate forgotten energies. This is a fine thing, and it is also dangerous. Information technology enables us to reconsider the fundamental values of the university, but it also enables us to destroy the university if that is what we want.

To make rational choices, we need to think seriously about the place of technology in institutional change. We need first to consider some common ideas about the matter. Does information technology impose a particular logic on the institutions of higher education? Having opened that question, we can ask how information tecnolgy might help us to resolve the genuine tensions within higher education as we know it.

Education in a Box

TWO PEOPLE I MET RECENTLY ON THE INTERNET TOLD stories that can help frame these issues. The first was a computer programmer. "You know those middle managers who were laid off during the early 1990s through downsizing? I did that," he told me. (I am paraphrasing his words from memory.) "My technology helped organizations expand managers' span of control and thus reduce the number of layers in the hierarchy." He said his next target will be college professors. He figures that four years of college education should cost $60. After all, Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft says a personal computer gives you $100 million worth of software for $100. And Titanic gives you $200 million worth of movie for $8. A college education in a box, distributed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide, could cost billions to produce and still turn a profit. Most professors would become redundant and end up on the street, my correspondent concluded. Such an outcome would not bother him at all.

My other correspondent was dissatisfied with his undergraduate education in art. His professors, he asserted, could never make a living by selling their work, and they made little attempt to teach the skills their students would need to make a living. His complaint was not that his art school had misrepresented itself as a practical place. His complaint was that such academic art schools existed at all.

Neither of these views is unusual. But are they reasonable? To understand the opportunities and responsibilities that rapidly changing technology imposes on higher education, we must learn to distinguish the elements of truth in these views from the elements of historically conditioned misconception.

Standard Theory

THE MOST COMMON STORY ABOUT INFORMATION TECHnology and higher education emanates from two camps: ideologists who believe that the universities have been taken over by tenured radicals, and software vendors who see a business opportunity in the idea of a radically different university. Members of both groups-I'll refer to them jointly as the "technophiles"tell a story of revolution.

It has eight parts: (1) The universities are now a centralized command-and-control system under the domination of an academic elite. (2) The Internet can change this situation by making instructional delivery possible over an arbitrary distance. (3) This kind of instructional delivery will give students more choice, enabling them to assemble their educations by mixing and matching courses from many institutions. (4) Course outcomes will be measured by examination or portfolio systems that are operated independently of the universities by centrally organized testing services or accrediting organizations. (5) Students will be able to learn on a just-in-time basis across their whole lifetimes; they won't be confined to a university campus for a fixed part of their lives. (6) Competition in the market will ensure quality and eliminate inputs such as faculty labor that do not contribute sufficiently to the measured outcomes. (7) Universities are backward organizations, slow to adopt technology, and they will resist these threatening innovations. (8) Those universities that do not adapt will be left behind, their customers steadily siphoned off by more enterprising competitors.

Although this thinking is not entirely wrong, it is also remarkably naive. The basic issue is economic. Usually, economists hold that the price of a good in a functioning market should approach the marginal cost of producing it. But information goods mock this principle because of their vast economies of scale. That is, a company with twice the market share can sell its product for half as much, everything else being equal. That is one reason why software markets often become monopolies. As more industries depend on software, trends toward centralization and consolidation may intensify. The it technophiles know all that, but the potential for educational monopoly does not concern them. They believe higher education will become so cheap that competition will no longer be driven by price. Consumers will choose among several inexpensive sources of education. But even in this scenario, a handful of star professors will reach millions of students apiece with their courses, as opposed to the thousands of professors who now teach tens or hundreds of students at a time. That would seem to undermine the technophiles' goal of using the Internet to break the domination of a putative academic elite. And it would lead to more centralized control over what is taught in universities, not less.