Technology, Scholarship, and the Humanities:
The Implications of Electronic Information
The Professional Implications of Electronic Information
Carolyn C. Lougee
Senior Associate Dean of the School
of Humanities and Sciences,
Professor of History
Stanford University
Abstract
This paper discusses the effect that electronic information resources can be
expected to have on the academic profession.
The most obvious issues concern the extent to which faculty effort in the area
of electronic information resources will be recognized in decisions on
professional advancement. My argument with respect to research applications is
that the use of electronic resources will be relatively transparent in the
evaluation process, which focuses on measures of impact in advancing a
scholarly field no matter what form of research product may effect the advance.
The issue with respect to teaching applications is much more complex, involving
the need to develop measures of quality in software design, measures of
pedagogical effectiveness and also calling into question the way teaching in
general is weighed in decisions about promotion, tenure, and salaries. My view
is that software development should be rewarded as teaching is rewarded, and
that the way teaching is rewarded must be changed.
But the issues raised by the introduction of electronic information resources
go much deeper; in order to comprehend them we need an understanding of the
academic profession as a whole and of its relation to the universities, as well
as an understanding of the technology itself. The second part of this paper,
therefore, looks at the character of the academic profession, describes the
technology that will be most significant in professional life, and estimates
the pace at which such change might be expected to occur.
The third section of the paper focuses on the decentralizing effects of
computers and networks, and speculates that their consequences will be a
loosening of the bonds tying academic professionals to universities. Effects
of the new technology will also include changes in faculty-student relations,
exacerbated inequalities among students, institutions, and disciplines, and a
need for academic professionals to state with greater precision the rationale
for the continued existence of the universities, especially for the role the
humanities should play within them.
© Carolyn C. Lougee, 1993
An unknown future faces the academic profession and American universities at
the end of the twentieth century. Shaky financial underpinnings, ambiguities
in mission, a crisis in public confidence, shifting curricular priorities,
unpredictable social needs: a new environment requires faculties and
university administrators to rethink the patterns of work and institutional
organization that have become established in the postwar American university.
What additional challenges will be created by the revolution in electronic
information resources? How will they intersect with the challenges already
facing the profession?
One set of issues has already begun to elicit discussion: whether, and how,
the universities' processes for decisionmaking on professional advancement will
need to change as electronic information resources modify the work faculty
members do. The first part of this paper addresses such questions:
- What counts as scholarship? With whom? For what purposes?
- Do we need to rethink our fundamental definition of what is scholarship
and what is not? Of how scholarship is judged and reviewed?
- Is creating a database like creating a critical edition of a text?
- Will publishing in electronic journals be considered as important as
publishing in print journals?
- What about significant contributions to ongoing scholarly debate via
electronic networks?
- What about software innovations or the editing and use of electronic
bulletin boards?[1]
But further, more far-reaching issues arise as we contemplate the
profound changes that electronic information resources will bring in the very
role of academic professionals in the production and dissemination of
knowledge. Therefore, the second part of this paper looks past issues of
professional advancement to consider the character of the academic profession,
describe the technology that will be most significant in professional life, and
estimate the pace at which such change might be expected to occur. The third
section then speculates that the decentralizing effects of computers and
networks may unravel the matrix of constituencies that now form the American
university.
Professional Advancement: Promotion, Tenure, and Salary Incentives
Is there now a "mismatch between prevailing academic reward structures and the
need for faculty involvement in instructional
technology"?[2]
Will professional standards--currently
resting on expectations for research, teaching, and service--need to change as
electronic information becomes a significant component of humanities
scholarship?
Research is not the nub of the issue; at least in the short run there will be
little to confound us in terms of evaluating new forms of research
contributions (though I shall return to this point in greater depth below when
I speak of the longer term). If new technologies spawn new forms of
dissemination and exchange that alter patterns of professional interaction and
even change the substance of the concepts or ideas that are exchanged,
evaluation procedures will, I believe, relatively easily expand to encompass
the change. In my view, the medium for research accomplishment is relatively
transparent in the evaluation process.
What about significant contributions to ongoing scholarly debate via
electronic networks? It will matter little whether exchanges between
scholars occur in a traditional session at a scholarly conference or over a
network: current methods of assessment recognize nonprint exchanges, "counting"
not the exchange per se but its impact in advancing the field, as attested to
by other scholars. What will matter is whether such exchanges between scholars
are (as the question, perhaps unwittingly, states) "significant." And that
significance can be assessed entirely independently of the medium the scholar
uses. What about the editing and use of electronic bulletin boards? It
will matter little whether draft papers are circulated online or through the
mail. In some fields, circulated drafts are already the primary way of
disseminating research results, and where this is the case drafts communicated
electronically will find their way into tenure decisions exactly as other
nonprint exchanges do: by virtue of other scholars' testimonies to their
impact.
Will publishing in electronic journals be considered as important as
publishing in print journals? The medium will not matter; the crucial
consideration will continue to be whether research papers have been refereed
or not, without regard to whether those papers exist in hard copy or only
electronically. That is, the legitimacy of electronic publication will turn on
whether there is "a system . . . in place to provide the same quality control
that is available in print media. The referee process is vital in online
publishing."[3]
Is creating a database like creating a critical edition of a text? If
the Spanish explorers could navigate through Florida using the Biblical map of
rivers in Eden, we too can "tame" the unfamiliar by analogy with the known. We
can evaluate the significance of a database by the criteria we have learned to
apply to such research tools as critical editions of a text. Crutches can
carry us through transitional times.
It seems to me, overall, that worry over this order of question, at least with
respect to research, implies a much too mechanical conception of the way
research is evaluated in decisions on professional advancement. If those
decisions were based upon counting words, lines, paragraphs, or articles, then
these would be crucial questions.
Where the issue of professional recognition has come to focus, and legitimately
so, is on the reward that might, or should, be forthcoming for innovations in
electronically based instruction. Here the issues are of enormous import,
multifaceted, and far-reaching. They tend to cluster under two broad
questions: Can current ways of evaluating teaching for advancement purposes
take appropriate account of efforts in electronic instruction? If not, if
"academic governance and reward structures are inhospitable to developing and
using instructional technologies,"[4] should
they be fundamentally changed because of the importance of these efforts for
the future of higher education?
It seems abundantly clear that current practices in American colleges and
universities present formidable obstacles to faculty involvement with
electronic instructional resources. To begin with, anyone who has ever
ventured into this area knows what a time sink the development and
implementation of electronic instructional resources almost inevitably become.
While faculty members report that time pressure and demands for research that
interfere with their teaching are the leading source of stress in their
professional lives,[5] "developing software
requires an enormous commitment of a scholar's time, even with support."[6] "Software development requires a
thirty-six-hour day. . . . A colleague referred to his own endeavors in the
writing of teaching software as a 'black hole of time.'"[7]
And time so spent may not gain professional recognition. Many would agree that
"the development of courseware lacks prestige among faculty members."[8] "Like textbook writing, [involvement in
instructional computing] is viewed as slightly less suspect than, say, working
weekends pumping gas, but it is tolerated."[9]
"The significant benefit issue is the role of courseware development in
promotion. Is it safe for junior faculty to spend time developing
courseware?"[10]
The thornier issue is whether such efforts, currently devalued in advancement
decisions, should be rewarded. The very professor who joked about pumping gas
at the University of Illinois thought not. "External rewards are not
sufficient to induce a reasonable person to devote substantial energy to such
an undertaking, nor should they be. In my own case, I wanted to provide
students with access to scientific tools, and doing so has proved very
rewarding, in and of itself."[11]
And he is not alone: "The most important [incentive to software development] is
the direct satisfaction of observing its use by students."[12] Without disputing the generosity of
teachers' genuine commitment to their students, the allusion to intrinsic
rewards will remind some of us that Governor Jerry Brown once justified low
faculty salaries on the grounds that teachers enjoy "psychic dollars." As we
debate the appropriate institutional, professional rewards for software
development, it bears remembering that other incentives can also come into
play. The possibilities for real dollars, as well as "psychic" ones, pose
important questions for individual faculty as well as institutions. To whom
should income accrue from faculty efforts in the domain of electronic
instructional media?
If [faculty] are to generate significant quantities of instructional
courseware suitable for distribution, they must be allowed to retain
ownership and distribution rights to their work. That is, the
intellectual property rights of faculty creating instructional
software should be protected in the same manner as are those of
faculty in other creative endeavors such as writing books or
producing works of art.[13]
And if faculty reap this income, will such monetary rewards substitute for,
rather than supplement, institutional and professional ones: that is, will
they relieve universities of responsibility for providing other incentives and
rewards?
We know that only 1 out of every 20 faculty members writes
textbooks, and only one out of every ten textbooks makes money.
If the same thing is true of courseware, should we encourage
faculty to get into this low-payoff game by some form of financial
reward or professional recognition? The university does not
directly reward the production of textbooks; the marketplace does.
Are we able to impose this same kind of expectation on faculty
doing courseware development? Should the financial rewards for
software development be in the university evaluation or in the
marketplace?[14]
I would argue there can be no doubt whatever that faculty efforts with
electronic instructional innovations, including software development, should be
rewarded in decisions on professional advancement. How can this be done? We
can make some use of our analogical crutch, to assimilate new modes of teaching
into existing decisionmaking procedures. Programs like tutorial software might
be rewarded as institutions reward publication of a textbook, simulation
software as development of new courses or curricula is currently recognized.
But this does not take us very far. Three issues at the very heart of current
practice must be addressed before faculty efforts with electronic media can
gain appropriate reward: how quality assessments can be made, what type of
credit should be awarded, and how teaching should be rewarded in cases of
professional advancement.
With respect to quality assessments, responsible advancement decisions depend
not upon quantitative measures of effort or output but upon quality
assessments, and these come up against particular difficulties when applied to
the new instructional media, difficulties that render imperfect the analogies
with traditional media that I sketched above. Whereas the pool of potential
evaluators for a textbook is obvious--any colleague in the field who teaches at
the level targeted by the book can evaluate print media--who among them can
assess the quality of software? Even within a discipline, who can distinguish
pathbreaking innovation in electronic information resources from "trivial
bandwagon-jumping"?[15] This issue arose,
for example, at Duke University, where the department chair wished to include a
junior faculty member's software among his professional achievements in his
tenure case. "I have always worked on the principle that if someone is doing
serious work and sharing it with the scholarly community, that work should be
considered." But the review committee suffered "some puzzlement about how
exactly to consider the software. There was no book in hand, we could not
measure the inches of pages of publication. We finally asked Jay to show us
the program, and we talked to people who had used it."[16]
It was to address this issue that EDUCOM set up a peer-review process for
computer software in 1988. This initiative was designed to redress the "lack
of information about the quality of software . . . [and in so doing] affect
tenure or promotion decisions . . . in the hope of promoting the recognition of
software development as a scholarly activity worthy of credit toward tenure and
promotion, legitimizing something that we all believe is important, but a lot
of the rest of the world doesn't yet." Establishing software development as "a
legitimate academic pursuit" would, it was hoped, result in greater
professional rewards for those who undertook it. At the heart of the project
was combined review by experts in the disciplinary field and software
specialists. From the beginning the project faced uncertainty "whether members
of tenure committees will actually consider the reviews and reward faculty
members for developing software" and was plagued, according to one of the
project's leaders, by "the classic 'chicken and egg' dilemma. The review
process cannot survive unless more software is created, he says, but a large
body of software will not be created unless the review process helps to
persuade colleges and universities to award professors credit for writing the
programs."[17]
Compounding the difficulty of evaluating the excellence of software as it has
been designed is the near absence of reliable means for measuring the
effectiveness of such resources in action. "Evaluating the results of using
instructional technologies is an important but difficult agenda that is seldom
supported with institutional resources."[18]
Even more fundamentally, few institutions have in place any qualitative means
for assessing educational outcomes: "The administration knows how many hours
and how many students we teach, but not how much we teach or how much students
learn. If I bring about an improvement of 42 percent in what my students learn
and in the courseware they use, neither my present dean nor any prospective
dean will know it. We lack a bottom line in educational improvement."[19]
Thus the issue specific to electronic instructional media converges with one of
the most important, and intractable, issues facing higher education in general:
finding means of gaining an accurate enough picture of instructional quality
and educational efficacy that institutions can base rewards upon them with as
much confidence as they currently have in evaluations of faculty members'
research.
A second, even more fundamental and vexed question emerges from current
practice: just what kind of credit should faculty efforts in instructional
media be accorded? As research? teaching? service? What counts as
scholarship? With whom? For what purposes? The founders of the EDUCOM
software reviews expressed hopes of "promoting recognition of software
development as a scholarly activity," but commentators on the EDUCOM program
have spoken of assimilation within existing means for recognizing teaching
rather than of considering software development as, or on a par with, research.
"In the context of tenure and promotion decisions, recognition of this software
by an awards program or other peer-review processes should be on a par with
positive reviews of a traditional textbook."[20] "In the beginning, I think the review
process will bring much more credibility [but] it will never achieve any status
beyond that of a textbook."[21]
The dean at a large research university spoke in the same vein: "We give 'good
guy' credit for writing software. It's like doing a good job teaching a
course, or being a good citizen of the university. But tenure and promotion
really comes down to your research reputation."[22] In the Duke case the software was
considered an addition to, not a substitute for, publication of a scholarly
book and several articles in refereed journals.
But there are reports that at least a few institutions have gone further. In a
case at Clarkson University a candidate for promotion had his software credited
"like an article in a refereed journal because the software and the
documentation had been reviewed widely on and off the Clarkson campus."[23] At Penn State, software development was
explicitly included by the faculty senate among those faculty activities that
should be "considered scholarship, just like research" in promotion cases.[24] Several advocates of computerizing
learning have argued that software development should be rewarded as research.
"Faculty members who have written software insist that it often has a large
research component, and compare the software to textbooks that contain
state-of-the-art material. Such textbooks, they say, can receive credit as
research work. They would like software that involves research to be judged
the same way."[25] "Many advanced programs
are analogous to the publication of one or several research articles. . . .
Indeed, a program like this can, in the manner of traditional research
articles, spawn additional articles, commentary, and even mainline research."[26] The Chronicle of Higher Education
spoke of the contrary opinion as "anti-software prejudice."[27]
My own view is that software development should be rewarded as teaching is
rewarded. But that merely begs the most important issue of all--how teaching
itself should be rewarded. The issue of appropriate recognition for developing
and implementing electronic instructional resources resolves itself into the
most talked-about issue in American higher education: the respective weight
accorded to research and teaching in the system of rewards and incentives
prevailing in American colleges and universities. Even if software development
gains the recognition and rewards envisioned above, it will still have merely
subordinate effect if teaching continues to have secondary status in decisions
on professional advancement. Should this general situation change? Should the
balance between research and teaching be rethought and revised? Do we need to
change how we think about teaching as well as how we think about instructional
computing, perhaps changing our views on teaching through our new views on
computing? Might the situation with respect to electronic resources, in
particular, point us to some new arguments that urge change, perhaps more
compellingly than the multitudinous other arguments that have been marshaled in
that direction?
In the past decade, numerous blue-ribbon, highly publicized national reports
have urged that greater emphasis be placed on teaching in American institutions
of higher education and, to this end, on teaching quality in decisions on
hiring, tenure, promotion, and
compensation.[28]
The reality is that, on far too many campuses, teaching is not
well rewarded, and faculty who spend too much time counseling
and advising students may diminish their prospects for tenure
and promotion. . . . these professional obligations do not get
the recognition they deserve. . . . the faculty reward system
does not match the full range of academic functions. . . . It
is unacceptable, we believe, to go on using research and
publication as the primary criterion for tenure and promotion
when other educational obligations are required.[29]
Many of our colleges and universities overemphasize research
and minimize quality teaching in personnel decisions, and this
tradition has potentially damaging effects on student learning
and development. . . . College officials directly responsible
for faculty personnel decisions should increase the weight
given to teaching in the processes of hiring and determining
retention, tenure, promotion, and compensation, and should
improve means of assessing teaching effectiveness. . . . We urge
them to develop systems for the assessment of teaching
effectiveness that will be accepted by faculty and to promulgate
criteria for the relationship between teaching effectiveness and
rewards.[30]
These reports have not spelled out the implications of overemphasis on research
for the development and application of instructional technology. The focus on
research means that
Too much attention to teaching could cost a faculty member
tenure, promotion, or renewal of contract. Today, one of the
main ways of spending "too much time" on teaching is to spend
time designing and developing educational computer programs
and exploring the use of such programs in the classroom context.
For many who attempt to use the computer for education, the
conflict between the desire to assist students in learning and
the desire to promote oneself professionally is all too clear.
Educational computing thus lies at the center of many debates
about teaching versus research.[31]
Moreover, the primacy of research structures the entire process of evaluation
for promotions in such a way as to push recognition to a second or third order
of consideration; tenure cases proceed from the disciplinary collegial group
upward to the university level, no matter which level could best assess each
aspect of a case. "The problem is that the department has the initial and
primary input into the tenure process, and though courseware development may
benefit the reputation of the college, it may not benefit the status of a
department. Departments gain status through scholarly publications, grants,
and excellent courses. . . . Tenured faculty are in a better position. Raises
are determined by the deans, not by the departments, and the administration
does appear to assign some value to good courseware development."[32]
What can be done, given that both the values animating higher education and the
embedded process preserving them constitute obstacles to faculty effort with
electronic information resources? William Graves has suggested circumventing
the process, Ernest Boyer revising the values. Graves proposes a national
initiative that would imprint on the professional reward process a sense of the
overriding, transdepartmental, even transinstitutional significance of the
overall initiative in which software development and other efforts with
electronic instructional media would take place.
But can software development simply be counted in rank and
tenure proceedings? Perhaps justified in some institutional
contexts, this oversimplified approach is largely unrealistic
and unjustified. The issue at hand is part of a larger issue
typically posed as a question of how to reward good teaching.
But good teaching should be a baseline expectation in higher
education and not a response to potential rewards beyond
cost-of-living salary increases. The real issue encoded in
the phrases rewarding good teaching and rewarding
software development is how to encourage, recognize, and
reward extraordinary achievement or innovation that either
identifies or responds to special institution or departmental
needs not accounted for in existing rewards structures. . . .
Must today's graduate students, who are cutting their academic
teeth with technological support, mature into full professorship
before such leadership can emerge and instructional technologies
find a niche in academic culture? A national strategy would
require strong participation by senior faculty to help move us
beyond academic paralysis on this issue. . . . A national program
to support scholars from across the nation to contribute to the
advancement of instructional technologies in their disciplines
and professions would further legitimate participation in
instructional computing. A national strategy would respond to
the premises that technology is here to stay and that educational
leadership demands an investment in the nation's faculty, one
that incurs the kind of nonrecoverable short-term costs that
typically cannot be borne by a single campus. . . . A national
strategy should articulate educational priorities and focus
resources accordingly.[33]
Do we need to rethink our fundamental definition of what is scholarship and
what is not? Of how scholarship is judged and reviewed? Boyer urges that
we do.
The most important obligation now confronting the nation's
colleges and universities is to break out of the tired old
teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative
ways, what it means to be a scholar . . . give the familiar
and honorable term "scholarship" a broader, more capacious
meaning, one that brings legitimacy to the full scope of
academic work.[34]
My own sense is that the American professoriate, even in the humanities, is
seriously remiss in its teaching responsibilities. I agree strongly with
Donald Kennedy that "It is time for us to reaffirm that education--that is,
teaching in all its forms--is the primary task, and that our society will judge
us in the long run on how well we do it."[35] But what has the power to change the
situation? Exhortation--no matter how cleverly we massage new meanings into
the words we use--will not dislodge a reward system that is in place precisely
because it serves faculty interests (in both senses of the word) as faculty
themselves have come to define those interests. The only way to change the
reward system in higher education is to convince the American professoriate
that "teaching is the lifeblood of colleges and universities, the sine qua non
for their primary support and for their patronage by students."[36] Might the issues surrounding the
electronic revolution in some fashion bring to a head, and at the same time
provide a new way of looking at, the need to refocus on teaching in American
higher education?
Beyond Professional Advancement: The Professoriate in the University
and the Forces for Broader Change
Without pretending that we have come even close to exhausting the issues
involved with professional advancement, let us turn our attention to the
academic profession more broadly and attempt to identify aspects of the
profession--particularly in the humanities--that may be affected by the
proliferation and application of electronic information resources.[37]
When we speak of the academic profession, we refer to the fact that the
professoriate in American institutions of higher education possesses certain
characteristics understood to define professions:
- work that requires specialized, knowledge-based expertise and that holders
of the expertise claim, and are given, exclusive rights to practice;
- collegial solidarity through which practitioners autonomously govern training
for, entry into, the nature of, standards of quality in, and norms of
responsible conduct for the occupation;
- a sense of vocation or calling, which orients the practitioner toward
intrinsic rewards and service to an
ideal.[38]
A particular condition of the professoriate is, however, that professors ply
their profession, not in wholly autonomous organizations such as solo practice
or partnerships, but in institutions they do not wholly control. Universities
are a joint venture of faculty, administrators, trustees, governments, and
students. In support of their mission to advance the discovery, transmission,
and application of knowledge, they receive funds from many sources--from
students, alumni, and governments in return for teaching; from industry and
governments as grants and contracts in return for research.
For all its shifts in guise over the years, the modern university has remained
at its heart remarkably like the idea of the university expressed by John Henry
Newman in 1856:[39]
A university is a place of concourse, whither students come
from every quarter for every kind of knowledge. You cannot
have the best of every kind everywhere; you must go to some
great city or emporium for it. There you have all the
choicest productions of nature and art all together, which
you find each in its own separate place elsewhere. All the
riches of the land, and of the world, are carried up thither;
there are the best markets, and there the best workmen. It is
the centre of trade, the supreme court of fashion, the umpire
of rival skill, and the standard of things rare and precious.
It is the place for seeing galleries of first-rate pictures,
and for hearing wonderful voices and miraculous performers.
It is the place for great preachers, great orators, great
nobles, great statesmen. In the nature of things, greatness
and unity go together; excellence implies a centre. Such,
then, for the third or fourth time, is a University. . . . It
is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries
verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and
error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind, and knowledge
with knowledge. It is the place where the professor becomes
eloquent, and a missionary and a preacher, displaying it in its
most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the
zeal of enthusiasm and lighting up his own love of it in the
breasts of his hearers. . . . It is a place which attracts the
affections of the young by its fame, wins the judgment of the
middle-aged by its beauty, and rivets the memory of the old by
its associations. It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world,
a minister of the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation.[40]
"The place of concourse" is still at the root of the university's coherence as
an institution: the university's very identity is linked to the site on which
are gathered the classrooms, research facilities, equipment, and personnel that
create an educational program and a community. In a specific geographical
space the faculty hired and the students admitted assemble and enjoy the
interchanges that constitute education. What the institution "certifies" as
its education is the work done together on that site, and the character of that
education is shaped by the resources and interactions that are on the site.
Institutions are rated by the resources gathered; the degree draws its value
from them. Each university dedicates its resources, and limits their use, to
its own members: that is, to those who can be in the same place at the same
time.
The professional scholar pursues both independent and institutional agendas
within this "place of concourse":
As a member of a profession, the college faculty member is
a person divided. As a member of a discipline, which means
primarily as a scholar, the faculty member meets all the
requirements for professional status. . . . [but not as a
teacher, for what the university does not do with respect
to the individual's research--assign its area, its projects,
set standards, --it does with respect to his/her teaching]
As teachers, faculty members are not organized into a
society of peers that itself sets the standards for practice
and monitors performance. As a consequence, faculty members
are not given the autonomy in their instructional role that
they have as scholars. . . . Without a clear sense of
profession, college professors have not sought the kind of
autonomy of practice in their teaching that they experience
in their other roles.[41]
A balancing act, then, is in play within American universities. The institution
seeks equilibrium among its several missions and its (sometimes competing)
constituencies. Professors balance the independent tradition inherited from
their predecessors--monks, guild masters, gentleman scholars--with their duties
as institutional employees. Intruding upon this "balancing act," electronic
information resources may make a profound difference in the academic profession
even without provoking immediate and wholesale changes; merely tipping the
weight in one or another direction can shift the balance to a new equilibrium
point--or to disequilibrium.
What are the electronic information resources that might bring changes? In
terms of the academic profession the most significant technological forces for
change are computing resources, modes of storage and retrieval, and
transmission links. There are more and more computers on campuses, increasing
in power as they decrease in size and cost, enhanced with expert
systems,[42]
endowed with speech as well as
speech-recognition and hence possessing capabilities formerly considered unique
to and defining of humans. The by-now familiar automated texts, simulations,
drills, word processing and desktop publishing are being complemented by
storage and retrieval technology (video, videodisc, compact disc). Compact
discs can hold and give access to huge amounts of text, pictures, films: a
single disc can store a national phonebook or ten years of ten journals with an
index permitting rapid searching and printing. "The videodisc can augment
machine-readable text by allowing inclusion of illustrations (such as maps or
medieval illuminations) that are an integral part of a work. It can store
auditory as well as visual information at high densities, can show action as
well as still frames, and can be programmed for a degree of responsiveness that
has not yet been demonstrated in systems designed for the microcomputer alone.
Although the cost of master discs is still high, the very low cost of
duplicating them is an attraction to those who hope to see a democratization of
research resources resulting from the application of one or both of these
technologies."[43]
With scanners and other
data-entry machines "the creation of machine-readable texts should become
almost trivial" and we can foresee "systematic development of a
machine-readable
library."[44]
Telecommunications (broadband two-way channels utilizing fiber optics and
satellite feeds, soon to be enhanced by digital high-definition
television[45])
permit shared and interactive remote
teleconferencing, lectures, tutorials. Networking brings formerly stand-alone
computers into systems of communications and information transfer through which
they can talk to each other. High-speed, high-capacity electronic networks
that already link more than 1,000 universities and research organizations for
research and communication are coming to be called the
"collaboratory."[46]
They will allow faculty to disseminate
research papers, circulate them for prepublication comment more rapidly, more
cheaply, and more easily than in print form. Even more, they will permit
transmission of large full-text files of any sort--archival, manuscript,
published, bibliographical--to any researcher who wants
them.[47]
"Not only printed books and journals but
any accumulation of materials needed for research must someday be
accessible."[48]
In sum, telecommunications
and data-transmission networks will both bring onto campus--or to any linked
receiver set up anywhere--resources located outside it and transmit on-campus
resources off campus.
What magnitude, and pace, of change is on the horizon? Many speak in terms of
revolution. Computers and information technology are "amplifying knowledge and
human powers of expression in ways unequaled since the invention of the
printing press or maybe even since the invention of writing and other forms of
symbolic expression several thousand years
ago."[49]
Derek Bok, when president of Harvard,
wrote that "in theory, at least, the new technology has the power to transform
the nature of the
university."[50]
Steven Muller, president of Johns Hopkins, suggested that sweeping
transformation was already underway: "we are, whether fully conscious of
it or not, already in an environment for higher education that represents
the most drastic change since the founding of the University of Paris
and Bologna and the other great universities some eight or nine centuries
ago."[51]
Probably no one would deny that the new technology will bring changes. But,
then, predictions of revolutionary change have been a staple for some
time,[52]
and relatively little has happened. Computers, video, and
television--like recording and radio before them--have found, at best,
marginal use as enrichment resources in classrooms.
Why has change been slow? Numerous answers have been proffered: the nature of
computerization,[53]
"the natural inertia of the
university,"[54]
the high cost of state-of-the-art technology in an age of shrinking
budgets,[55]
the inability to demonstrate actual benefits (financial as well as
educational),[56]
competitive
mystifications,[57]
and resistance from faculty. The last, especially in the humanities,
may come from a perceived threat to the teacher's role as knowledge
dispenser, lack of recognition for faculty who make innovative uses of
electronic technology, the humanist's ages-old solitary
work-style,[58]
Heideggerean fear that technology is
dehumanizing,[59]
or the anti-practical element in humanists' self-image that makes them
proudly claim "the luxury of
incompetence."[60]
But here we are chasing a flawed question, in seeking reasons why technology
did not bring immediate changes as soon as it was available. Americans in
particular have a propensity to view technology as irresistible and consequent
change as inevitable unless some countervailing power stands--rightly or
wrongly--in its way.
The dominant view, at least in America, is to regard technology
as a powerful independent force for organizational change. The
impact of new manufacturing technology on the creation of
assembly-line production is the classic example of this view.
But it is not the only example. Nearly all the new technologies
pressed on schools since WW II, from paperbacks to microcomputers,
have been advertised as agents that would change education by
making students less dependent on teachers, and by reducing
whole-class, lock-step, batch-processed teaching and learning.
Americans persistently dream about the liberating effects of
technical innovations. There is a St. Simonian, almost utopian
quality about these hopes, a sense that technology itself can
break the chains that bind us to a dreary, work-a-day routine.
Much of the promotion for microcomputers, among other educational
innovations, attends little to their potential for school
instruction, focusing instead quite selectively on their most
extraordinary possibilities. This view of technology seems more
plausible if one focuses just on the possibilities for learning
and teaching that new technologies might open up. But new
possibilities alone will not drive social organizations to
realize them. Incentives are required to encourage the changes
that new technology requires; work often must be reorganized to
accommodate new modes of production; decisions must be taken.
A little analysis of the old assembly-line example reveals that
technology did not drive change in the organization of production.
It only opened up opportunities for such change. Workers and
managers still had to decide whether changes would be made, what
they would be, and how they would be made. Work still had to be
reorganized to accommodate these changes. Technology alone
reorganizes nothing. If we view technology as an enabler rather
than a driver of organizational change, we can ask a question
that enthusiasts and commentators alike have often ignored: What
might it take, in addition to the possibilities opened by the
new technology, to change an organization so that it could take
advantage of the new technical possibilities? . . . [Education
as a sector is poorly situated in this respect.] Unlike most
private firms, it is not organized as a market activity.
Therefore decisions about technology use, among others, are not
much affected by economic incentives. . . . [Institutions select
those technology applications that fit established practices.]"[61]
We think of revolutions as being sudden events, producing
far-reaching changes in a very short period of time. But
the revolution launched by the steam engine took, by any
reasonable account, 150 years. . . . There are no crystal
balls that can tell us what the consequences of a fundamental
technological change are going to be. A genealogical chart of
the First Industrial Revolution would encompass about six
generations. Parents all come to understand the impossibility
of foretelling how their children are going to turn out; how
much more futile it would be for them to try to imagine what
their great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be like. . . .
If we were to make a genealogical chart for the second industrial
[computer] revolution, it would of course be far less elaborate
than the one for the first, because computers have been around
for only about 40 years. . . . At most, there have been two
generations so far. It is true that people in the hardware
business like to say that they are now in the fifth generation,
but that's a little like asking us to accept child marriage. I
think it's more accurate to say we're now in the third generation,
and even that one is at most in its adolescence.[62]
These sociological and historical perspectives suggest why the implications of
electronic information resources will not be realized overnight or at one fell
swoop or even very rapidly. They also suggest that the key issue in
technological innovation lies not within technology itself but among its
potential users--whether they possess a clear vision of opportunities that
permits wise choices about what to pursue and what to prevent. As electronic
information resources become more and more central to higher education, what
fundamental alterations in universities' operations, and hence what rebalancing
of the elements in universities' very nature, do they have the potential to
effect? Which among these should we welcome and which resist?
How Will the Academic Profession Be Altered?
The effect of electronic information resources in American universities will be
to unsettle the current balance between profession and institution, between
teaching responsibilities and other professorial work, between hierarchy and
equality within universities, and between universities and other institutions.
My sense is that unless academic professionals, especially in the humanities,
take effective action to make it otherwise, electronic information resources
will accentuate professional ties over the institutional, depersonalize the
community of teachers and learners, exacerbate inequalities, and infringe the
professoriate's monopoly in higher education.
The unsettling of the professional/institutional dichotomy and of
faculty-student relations is likely to issue from the decentralizing force of
computers and other electronic information resources. The way the faculty does
its work will change in the direction of greater autonomy. Armed with a
computer and a network connection, the academic author will have unprecedented
autonomy in production and dissemination of scholarship. Some have lamented
the word processing mania. . . . As chairman of the math
department at Dartmouth I was proud to have built up a very
able secretarial staff to take routine chores off the
shoulders of the faculty. Then, in 1969, I left to serve as
president of the college. When I returned twelve years later,
I found that faculty members were again typing their own papers.
They were even typing routine notices. Why? Because they had
fallen in love with their word processors. A notice that a
meeting had been postponed would look like an illuminated
manuscript![63]
But the new division of labor that finds faculty members again typing lends
them "almost complete control over their work from beginning to end; it has
begun to eliminate the alienating division of labor between a secretary and the
writer. Now, as never before, authors have the power to take complete control
of their manuscripts from inception to completion, and, even if not
particularly good typists, they should be able to produce a completed copy for
the publisher."[64] They may go even
further, using network access to control the dissemination of the finished
product, as publishers hitherto have done, and (depending on the outcome of
legal review on property rights)[65] perhaps
reap whatever income it generates.
Even as electronic resources give humanities scholars greater control over
their research products, they will, by permitting regular conversations with
national and international peers, vastly decrease the distance that separates
them from their fellow specialists around the world, perhaps in the process
loosening their ties to local colleagues and bringing them closer in character
to what we now call "independent scholars": that is, disciplinary
professionals who have no institutional affiliation. The tension between
discipline and institution is already a reality:
The professor's life is fragmented, and his loyalties are
often sharply divided; he feels a pull to his students, to
his university as an institution, but also to his discipline,
to his society, to possible converts to his way of thinking
beyond the borders of the academy. The modern university is
a house divided, and many of its critics are not at all
convinced it can stand.[66]
[the marketversity has become] just another branch factory
of a nationwide knowledge industry. Faculty and administration
shuffle from one branch to another--interchangeable parts in a
highly mobile market.[67]
At a time when faculty members are in greatest demand for
service around the world, there are intimations that their
efforts to save the world will cost us our university soul.[68]
It is, of course, possible that electronic networks, by relieving scholars from
the burden of travel to archives (which will have been brought online in
machine-readable form) or professional meetings (which might take place by
teleconference), will permit faculty members to become more rooted in the
institutions in which their teaching responsibilities lie. But is it more
likely that scholars' new communications capability and control over their
research will exacerbate the centrifugal pulls on their attention and energies,
lessening scholars' dependence on, and identification with, their institutions?
And would this "lessening" be a good development or bad? The answer to this
depends precisely on how one frames the question. Ithiel de Sola Pool, whose
Technologies of Freedom tried a decade ago to foresee the professional
implications of electronic technology, asked: "What will be the impact of the
new technologies of communication on the structure of institutions of higher
learning? Specifically, will the new developments increase the pressures
toward bureaucratization or will they help preserve the autonomy of the
scholar?" For Pool, the claims of the institution were an infringement, a
threat to academic freedom, which consists in the basic freedom as scholars to
choose and pursue the work of one's own choice. The centrifugal thrust of
electronic resources would therefore be beneficial: "Academic institutions
must hold firmly to their 1000 year old tradition of the autonomy of their
members. They must fight off the pressures toward bureaucratization of their
structure."[69]
I, by contrast, have (above)
framed the question differently, asking whether the new technology "will
exacerbate the centrifugal pulls on their attention and energies, lessening
scholars' dependence on, and identification with, their institutions?" In my
view, the balance between profession and institution is currently threatened
more by centrifugal pulls from the disciplines than by institutional claims on
faculty. And I am convinced, not merely from my experience as an administrator
but on the basis of the values I cherish as a scholar with deep institutional
roots, that the integrity of the professoriate and our ability to fulfill our
professional missions (both teaching and research) depend upon a certain level
of collegial solidarity within institutions that provides the base for faculty
self-governance, without which universities can only--much to their
detriment--be turned over to
bureaucracies.[70]
The centrifugal effects of electronic information resources will, however, do
more than turn faculty's attention outward: they will in addition so change
the foundation of the university's identity that a deep revision of the
institution's rationale will be needed.
The new technologies--microelectronics, fiberoptics, and
photonics--have catapulted us into the information age.
We're no longer tied to the cord on the phone or the computer
plug in the wall. We have arrived at a point where we can
access information from anywhere at almost any time.
Technology has blown away the limits.[71]
In doing so, technology will sweep aside the traditional rationale for the
university as
"a place of concourse." The student or faculty member will be able to access
what is happening on campus from anywhere, and the student or faculty member on
campus to access what is happening anywhere else. Students need not "come from
every quarter" in order to learn, nor professors to teach. "All the riches of
the land, and of the earth. . .first-rate pictures. . .wonderful voices. .
.great preachers, great orators" will be electronically transmissible in an
instant. If telecommunications were to decentralize instruction,
undergraduate or graduate students could take their classes in
their rooms, their parents' homes, or in downtown hotels. . . .
it would be a great change in the organization--and the
theatre--of higher education. And the change would raise
questions about the value of university campuses, dedicated
as they are to classrooms. . . . It also would raise nasty
questions about the faculty. For if classes can be preserved,
packaged, and rebroadcast, why keep the likes of us around,
soaking up salaries by annually offering courses that might
better be taped once every 5 or 10 years? And finally, this
technology would eliminate the need for universities to provide
daycare for superannuated adolescents: The costly and burdensome
administration of dormitories, health services, counselling,
and related services could be reduced or eliminated. But such
measures might produce hostile reactions among parents and
students, eager for relief from each other.[72]
Four prospects, then--remote broadcast of courses with shared access to
educational materials, reduced numbers of faculty, unused campus buildings,
abandoned student services--raise four crucial questions about the future shape
of the academic profession. Could electronic resources offer a radically
different, but satisfactory, pattern of course offerings and course-taking in
the humanities? If so, would there still be a rationale for a university
campus of classrooms, faculty offices, and dormitories? What would determine
the number and distribution of faculty? Would the residential university
continue to have meaning for students?
Electronic resources could, and in my view should, be used to change the
pattern of teaching in American universities--and change it for the better.
The possibilities go far beyond the development of computerized learning aids,
which is the focus of the vast majority of policy discussions. It will become
rational and desirable for scholars to offer courses electronically to students
who seek their knowledge, no matter where the students are located, perhaps no
matter what institution they attend. "There is no more sense in having each
university prepare all its own instructional programs than there would have
been in having each one publish its own
textbooks."[73]
Is there any more reason for each
university offering its own lecture course on The Enlightenment or on Medieval
Japanese Literature? Or for depriving its students of such a course whenever
local faculty cannot teach it? Telecommunications and electronic media make
possible the sharing of courses across universities or even team-teaching of
courses by professors from different universities while they are in different
locations.[74]
What would the consequences of such an innovation be? First, multi-university
course offerings could evolve into unusually elaborated presentations,
"super-courses" with state-of-the-art multimedia features that would remain
beyond the reach of individual professors. Second, students' choices would be
vastly expanded, and so would their autonomy as they pursue their educations.
Third, dozens of professors would be freed from the work of preparing lecture
courses. But a plethora of further questions spin out from these responses.
Who would be anointed to teach the showcase courses and by whom? Would faculty
teaching the showcase courses copyright them and personally receive the income
from them, as some scholars now do with commercial videotapes? Or if such
courses were sponsored by universities, would the professor's institution have
an interest in regulating the content or presentation of the course that it now
renounces in the name of academic
freedom?[75]
How would institutions decide which
courses to accredit for their own students? Or would degrees cease being
university-specific? How much autonomy are we willing for students to have?
Might a different pattern of student residence on campus--perhaps some forms of
periodic rotation onto and away from campus--replace the four nine-month
periods of residence that are now standard for undergraduates? Would faculty
released by technology from teaching lecture courses use their time to teach in
other ways, abandoning the "theory of infection" concept of
education[76]
for more meaningful forms of interactive
instruction? Or would the number of faculty in American universities be
reduced, perhaps with many (or most?) being replaced by parafaculty who can do
the tasks (recitation sections, grading) ancillary to the main, televised
course?
Faculty have to step up to these issues and figure out ways of reallocating
faculty teaching time that will both improve faculty productivity and raise the
quality of education. Paradoxically, we might even find that the seemingly
depersonalizing electronic technology gives us a means of personalizing
education. Though it is the expectation of face-to-face education that brings
students to the university as a "place of concourse," it must be admitted that
personal contact between faculty and student is notably weak in American
universities today. Faculty commitment to teaching is justly questioned.
"Sometimes I think that it's only the economic self-interest of professors that
demands that they be there live at
all."[77]
"Being a college professor is the closest thing to being an entrepreneur in
terms of controlling your own destiny, but you get a salary while you are doing
it."[78]
Technology-based education, as it has been pursued to date, has been
observed to depersonalize education further.
New technologies can have a tremendously beneficial impact
on undergraduate learning, but the narrative evidence we have
examined suggests that most of our current uses of computers,
other forms of programmed instruction, language laboratories,
and televised instruction isolate the learner from the teacher
and the teacher from the assessment process. When colleges
race to install as many microcomputers as possible, only to
use them as drill sergeants or as the exclusive source of
instruction in problem solving, we question whether they are
concerned more with acquiring the machinery than with using
it well. . . . Since no factor seems to account for student
learning and satisfaction with college more than faculty
contact, we are concerned about any technology that has the
potential of diminishing significant intellectual contact
between faculty and students, and of removing the passion
from learning. . . . Learning technologies should be designed
to increase, and not reduce, the amount of personal contact
between students and faculty on intellectual issues.[79]
Faculty have an opportunity, through electronic instructional resources, to
restructure their teaching lives. They can relieve themselves from forms of
instruction like lecture courses that have the double disadvantage of being
excessively time-consuming for themselves and impersonal for their students.
They can invest the time gained in tutorials and discussion formats. They can,
by coming closer to their students again, reassume a responsibility--not simply
to teach courses--but to oversee the intellectual development of their
students.
Whereas the rebalancing of the professional-institutional dichotomy and of
faculty-student relations would issue from the decentralizing force of
computers and tele-communications, the prospect of exacerbated inequalities in
higher education arises from differential access to the hardware, software, and
services that make possible their use. The democratizing potential of
information resources has been widely assumed. "[The computer] has a great
leveling effect in making the entire society 'information-literate,' and making
information available to people where they need it and can use
it."[80]
Just as Gutenberg's movable type placed in
lay hands the texts previously held only by the learned, information now
accessible only to initiates or the privileged would be opened to all.
Nonetheless, on the basis of experience to date one can foresee gaps widening
rather than closing, and widening to disturbing proportions, among students,
institutions, and disciplines.
By one recent estimate there are, in American universities and colleges, over
half a million personal computers but nearly 10 million
students;[81]
so computing power is concentrated in the
hands of relatively few. Gender, ethnic, and economic differentials are
marked. Unequal access to expensive tools is of relatively small import if
those tools are merely enhancements or motivators, but will become intolerable
as they become central to the educational process.
Among institutions, distribution has also been uneven. Computing resources
have been concentrated in elite colleges and universities, with regional public
colleges, community colleges, historically black colleges, and less-selective
private colleges undersupplied. "Vendor attention (and gifts) generally favor
elite private and large public institutions. State and community colleges are
often viewed as less important and certainly less wealthy
customers."[82]
While differentiation among institutions
is, and will remain, characteristic of American higher
education,[83]
too great an inequality of resources cannot be healthy for the system or
for the society.
But the inequality with the most serious professional implications is among
disciplines. "Computing in the humanities faces a substantial period of
'catching up.'"[84]
The relative under-endowment of the humanities with electronic information
resources has several causes. First, of course, is the nature of the
field of study.
Humanists work with knowledge that is open-ended, speculative, that calls for
interpretation, criticism, and theory: that is, little amenable to the formal
rules, algorithms, and verification that computers excel in. But much more is
involved in determining the opportunities available in the humanities in
universities that are no longer "intellectual
oases."[85]
As the quest for desktop resources advances, more departments
and academic units attempt to initiate individual negotiations
with vendors. Departmentally negotiated "gift" agreements
began in engineering and computer science programs, soon
spread to business programs, and soon will beckon the less
computer-intensive disciplines. The vendor interest is
obvious: a donated lab to X department means another strategic
alliance with a prominent program. But these arrangements
impose a territoriality among faculty and students, providing
computer access to some solely on the basis of major or degree
program, but tending also to provide less access for "pure
humanities" students and faculty.[86]
High technology has already altered some of the traditional
faculty relationships in higher education. Departments that
involve themselves in high technology receive the largess of
private industry and the government, not only in research
grants and gifts, but in consulting arrangements and positions
for graduate students. Consequently, some departments have
large per faculty budgets for travel, xeroxing, hourly help,
and other support services, while others ration their paper
clips and pencils. This inequality might be accepted as an
inevitable aberration, well-confined and benign, except that
the migration of faculty to high technology centers and the
deeper involvement of remaining faculty with industry
(sometimes to the point of divided appointments) further
reduces the ability of colleges and universities to be
intellectual institutions, immune to the pressures and
constraints of business and politics. A faculty that spends
half of its time with industry is not a faculty that is
totally free to question old truths and search out new ones.
At risk is not just the integrity of the sciences, but the
well-being of the arts and humanities also. The problem of
utility, which Eva Brann discusses in her Paradoxes of
Education in a Republic, is being settled without
discussion in favor of a commitment to the immediate needs
of industry and government. With this bending, the arts and
humanities are being threatened with second-class citizenship:
happy, amusing folks to have around, but not ones you can
depend on to help our industrial connections. As the
university becomes more and more a partner with industry and
government in developing and applying computer technology,
the role of the arts and humanities will diminish. . . .
Students have responded to this new era in American life by
rushing to enroll in the high-utility programs: computer
sciences, engineering, and business. Foreign language
departments are withering, as are departments in the arts
and humanities. The prognosis for such departments is not
particularly bright.[87]
For some time now the universities have been unable to "support the humanities
in the style to which the sciences have become accustomed."[88] It must be understood that the humanities
are at risk in American universities even before electronic information
resources begin to transform the academic profession. Institutional funds do
not build libraries the way grants and contracts build laboratories. Humanists
pay out of pocket for the tools of their trade (hard enough to do when the
tools are pen and paper, much less computers), which scientists need not do.
Can the electronic university afford humanists? As the needs of the
"information age" put universities under increasing pressure to turn out
scientists and engineers, can the humanities be regarded as anything but
frills? Warning shots have already crossed our bow:
Advocates of technology in education are not declaring war
on the humanities and arts, but we should remember that in
a world of limited resources, satellite communication systems
and computer assisted instruction may in fact absorb funds
that are needed for verdant campuses, art studios and books
with leather bindings.[89]
After shivering appropriately at the implications of this statement, humanities
professionals need to formulate priorities to counter further marginalization
and develop organs for raising their voices with policymakers, institutional
and public.
Through it all, as academics come to terms with the opportunities and problems
presented by electronic information resources, they need to see the trump card
that sits in other entities' hands: the potential of the new technology to
undermine the professoriate's monopoly on advanced education. At present, the
road to professional careers--whether in sciences, humanities, or
engineering--runs through universities, which offer both general education and
specialized training. If, as we have said, the electronic university may lose
its general education to internal competition, it may be that specialized
training will be lost to external competition. The CEO of IBM, exposing the
need to "create an entirely new, dynamic system of education from preschool to
graduate school," has foreseen
the possibility that our principal institutions for learning
and research could very well become the corporate college.
Why the advent of corporate colleges? If, as some forecasts
have it, our nation faces a shortage of half a million
scientists and engineers by the turn of the century, the
business community, in order to survive, will fund and staff
its own institutions of higher education. I do not want to
see--none of us wants to see--this future. . . . Business
doesn't have all the answers, but it does understand the
requirements of the jobs of the future.[90]
The prospect of external competition may serve as the universities'
wake-up call. "[The world of applied training] constitutes, in fact,
the university world's long-delayed 'Japan,' the main competitor which
may finally force some changes in our own institutional
practices."[91]
There is and will be competition in this "information society."
More importantly, there is and will be competition in the arena
of imparting knowledge. . . . For example, it is probably not
going to be enough in future years to say simply that we are
in the business of educating people, because a great many other
organizations and institutions are getting into that business,
too. Perhaps we want to say we are providing a certain type of
education to a certain clientele with specific intended outcomes.
The more precise the defi-nition, the better able we are to set
precise goals and arrange strategies.[92]
Conclusion
Twenty-five years ago John Pierce, then at Bell Labs, wrote that "after growing
wildly for years, the field of computing . . . appears to be reaching its
infancy."[93]
The same sense of sitting
toward the beginning of an open-ended course is with us today. Unable to see
clearly where it will lead, we yet need to begin to take action to ensure that
electronic information resources will reshape the academic profession for the
better.
It is hard to know what the remainder of the century holds. It seems certain,
though, that the decade in which we face the challenge of integrating
electronic information resources into our professional lives will be a time of
budget constraints such as we have never experienced and that universities will
be forced to focus their own purposes and priorities with unaccustomed
precision. If Ernest Boyer's prediction is borne out and the 1990s are "the
decade of the undergraduate in American higher
education,"[94]
then we will have set to rest public
concern with the quality of education. But public impatience has, justly or
not, moved on to question the very structure of universities, including the way
tuition pays for scholarship. In default of leadership from universities and
from national scholarly associations, faculties will begin to lose--whether to
some distant colleague or to a corporate competitor--the opportunity to teach
that has paid their professional salaries.
The imminent universe of digitized information will both raise new issues and
exacerbate problems that have been festering for decades. If past be prologue,
universities will survive, for they have been remarkably tenacious. "Clark
Kerr has pointed out that 66 western institutions have survived since the year
1530 without significant alteration in form, and that 62 of these are
universities."[95]
But the university of
2010 may be as different from the institution of 1992 as today's university is
from those in 1530. Who will draw its profile: university bureaucracies or
public authorities or corporate competitors or faculties? What conception of
the university will reseed or succeed the "place of concourse"? Will the
university continue merely as owner of the electronic hardware or as a mere
waystation for adolescents? Or can it find new rationales as educator,
alchemist of information into knowledge, guardian of intellectual freedom?
Footnotes
[*] Senior Associate Dean of the School
of Humanities and Sciences, 1991; Associate Dean of the School of Humanities
and Sciences, 1982-87, 1989-91; Dean of Undergraduate Studies, 1982-87.
[1]These questions were supplied by the organizers of the
conference for which this paper was prepared.
[2]William H. Graves, "A National Perspective?" in William H.
Graves, ed., Computing Across the Curriculum: Academic Perspectives
(McKinney, Texas, 1989), p. 429.
[3]Jerome Yavarkovsky, "A University-Based Electronic
Publishing Network," EDUCOM Review (Fall 1990), p. 19.
[4]Graves, "Introduction," in Graves, ed., Computing,
p. 5.
[5]Survey conducted by the Higher Education Research
Institute at UCLA and reported in Carolyn J. Mooney, "Professors Feel Conflict
Between Roles in Teaching and Research, Say Students Are Badly Prepared,"
Chronicle of Higher Education (May 8, 1991), pp. A15-17 as well as in
Society (November/December 1991), pp. 2-3.
[6]Graves, "Introduction," p. 4.
[7]Richard A. Meiss, "Development of Teaching Software: Some
Hindsights," in Graves, ed., Computing, pp. 43, 49.
[8]Milton D. Glick, "Integrating Computing into Higher
Education," EDUCOM Review (Summer 1990), p. 36.
[9]Robert W. Hendersen, "Microcomputer-Based Instructional
Computing in Psychology: Where, What, When, Why, and Who?," in Graves, ed.,
Computing, p. 23.
[10]George L. Wolford, Lawrence M. Levine, and Thomas E.
Byrne, "Dartmouth College: The Evolution of Instructional Computing -- Survival
of the Fittest," in Graves, ed., Computing, p. 244.
[11]Hendersen, "Psychology," p. 23.
[12]Loretta L. Jones and Stanley G. Smith, "Case Study:
Exploring Chemistry," in Graves, ed., Computing, p. 32.
[13]Jones and Smith, "Case Study," p. 32.
[14]Glick, "Integrating," p. 38.
[15]Nina Garrett, with James Noblitt and Frank Dominguez,
"Computers in Foreign Language Teaching and Research: A 'New Humanism'," in
Graves, ed., Computing , p. 137.
[16]Judith Axler Turner, "Software for Teaching Given Little
Credit in Tenure Reviews," Chronicle of Higher Education (March 18,
1987), p. A20.
[17]Thomas J. DeLoughry, "Plan for Scholars to Review Peers'
Academic Software Is Announced by College Computing Consortium," Chronicle
of Higher Education (February 17, 1988), pp. A13, A18; Thomas J.
DeLoughry, "Faculty Attitudes Mixed on Peer-Review Process for Computer
Software," Chronicle of Higher Education (October 26, 1988), pp. A1,
A20-21.
[18]Graves, "Introduction," p. 5.
[19]Glick, "Integrating," p. 36.
[20]Robert J. Cavalier, "Shifting Paradigms in Higher
Education and Educational Computing," EDUCOM Review (May/June 1992), p.
34.
[21]J. Michael Williams, quoted in DeLoughry, "Attitudes,"
p. A21.
[22]Quoted in Turner, "Software," p. A20.
[23]Turner, "Software," p. A20.
[24]Turner, "Software," p. A20.
[25]Turner, "Software," p. A20.
[26]Cavalier, "Paradigms," p. 34.
[27]Turner, "Software," p. A20.
[28]The most notable have been Association of American
Colleges, Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic
Community (Washington, 1985); William Bennett, To Reclaim A Legacy: A
Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, 1984); Ernest L.
Boyer, College: The Undergraduate Experience in America (New York,
1987); National Institute of Education, Involvement in Learning: Realizing
the Potential of American Higher Education (Washington, 1984).
[29]Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities
of the Professoriate (Princeton, 1990), pp. xii, 1, 34.
[30]N.I.E., Involvement in Learning, p. 59.
[31]Cavalier, "Paradigms," p. 32.
[32]Wolford et al.., "Dartmouth College," p. 244.
[33]Graves, "National Perspective," pp. 429-431.
[34] Boyer mentions courseware development as a scholarly
function that broader definitions should come to encompass: "Preparing quality
computer software, for example, is increasingly a function of serious scholars,
and even videocassette and television offer opportunity for communicating ideas
to nonspecialists in creative new ways." Boyer, Scholarship, p. 36.
[35]Donald Kennedy, "Stanford in its Second Century: An
Address to the Stanford Community, 5 April 1990," p. 10.
[36]Richard L. Venezky, "The Impact of Computer Technology
on Higher Education," in Jan H. Blits, ed., The American University:
Problems, Prospects, and Trends (Buffalo, 1985), p. 63.
[37]In our rapid survey we must, for the moment, gloss over
the tremendous diversity within the academic profession that was the
fundamental finding of Burton Clark's probing and insightful examination of the
condition of the professoriate in the mid-1980s: "Variety is its name, for it
is inevitably a conglomerate of interests in which purposes and tasks steadily
divide along lines of subject, clientele, and occupational linkage. . . . The
routes of cultural integration lie less in unities of commonness than in
overlapping meanings among narrow specialisms." Burton R. Clark, The
Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds (Princeton, 1987), pp. xxi,
xxviii.
[38]This definition borrows from but heavily reworks those
given by Clark in The Academic Life, pp. xxiii-xxiv and by Robert E.
Young in "Faculty Development and the Concept of 'Profession'," Academe
LXXIII (1987), p. 12.
[39]Jo Ann Gerdeman Thompson, The Modern Idea of the
University (New York, 1984).
[40]John Henry Newman, "What is a University?," (1856),
reprinted in Michael Tierney, ed., University Sketches (Dublin, 1952),
pp. 15-16.
[41]Young, "'Profession'," pp. 12-13.
[42]"I used to say that computers were only able to assist
their human users; with expert systems they are becoming more like working
partners." Robert L. Oakman, "Perspectives on Teaching Computing in the
Humanities," Computers and the Humanities XXI (1987), p. 232.
[43]Joseph Raben, "Computer Applications in the
Humanities,"Science CCXXVIII (April 1985), p. 435.
[44]Raben, "Applications," p. 435.
[45]Edmund L. Andrews, "And Now for Something Substantially
Different: Digital TV," New York Times (July 12, 1992), p. E22.
[46]Yavarkovsky, "Network," p. 15.
[47]On the National Research and Education Network (NREN),
see Beverly T. Watkins, "Humanities Scholars Seen as 'Pioneer' Users of
Research and Education Network," Chronicle of Higher Education (April 8,
1992), p. A22 and "The National Research and Education Network: Promise of a
New Information Environment," Educational Technology (February 1991),
pp. 59-60.
[48]Raben, "Applications," p. 437.
[49]George E. Brown, Jr., "Computers and Education:
Revolutionizing the Free Market of Ideas," EDUCOM Bulletin (Spring
1987), p. 11.
[50]Derek Bok, "Looking into Education's High-Tech Future,"
EDUCOM Bulletin (Fall 1985), p. 3.
[51]Steven Muller, "The Post-Gutenberg University," in
American Association for Higher Education, Colleges Enter the Information
Society (Washington, 1984), p. 32.
[52]See for example Robert J. Spinrad, "The Electronic
University," EDUCOM Bulletin (Fall/Winter 1983), pp. 4-8, 15.
[53]"One of the problems we must recognize is that it is
easier to integrate computers into an airline, business, or hospital than into
a university, because in those areas most of the tasks are repetitive, not
creative. Increased productivity in a business or the airline industry yields
quantifiable results that can be converted into new resources and new revenue.
Increased productivity in higher education is hard to define, let alone
quantify and measure. We try to describe it by the quality of our graduates
and the impact of our research results, but converting these into a bottom line
is almost impossible." Glick, "Integrating," p. 36.
[54]Richard L. Van Horn, "How Significant is Computing for
Higher Education?," EDUCOM Bulletin (Spring 1985), p. 8. See also
Glick, "Integrating," p. 35: "I am a serious skeptic about our ability to
integrate computing into most of our curriculum in the near future in a
substantive way. This is not due to any lack of technological capacity. Even
on "Star Wars" campuses, the culture changes slowly." See also George M. Kren
and George Christakes, Scholars and Personal Computers: Microcomputing in
the Humanities and Social Sciences (New York, 1988), p. 106: "The academic
profession seems more resistant to change than others, and, despite claims of
collegiality, is quite Hobbesian--with individual members carefully guarding
their findings until they can present or publish a paper under suitable
circumstances."
[55]"The unwillingness of faculty to make trade-offs is an
important barrier to use of technology. In the next ten years, society is not
going to subsidize university expansion to any great degree. Were we to provide
technological alternatives that increase faculty productivity, it does not seem
likely that departments would agree to have fewer but more productive teachers
in order to pay for those productivity tools. Most department heads judge
success by whether or not the number of faculty members in the department has
increased." Glick, "Integrating," p. 37.
[56]"A very important issue is the absence of full costing
of education. It is industry that, in my belief, attests to the
cost-effectiveness of Plato in education, because industry thoroughly computes
the cost of education. This includes the cost of the time that workers spend
in a course or at a terminal. If they are away overnight, then food, lodging,
and transportation are included. Industry does a full-cost analysis of what it
takes to educate its workers. Our universities have not even a vague notion of
the full cost of the education they provide; only faculty, service, equipment,
and maintenance costs are taken into account, and these are not allocated
accurately. We don't build the students' opportunity cost into our cost of
education. Therefore, we cannot come up with the same kind of price trade-offs
that we could if we were to cost full out." Glick, "Integrating," p. 37.
[57]"Computers are still controlled largely by technocrats,
who tend to be reluctant to share them and who benefit from perpetuating the
myth that computers have exclusively scientific, technical, and clerical
functions." Raben, "Applications," 437.
[58]"Perhaps the greatest obstacle to full utilization of
the computer by humanists is their centuries-old tradition of independent work.
Ingrained in our collective mind is the image of the solitary humanist,
surrounded by piles of open books and scribbled notes, mining for one more
quotation to provide a footnote. Humanists are having difficulty in adjusting
to an environment in which cooperation may be the best path to success.
Whereas articles by single authors are still often the foundation for
successful careers, computer software developed in the same way is not likely
to achieve much status for itself and its author. The labor required to write
programs is usually far too great for individuals who have other demands on
their time. Similarly, analysis of large data bases such as are now accessible
is seldom manageable by 'loners.'" Raben, "Applications," p. 437.
[59]Still strong among humanists, and even a source of
professional pride for some, is the sense that technology is destructive of
human values and hence antithetical to the aims of the humanities:
"technological anxiety. . . fear [of] quantitative style overpowering and
suppressing qualitative aspects of life [issues in] resistance to the
introduction of technology in education." Edward A. Friedman, "Technology and
Humanism--Are They Compatible?," in Technology and Education: Policy,
Implementation, Evaluation (Washington, 1981), pp. 290, 293.
[60]Kren and Christakes, Scholars, p. 21.
[61]David K. Cohen, "Educational Technology and School
Organization," in Raymond S. Nickerson and Philip P. Zodhiates, eds.,
Technology in Education: Looking Toward 2020 (Hillsdale, N.J., 1988),
pp. 240-41.
[62]Herbert A. Simon, "The Steam Engine and the Computer:
What Makes Technology Revolutionary?," EDUCOM Bulletin (Spring 1987),
pp. 2-3.
[63]John G. Kemeny, "Computers in Education: Progress at a
Snail's Pace," EDUCOM Review (Fall 1990), p. 46.
[64]Kren and Christakes, Scholars, p. 19.
[65]See Steven W. Gilbert, "Information Technology,
Intellectual Property, and Education," EDUCOM Review (Spring 1990), pp.
14-20. See also Scott Bennett and Nina Matheson, "Scholarly Articles: Valuable
Commodities for Universities," Chronicle of Higher Education (May 27,
1992) and letters to the editor responding thereto in the July 1, 1992 issue,
p. B3. The issue of ownership is of first importance and requires more
discussion than it receives here. If and when the publisher as middle-man is
rendered unnecessary by scholars' direct access to online publishing, who--the
individual faculty member or her/his university--will be entitled to the income
that now accrues to publishers? Will universities claim ownership on the
grounds that the work was done on "company time," a claim not currently made
with respect to print publications? At the heart of the matter is the
professional/institutional dichotomy being discussed in this talking paper.
[66]Stephen Orgel and Alex Zwerdling, "On Judging Faculty,"
in Robert S. Morison, ed., The Contemporary University: U.S.A. (Boston,
1966), p. 221.
[67]James H. Billington, "The Humanistic Heartbeat Has
Failed," Life (May 24, 1968), p. 32.
[68]James A. Perkins, The University in Transition
(Princeton, 1966), p. 4.
[69]Ithiel de Sola Pool, "Academic Practices, Freedoms, and
the New Technologies," in Colleges Enter the Information Society, p.
24.
[70]The Pew Higher Education Research Program devoted the
September 1992 issue of its Policy Perspectives to what it calls the
most urgent issue facing higher education: "too often the commitment faculty
make to their home institutions has declined in just proportion as their own
professional activity has increased. This shift in emphasis has brought about
increased cost, a decline in faculty teaching and mentorship, and growing
concerns about the coherence and quality of instruction that students receive.
The time is ripe for broad discussions concerning the social contract that
links individual faculty to the mission and goals of their home institution.
Strong leadership is needed to ensure a balance between faculty members'
commitment to their professional interests and to the educational goals of
their institutions."
[71]Robert Allen, "Technology for a New Renaissance,"
EDUCOM Review (Winter 1990), p. 24.
[72]Cohen, "Educational Technology," pp. 238-39.
[73]Simon, "Steam Engine," p. 5.
[74]Consortia for course sharing have been established among
eleven institutions with substantial Hispanic enrollments (see Chronicle of
Higher Education, July 15, 1992, p. A19) and by the National Education
Telecommunications Organization (see Chronicle of Higher Education, June
10, 1992, p. A15).
[75]Pool ("Academic Practices," p. 21) raises this issue on
the basis of experience at the Open University in Great Britain: "When
individual teachers in ordinary classrooms say something foolish or
controversial, that is their academic freedom. Others, including their
students or other teachers, may dispute what was said, but it is not a matter
of great import. It is rarely important enough to stimulate any kind of
bureaucratic interference. But what goes over the air in the name of the Open
University is not that sort of individual eccentricity. . . . Material that
would otherwise be an ordinary professor's individual point of view, becomes a
matter of institutional policy."
[76]Simon, "Steam Engine," p. 4: "Up to now, particularly at
the university level, we have operated on what I call the 'infection theory' of
learning. This theory holds that if you assemble a large number of people in a
room and spray a large number of words at them, some of those words will be
infectious and will stick with some of those people and perhaps affect their
future behavior. (Another form of the theory is that people are infected if
they spray themselves with words from a large number of pages of print.)"
[77]Simon, "Steam Engine," p. 5.
[78]A business professor at a research university in 1984,
quoted in Clark, Academic Life, p. 69.
[79]N.I.E., Involvement in Learning, p. 29. That
educational technology has been developed, and used, in depersonalizing forms
would seem to account for the interesting fact that to date technology has been
most extensively applied in those institutions in which faculty assume least
responsibility for student's development (adult education, community colleges)
and least extensively applied where such responsibility is most central (high
schools, liberal arts colleges). See Cohen, "Educational Technology," pp.
238-239.
[80]Louis Robinson, "The Computer: An Enabling Instrument,"
in Colleges Enter the Information Society, p. 12.
[81]Brown, "Computers and Education," p. 13.
[82]Steven W. Gilbert and Kenneth C. Green, "New Computing
in Higher Education," Change (May/June 1986), p. 43. See also, N.I.E.,
Involvement in Learning, p. 29.
[83]Clark (Academic Life, p. 61) makes a fascinating
and important argument about the functionality of inter-institutional
inequality: "Despite all the problems of invidious distinction that it brings,
institutional hierarchy is a way of inducing hundreds of thousands of
quasi-autonomous professors and institutional administrators to work hard. . .
. It generates the process of academic drift in which institutions of lesser
status seek to make themselves over in the image of institutions of higher
standing. . . . Especially in a large, open, and competitive system of higher
education, hierarchical differentiation and the merit principle may be
inseparable."
[84]Raben, "Applications," p. 435.
[85]Stephen C. Ehrmann, "Challenging the Ideal of
Campus-Bound Education," EDUCOM Review (March/April 1992), p. 24.
[86]Gilbert and Green, "New Computing," p. 43.
[87]Venezky, "Impact," pp. 64-65. The reference is to Eva
T.H. Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago, 1979).
[88]Orgel and Zwerdling, "On Judging Faculty," p. 220.
[89]Friedman, "Technology and Humanism," p. 293.
[90]John F. Akers, "Two Visions and the Challenge for Higher
Education," EDUCOM Review (Winter 1989), p. 14-15.
[91]Richard A. Lanham, "Electronic Texts and University
Structures," in Scholars and Research Libraries in the 21st Century
(ACLS Occasional Paper, no. 14, 1990), p. 32.
[92]Elizabeth L. Young, "Looking to the Future: What
Business Are We In?" in Technology and Education: Policy, Implementation,
Evaluation (Washington, 1981), p. 313.
[93]Quoted in Spinrad, "Electronic University," p. 4.
[94]Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship, p. xi.
[95]Venezky, "Impact," p. 64.
