Electronics and the Dim Future of the University

John Naughton's Welcome to the desktop degree... today pointed to Electronics and the Dim Future of the University by Eli Noam, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science (Vol. 270, pp 247-249, October 13, 1995), in which Noam (who has been ploughing a deep furrow at Columbia University for over 30 years as a professor of economics and finance) provides a brief, forceful, and exceptionally far-sighted analysis of why the Internet, computing, and the exponential growth in the production of scientific and other knowledge, will change universities.

The article deserves to be read in full.

To whet your appetite here are its concluding three paragraphs.

In presenting this bleak scenario for the future of the university, it is easy to appear as yet another dismal economist or technological determinist and to invite a response reaffirming the importance of quality education, academic values, the historic role of education in personal growth and the human need for freewheeling exchange. Such arguments are correct, may make one feel good, but are beside the point. The question is not whether universities are important to society, to knowledge or to their members -- they are -- but rather whether the economic foundation of the present system can be maintained and sustained in the face of the changed flow of information brought about by electronic communications. It is not research and teaching that will be under pressure -- they will be more important than ever -- but rather their instructional setting, the university system. To be culturally important is necessary (one hopes) but, unfortunately, not sufficient for a major claim on public and private resources. We can regret this, but we can't deny it.

This scenario suggests a change of emphasis for universities. True teaching and learning are about more than information and its transmission. Education is based on mentoring, internalization, identification, role modeling, guidance, socialization, interaction and group activity. In these processes, physical proximity plays an important role. Thus, the strength of the future physical university lies less in pure information and more in college as a community; less in wholesale lecture, and more in tutorial; less in Cyber-U and more in Goodbye-Mr.-Chips College. Technology would augment, not substitute, and provide new tools for strengthening community on campus, even beyond graduation. In research, the physical university's strength lies in establishing on-campus specialized islands of excellence that benefit from the complementarity of physical proximity. This requires the active management of priorities and a significant unbundling of the credentialing, teaching, housekeeping and research functions. In the validation of information, the university will become more important than ever. With the explosive growth in the production of knowledge, society requires credible gatekeepers of information, and has entrusted some of that function to universities and its resident experts, not to information networks. But to safeguard the credibility of this function requires universities to be vigilant against creeping self-commercialization and self-censorship.

The threats to universities may not appear overnight, but they will surely arrive. People often overestimate the impact of change in the short term, but they also underestimate it in the long term. They recall that earlier promises about the potential of broadcasting as a tool of distance education failed to materialize, and they now believe that even a vastly more effective interactive medium will meet the same fate, forever. Yet the fundamental forces at work cannot be ignored. They are the consequence of a reversal in the historic direction of information flow. In the past, people came to the information, which was stored at the university. In the future, the information will come to the people, wherever they are. What then is the role of the university? Will it be more than a collection of remaining physical functions, such as the science laboratory and the football team? Will the impact of electronics on the university be like that of printing on the medieval cathedral, ending its central role in information transfer? Have we reached the end of the line of a model that goes back to Nineveh, more than 2500 years ago? Can we self-reform the university, or must things get much worse first?

Noam's Education is based on mentoring, internalization, identification, role modeling, guidance, socialization, interaction and group activity is a pretty good high level specification for an educational institution. I'd love to know whether Noam would now be quite as firm about the importance of physical proximity as he was in 1995.

Comments

[Asimong]

I'd say that physical proximity is indeed very useful, if only because the effective bandwidth of communication is so much greater than for electronic approaches. The non-sequitur is surely thinking that you need an institution (or even more bizarre, an institution like a current university) to enable that proximity. We do, however, need more common, effective and popular ways of electronically facilitating meeting up, and (similarly) getting to know like-minded people with similar intentions.

Simon

[Brian Mulligan]

Noam may have not been able to predict the rise of tools that facilitate this "proximity" over the Internet. However, possibly more importantly, even though such "proximity" may be important for quality in the learning process, many people underestimate the importance of convenience to people. If a course is of high quality but not convenient, they often cannot attend. If the other way around, they can live with it (particularly if the price is right).