The American Research University from World War II to World Wide Web: Governments, the Private Sector, and the Emerging Meta-University

4. The Emerging Global Meta-University: Higher Education and Scholarship in the Age of the Internet

91 four The Emerging Global Meta-University Higher Education and Scholarship in the Age of the Internet Even as we face and resolve the thorny issue of balancing security and openness to sustain our campuses as great magnets for the brightest minds from around the world, modern information and communication technologies have fundamentally altered what it means to be an open scholarly or educational community .1 At the same time, India, China, and other countries are making strong investments to bring their research universities to world-class status. Strong forces and great opportunities are extant in higher education. How will the use of so-called educational technology play out? What will be the nature of the globalization of higher education? Will the Age of the Internet and what lies beyond it fundamentally reshape education and research ? Are residential universities dying dinosaurs, or models to be propagated further? My personal assessment of these matters is made in the context of two admitted biases. First, I remain hopelessly in love with the residential university—with Clark Kerr’s multiversity. 92 / The Emerging Global Meta-University Teaching is a fundamentally human activity, and it is difficult for me to envision anything better than the magic that happens when a group of smart, motivated, and energetic young men and women live and learn together for a period of years in a lively and intense university environment. Second, years ago I read a book by Princeton’s Gerard O’Neill in which he looked back over the centuries at what futurists of each period had predicted and then compared their predictions with what had actually occurred .2 The primary lesson from this study is that the rate of technological progress is almost always dramatically underpredicted , and the rate of social progress is almost always dramatically overpredicted. I share this view. What I envision, therefore, is a way in which relatively stable and conservative institutions will develop enormous synergies through the use of ever-expanding technological tools. Indeed, this is already happening in profound ways. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND HIGHER EDUCATION Computers, of course, have had a strong influence on higher education since the 1960s, starting out as specialized tools in science, engineering, and mathematics, and then propagating across the humanities, arts, and social sciences, as well as to business , law, and medicine. During the late 1990s, following the development of the World Wide Web and accelerated by the ever-decreasing prices of storage and processing, educators everywhere began to see information technology as a transformative force. This coincided with the dot-com era in the world of business, so attention quickly turned to how universities could The Emerging Global Meta-University / 93 teach large numbers of students at a distance, and how they could realize financial profits by doing so. Journalists, critics, and many of our own faculty concluded that classroom teaching in lecture format was doomed. Economies of scale could be garnered and many more people could afford to obtain advanced educations via digital means. For-profit distance education was assumed to be the emerging coin of our realm. University faculty and administrators across the country wrestled over the ownership of intellectual property when a professor’s course was made available electronically. Profit-making arms of some major universities, such as Fathom.Com at Columbia, were formed; providers like the University of Phoenix rapidly expanded; and adult-focused universities like Strayer moved online. The Western Governors Conference established a distance-education program as a collective effort to offer degrees and certificates through online courses in business, education, and information technology. The model that was proposed over and again for higher education was “find the best teacher of a given subject, record his or her lectures, and sell them in digital form.” There is an appealing logic to this proposition, and I very much believe that there are important roles for this kind of teaching tool, but the image of students everywhere sitting in front of a box listening to the identical lecture is one that repels me. It struck me as odd that many of the same critics who decried the lack of personal attention given students on our campuses seemed eager to move to this model. Nonetheless, the dominant proposition was that a university should project itself beyond its campus boundaries to teach students elsewhere. In the meantime many other teaching and learning innovations were introduced...