New Wine, (Fewer) Old Bottles

By the mid-90s, the promises of digital information technology seemed to know no bounds. Wall Street hurtled along on its wildest streak of bullishness since the 20s, fueled by the allure of technology stocks. Hardly a week went by without a new blockbuster merger of telecommunications giants. When Microsoft, hot on the heels of sweeping the market with its new online service, merged with Disney/ABC, even Ted Koppel couldn't help but joke that now Big Brother was surely "all ears." Although it was still more of a country road than a major thoroughfare, the information superhighway was transforming U.S. society. The ivied walls of higher education were not spared this assault.

Mid-decade many factors came together to raise a collective clamoring within academe for a close examination of the university qua university. The onslaught of digital information technologies was certainly one such factor, but so were cuts in federal funding for research and for students, and the fear that universities were losing ground to institutions that catered to students who were in search of narrow skills training. The proximity of the new millennium also had something to do with this soul-searching; most every university issued some incarnation of the "Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century" brochure. The unspoken subtext in this self-reflection was the question of whether the university itself could survive in this brave new world.

Though the results of these university discussions usually showed ambivalence about how fully to embrace these new learning technologies, many individual faculty members were already making good use of them. Interactive "edutainment" programs were becoming sophisticated enough to make their appearances in undergraduate classrooms. The University of Indiana began to make use of Broderbund's Composer Supposer CD-ROM in its introductory music theory classes. Faculty there had concluded that the program's melding of graphics and sound illustrated certain musical concepts more readily than either medium alone could have. Indiana's reputation in music encouraged other schools: as went Bloomington, so went the nation.

Those who advocated full adoption of such learning technologies argued that not only were they efficient, engrossing, and self-paced, but they allowed each student to choose the learning style that was best for him. They even argued that such media created new modes of knowledge, knowledge that could not be fully represented in other ways. Such modes of knowledge, they said, represented nothing less than a new paradigm of literacy.

Though these multimedia programs were becoming more and more popular on campuses, many voiced fears that they represented just one more force pushing the university away from its traditional--and etymological--breadth of focus into a narrow concern with job training. This chord of concern would be struck again and again in coming years. These fears of "infotech" were not baseless. By the end of the decade interactive multimedia programs had become the most widely used learning tool in training programs for business. Many were custom-designed to teach new employees the skills necessary to be productive at a particular job. The one program that was the single biggest target for academics' disdain was the program McDonald's put together for its recruits and touted in its TV commercials: it allowed new employees to practice their serving skills on virtual celebrities--Madonna buying a Coke without ice, Ben Franklin ordering eleven Big Macs. Computer simulation at its most inane, it represented to its critics the mindset that would forever limit digital learning technologies, a mindset, they argued, that despite its profitability had no place in the university.

But the digital boom showed no signs of bust. In 1997 the Supreme Court ruled in Buchwald v. Broderbund that the use of short excerpts from copyrighted works in CD-ROMs did not constitute fair use and that copyright owners must be compensated. Rather than putting a damper on multimedia production, this ruling proved a boon for it, for intellectual property owners and creators now had their incomes legally protected. Protection under law didn't guarantee protection in practice, but several technologies combined in the late 90s to bring the real closer to the ideal. Secure "digital watermarks"--electronically imprinted bits of data that, like the watermark on currency, ensure authenticity--were developed and allowed producers to tag their digital information. Buyers of CD-ROMs began to pay for use of all the intellectual property on the disk, but--publishers keeping in mind that pennies add up when volume is in the millions--the cost was kept to a minimum.

All of this digital compensation relied on online commercial transactions, which by 1998 were secure 99% of the time--slightly more often than face-to-face transactions. Even online multimedia documents could now be financially profitable for their creators. Adding to the multimedia blitz was a deluge of new digital information. Reelected from a field of formerly-Republican competitors, President Bill Clinton in 1997 made good on a campaign promise to open the government's vast troves of information to online access at cost. Within three years all public domain material from the Library of Congress was available through any phone line, as were the public files of most government agencies. The Administration also encouraged competition for databases that had previously been monopolized by one or two suppliers. Westlaw and Lexis, for example, which had charged law firms tens of thousands of dollars for access to their legal databases, were forced to slash their prices to compete with such cut-rate packagers as LawLine.

Galaxies of readily accessible information lured academics into multimedia by the thousands. One of the most successful was Hector Chavez, a professor of history at MIT. All the applications ever filed at the U.S. Patent Office had recently been put online. Chavez used this cheap information as the raw material for his immensely popular Invention Strategies course, a course that enrolled almost 20,000 would-be inventors from all over the world each fall. The arts and humanities, to the surprise of many, engaged in more than their share of these endeavors. George Mason University maintained a home page for the nation's poet laureate that included online poetry workshops and readings for high-school students. And the popularity of a multimedia program by Robert Pinsky that allowed the interactive study and creation of formal poetry, ProzCD, caught even its creator by surprise.

Multimedia pushed Chavez and Pinsky into the new realm of faculty stars. A select few of these digerati pulled in multimillion dollar incomes from their digital packagings, whether CD-ROMs or online courses. Many universities positioned themselves well in this area by taking on the role of "studio" to their stars--acting as production company and distributor. The star system increased competition among faculty and began to make the AAU look in some respects like the NFL--a few superstars demanding and getting outrageous salaries and bonuses.

In a paradoxical twist, this star system also helped to undermine the value of tenure. Tenure, while still guaranteeing a certain degree of stability, no longer guaranteed professors regular raises at many universities, and it certainly didn't guarantee professors a shot at star status. Once the echelon of royalty-rich faculty stars arose, many of whom were free agents, tenure seemed almost the mark of second rank. It was also no longer a benefit universities had to offer to attract top people. Before the first decade of the millennium was out, more than a dozen major universities had cut salaries for all new tenured faculty by 50% and instituted what were, in effect, large productivity bonuses: the more students a prof's teaching brought in, the larger her lump sum at the end of the semester.

While cheap online information helped create the star system, it also had more mundane benefits. Penn's English department, one of the first to set up a home page on the World Wide Web, soon dispensed with texts for most of its survey courses. Linked "coursepack" materials on the Web proved cheaper for both students and professors. Online materials also allowed students to encounter in their reading hundreds of additional alluring leads they could follow into mazes of related materials. Faculty found that the hyperlinked nature of the Web itself promoted student exploration--all avenues could immediately be traveled without the added work of trips to libraries. Annotated bibliographies--complete with Universal Resource Locators (Web addresses)--became standard undergraduate projects. They also became necessary road maps, for with so much information literally at their fingertips, students increasingly needed guides to help them locate what was useful and reliable.

This growing need for information "filters" brought renewed focus to the role of the reference librarian, who now almost never touched paper books ("flammables," as they came to be known) but who was the person students, faculty, and even the corporate world (for a fee) turned to to boldly go where few others had into the newest reaches of the "infinetwork." It was this same need for filters that eventually led the Pac 8 universities to collectively alter most of their upper-division courses to an Oxford mentoring model: students would engage in largely independent readings, research, and projects--generally on the Web--with faculty providing direction on what should be read, what could reasonably be ignored, and what avenues of inquiry glowed most promising.

More faculty time spent on these upper-division students was to some small extent balanced by less time required for lower-division students. Multimedia packages helped here, as did a greater focus on collaborative work. The greatest savings, though, were achieved through the use of distance-learning technologies. Distance-learning meant larger markets and lower costs, and it increased by an order of magnitude the number of students a university could profitably enroll. Information technologies in general offered universities new economies of scale and greatly pushed up the point of diminishing returns. Florida University, a state-mandated merger of the University of Florida and Florida State, now has an enrollment in excess of 100,000 and has been doing splendidly (though ironically enough its football team has not).

Distance-learning also meant global competition on a new order of magnitude. Such competition was further enabled by widespread use of automatic translation software on the Internet and by the overthrow of the old ASCII computer code in favor of a new 16-bit standard code that could represent all characters of all languages.

The passage of the NAFTA and the GATT, and successful negotiation by the World Trade Organization of repeated U.S.-Japan trade tiffs, enhanced this globally competitive environment for universities, signaling the crumbling of trade walls throughout most of the world. This subsidence of barriers brought advertising by overseas universities eager to lure U.S. students into online lower-division courses. Singapore University was particularly successful at attracting undergrads. Their home page featured Michael Fay using a cane to punctuate his discussion of "disciplined learning" and making prominent mention of Singapore's "graffiti-free" skyscrapers. U.S. students who enrolled in such courses--generally math and science courses--almost always transferred the credit to the U.S. institutions from which they eventually took their degrees, for U.S. institutions still had worldwide prestige.

This prestige was elemental in helping U.S. universities take advantage of the opportunities presented by this new world market. This prestige, the lack of trade barriers, a weak dollar, and increased importance of education in a global information society all served to bring students from other nations, especially from Asia, to U.S. institutions in record numbers. By 2003, Asian nationals represented a majority of the students doing coursework in the University of California system. Many of these students had never set foot in the U.S. Their classes were more often than not satellite broadcasts or World Wide Web packages.

Emory was one of many institutions to contract with foreign governments to deliver online courses. In 2004 it signed on to provide virtually all undergraduate instruction in the English language for the republic of Estonia.

The success of projects such as Emory's Estonia venture convinced many that the "virtual campus" should be not only a growing source of revenues but also a place where the university should commit an increasing proportion of resources. The 90s witnessed, retrospectively at least, perhaps the last great construction boom on American campuses. Many universities had struggled to maintain a deteriorating infrastructure, a struggle typically amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance by the end of the decade. More and more of them found it was less expensive to invest in the technologies and aggressive marketing necessary to promote virtual classrooms. California's Harvey Mudd College went a step further, essentially announcing in 2003 that students would no longer have an on-campus presence.

Harvey Mudd's decision was something of a wakeup call to universities. All the talk in the 90s about how to change the university so it could keep up had been accompanied by an undercurrent of worry: making whatever changes seemed necessary to save the university could end up destroying it, leaving a new and empty edifice in its place. Softer voices had spoken of the university as a community--of scholars, students, even families--and had worried about the effects of the fragmentation of this community. They had pointed out that scholars and researchers rely on a university for a stable base and that, especially in an era of free-agent faculty, stability might become more important then ever. They had fretted over the possibility of universities becoming little more than training grounds for the specialized workforce of the 21st century. These voices had persisted in quietly asking again and again what a university was, and what it should be. After almost a decade these softer voices had grown into a loud majority in universities. The belief grew widespread that universities were perhaps giving up something essential in becoming leaner, quicker, more attenuated, more digital.

Many universities took measures to enhance their sense of community and stability by reaching out to their extended families--the alumni, the parents, the sports fans. They offered free or inexpensive access to their computer networks. Not only did this serve to undercut potential competition from multimedia "edutainment" products provided by America OnLine and Prodigy, it also allowed universities to have regular access to their alumni. This was the infrastructure universities needed to provide continued services to alumni, services that ran the gamut from lifelong learning contracts, to online coursework, to coverage of basketball games. The success of these expanded network endeavors was soon apparent: by 2005 university networks were gaining more new users than America OnLine and Prodigy combined.

This enhanced link to alumni proved a two-way conduit--universities also increasingly tapped alumni for narrowly targeted advising of students and for specialized professional knowledge. Worcester Polytechnic Institute was among the first to require its students to partake in online mentoring programs with alumni employed in their areas of specialization. Such alumni mentoring programs helped stop the depreciation of college degrees in the eyes of employers. It also helped undercut for many companies both the necessity for and the feasibility of establishing extensive educational programs for their job recruits.

Questions about community on campus paralleled questions about community in the larger society. Rapid development of technology and information meant that companies could no longer maintain in-house much of the expertise they needed. They relied more and more on consultants and independent contractors. A globe linked by digital information technologies meant that anyone with an up-to-date multimedia computer could do business anywhere in the world. Often workers collaborating on a project never met. The IRS reported in 2010 that the number of taxpayers filing as self-employed had increased by 280% over the previous two decades.

This growing social fragmentation brought an increased emphasis within higher education on collaboration technologies. Universities finally convinced their undergraduates that, contrary to the strictures set out by fifth-grade teachers, it was not necessary that they always keep their eyes on their own papers. In the late 90s, for example, the University of Michigan's English Composition Program was among the first to offer online classes in collaborative writing--a mode of communication that was widespread in the professional world. Most introductory math and science classes prepared students for upper-level project work by having them complete much of their "homework" in groups.

Collaboration and group work on campus became the norm in part because the number of communities students needed to belong to increased dramatically. Most of these communities were virtual communities. It was not uncommon for all of a student's social interaction in the course of one day to be virtual interaction in online classes, mailgroups, bulletin boards, and the like. For years, Cassandras had harped on the societal disintegration that would result from lives lived in virtual communities. While these communities required at least as much social development and skill as any other, it was true that the skills were somewhat different from those required in real-time communities. Universities came to recognize this and instituted a variety of residency requirements that ensured at least a minimum of face-to-face interaction through the course of an undergraduate education. At most institutions this meant that students had to spend at least four semesters on the "R-L" ("Real-Life") campus.

Despite--or perhaps because of--these residency requirements, U.S. universities continued to attract record numbers of students from around the world to their campuses. By 2010 even Harvey Mudd had become convinced. Its public invitation to its students to return to the R-L campus gained some fame in the academic world by concluding that, "the socialization function of a traditional university--students living within a community of colleagues and scholars who are engaged in a variety of intellectual pursuits at the highest levels--serves two essential functions that the virtual campus can not efficiently replicate: such a community does serve to round out the educated person's analytical and intuitive abilities in subtle but essential fashion, and such a community allows the educated person to refine her ideas about those fields of endeavor for which she is best suited." Copies of this statement were tacked to faculty office doors all over the country. They will probably remain there for years.

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4/25/96