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]
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]
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.
