Electronic
Community of Scholars and the Future of the University
Eli M. Noam
Presented at Trinity College
The Liberal Arts College in the Civic Sphere
February 22, 1999
You've read all about it in the airline magazines -- the tremendous advances in
computer networks as tools for research; the cheap and rapid communication
links; the sharing of information and data among researchers around the world;
the loss of stifling organizational hierarchy; the impossibility of coercive
governmental controls; the replacement of crass commercialism by an ethic of
sharing Technology, it seems, has created a new set of tools for academic
endeavors, strengthening and enriching the existing research environment.
Parts of this scenario will come true. Yet the notion which digital
fundamentalists hold, that the global academic village academic is all gain and
no pain,except protecting against a few immature but creative youngsters, and
the hand-holding of a few technologically obsolete old-timers, is touchingly
naive. True, communications technology will link the information resources of
the globe. But as one connects in new ways one also disconnects the old ways.
Thus, in my view, new communications technologies are likely to weaken the
traditional institutions of research, learning, and teaching.
Many of the traditional functions of universities will be superseded, their
financial base eroded, their technology replaced, and their role in
intellectual inquiry reduced.This not a cheerful scenario for higher education.
Community, to commune, communicate, the terms are related linguistically
as well as functionally to each other, to togetherness, and to exchange.
Communities are defined by heir members' ability to communicate. Language, more
than any other factor, defines cultural identity, nationality, borders. The
range of local communities is set by the practicalities of communication. In
France, the size of an administrative departement was set by Napoleon to
permit an official to travel to any point of his domain and still be home for
dinner. Around the world, the advent trains, automobiles, and telephones
expanded the range of metropolitan regions. Today, new information technology
connects in new, efficient, convenient, and cheap ways. Which also means that
it makes traditional forms of communication and the communities they define
relatively less efficient, convenient, and cheap. One such community is the
university.
To look at the impact of communications technology on universities we must
begin by defining what scholars do. Scholarly activity, if we look at it
dispassionately, consists primarily of three elements: to produce and screen
information; to preserve it; and to transmit it to others. Accomplishing each
of these functions is based on a set of technologies and economics. Together
with history and politics, they lead to a set of institutions. Change the
technology and economics, and the institutions must change, eventually.
Information institutions started about 5,000-8,000 years ago when at different
places around the world specialized preservers and producers of information
emerged in the form of priests.1
They congregated at particular locations, called temples or shrines, to
commune, standardize acceptable knowledge and transmit it. Collectively they
were also the primary information storage medium of their societies. But since
reliance on individual and group memory to store and transmit information
across time and space was clearly inefficient, recording methods emerged.
Writers had to be trained, and schools emerged. A surviving copying exercise
used in a school for scribes in ancient Egypt, an academy for budding scholars
and bureaucrats, described one of the incentives for learning with timeless
simplicity: "Be a scribe! It saves you from hard work, and preserves you
from every kind of labor."2
Writing, in turn, led to information storage institutions. Under the Assyrian
king Assurbanipal (668-627 BC), the royal library in Nineveh stocked over
10,000 works on 30,000 tablets.3 Documents
were arranged by subject in different rooms: history, government, biography,
geography and commerce, laws, legends, mythology, religion, hymns, astronomy
and astrology, biology, mathematics, medicine, and natural history. Thus,
knowledge was already being organized along lines that are strikingly similar
to the departmental lines of today's universities. Importantly, the rooms were
open to scholars who congregated to use the information and probably to add to
it. No doubt they also argued among themselves, and were surrounded by
disciples. It was probably the first university in the sense of
comprehensiveness of coverage, though we have no evidence about the extent of
an organized teaching activity.
This model -- centrally stored information, scholars coming to the information,
and a wide range of information subjects under one institutional roof -- was
logical when information was scarce, reproduction expensive and restricted, and
specialization low.It became also the model for the most formidable of
knowledge institutions of antiquity, the Great Library of Alexandria. In terms
of storage, the relentless acquisitiveness was extraordinary. For three centuries,
it grew at an average of about 3,000 volumes per year, lavishly subsidized by a
state that wanted to shine as a center of culture.4 At
its peak, the library had a collection of nearly 700,000 volumes.This
extraordinary wealth contrasts with the information poverty elsewhere, and with
the scarcity of physical dissemination of information. When the great library
was destroyed, humanity lost a vast store of the accumulated information of
centuries.For example, most volumes of the complete history of Phoenicia
perished forever, as did most of the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Less recognized is the function of the library as a graduate university. From
the beginning, Ptolemy I Soter and his librarian, Demetrius, recruited some of
the foremost scholars of the Hellenistic culture to what was called the
"museum."5 Examples are
geometrician Euclid, the playwright Philemon, and the polymath Erastosthenes. These
scholars were surrounded by disciples and apprentices.Again, the pattern was
similar to Nineveh's. Scholars came to the information storage and produced
still more information there, and students came to the scholars.
When the spirit of collection and inquisitiveness of antiquity gave way to the
Dark Ages, at least in Christian Europe, the seeking of knowledge was
discouraged. What there held in closed religious orders, and recorded in a
language few could understand or read. St. Augustine of Hippo, who died in 430
AD, advised: 'There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with
danger. This is the disease of curiosity... It is this which drives us on to
try to discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our
understanding, which can avail us nothing and which men should not wish to
learn... In the midst of these things which float unceasingly around me in
everyday life, I am never surprised at any of them, and never captivated by my
genuine desire to study them... I no longer dream of the stars.'"
But by the late Middle Ages, with economic prosperity on the rise, information
production expanded again through the emergence of universities, from Salerno
to Paris, Oxford, Reggio, and Montpellier.These islands of knowledge and scholarship
attracted students from afar.A community of scholars was created again, with
Latin the common language. Information flowed through a network of diffusion of
manuscripts and letters, but especially through the movement of itinerant
students and scholars. The direction of the flow was same as it had been in
Nineveh and Alexandria: information was the factor that was scarce and hard to
move. People were more mobile, even when transportation was primitive. One
might would expect the advent of printing in the 15th century to change these
"terms of trade" by making dissemination of information so much
cheaper. But it did not. To the contrary, universities grew in importance and
size, and continued to do so well into the tail end of the 20th century. Among
the economic reasons is first, that even if the total cost of a book copy was
much lower than that of a manuscript, it was still much higher than the
incremental cost of its use. In other words, it still made more sense to share
the information in a library than to acquire it individually. This logic is
still very much with us for the acquisition of physical "hard copy."
If anything, its impacthas increased impact with the expansion of knowledge
production.
Second, despite the image of the solitary scholar toiling in the ivory tower,
much of scholarship is based on some form of team work. Sociologists of science
have long supported the notion of knowledge creations as a communal endeavor.
Some of it is due to large research projects that require many participants, or
to expensive equipment that must be shared by several researchers. But most of
it is due to the diffusion of information that is facilitated by physical
proximity, and to the complementarity of intellectual production that operates
through dialogue, synthesis, and collaboration.
The third fundamental economic factor for the university is its teaching
function, and the related credentialing in the mastery of a body of knowledge.
For a long time, teaching technology, or more correctly its absence, made the
physical aggregation of students the most efficient arrangement, with teaching
a wholesale (lecture) rather than retail (tutorial) activity, partly again
because the incremental costs of adding another listener are quite low. Since
students took a wide variety of study programs and courses, the teaching
curriculum was broad. The economic foundations for this system were student
payments, the related public funding for instructing the young, and public and
private support for advancing the state of knowledge, a public good.
The system remained remarkably stable for 2,500 years. But it is now in the
process of breaking down. The reason is not primarily technological. Technology
simply enables change. The fundamental reason is that the production of
information has undermined the traditional university structure, making it
ready to collapse in slow motion once alternatives to its function become
possible. We all know that the quantity of information and of information
producers has grown prodigiously. It has been said that 90 percent of all
scientists who ever lived live today.6 The same
holds for other information professions such as lawyers, journalists, or
engineers.
Most branches of science show exponential growth, at about 4-8 percent annually
with a doubling period of 10-15 years. There are about 80,000 scientific and
technical journals, and 1,500 scientific abstracting periodicals.7 To get a sense of the trend: Chemical Abstracts
took 32 years (1907 to 1938) to reach one million abstracts.The second million
took 18 years; the third, 8; the fourth, 4 years 8 months; and the fifth, 3
years and 4 months, or 1/10 of the period it took in the first third of this
century.8 It's reasonable to
assume that before 1907, there had been no production of a full million of
articles in chemistry.
Individuals and organizations cannot handle this volume of information except
by adaptation. The responses are to try to improve processing capabilities by
better education, larger staffs, internal reorganization, and investment in
technology. But the main response is through specialization. There is
nothing new about this. Tasks were divided from the earliest days. Long before
Adam Smith wrote his famous description of the needle factory, the sons of the
original Adam specialized already, the Bible tells us. As the body of knowledge
grew, the evolution of fields of expertise continued into ever-narrower slices.
German has an apt term, the "Fachidiot" (Specialty-moron).Nietzsche
mocked it century ago. "A scientist was examining the leeches in a marsh
when Zarathustra, the prophet approached him and asked if he was a specialist
in the ways of the leech."O, Zarathustra,...that would be something
immense; how could I presume to do so!... That, however, of which I am master
and knower, is the brain of the leech; that is my world!...For the sake of this
did I cast everything else aside, for the sale of this did everything else
become indifferent to me..."9
The inexorable specialization of scholars means that universities cannot maintain
a coverage of all subject areas in the face of the expanding universe of
knowledge, unless their research staff grows more or less at the same rate as
scholarly output, about 4-8 percent a year. This is neither sustainable
economically, nor would it permit the existence of smaller-sized elite
universities. The result is that universities do not cover anymore the range of
scholarship. They might still have most academic disciplines represented --
whatever that means -- but only a limited set of the numerous subspecialities.
Many specialized scholars find fewer similarly specialized colleagues on their
own campus for purposes of complementarity of work. In other words, the
collaborative advantages of physical proximity in universities decline. Instead,
scholarly interaction increasingly takes place with similarly interested but
distant specialists of similar specialists, i.e., in the professional rather
than the physical realm.
This is not new, of course. Diana Crane's classic Invisible Colleges (1972)
demonstrates the interaction among distant scientists.10 But the information-induced pressures of specialization
are greater than in the past, and the means to make the invisible college the
main affiliation have increased. Air transport has created the jet-setting
professoriate. Even more so, electronic communications are creating new
scholarly communities which respond to the elementary need for intellectual
collaboration, through electronic dialogues, computer conferencing, and (in the
near future) video calls, strengthened by the occasional beer at a conference
for human bonding. Ironically, it is the universities that pay for the network
connectivity which help their resident scholars to shift the focus of their
attention to the outside, or, to use the buzz words, to join virtual
communities in cyberspace.
There is no arguing about the flourishing of computer networking. For example,
the Usenet consists of over 9000 newsgroups. Collaborative research becomes
easier, especially for huge projects. The Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man
(OMIM) Project based at Johns Hopkins University, in 1991, had 1500 registered
participants. The number of participants in the Human Genome Project (HGP) has
doubled every year.11
As one of the boosters of computer communications writes "if you are the
unrecognized scientific outsider Gregory Mendel, all you have to do is gain net
access in order to participate in the international group conversation of
science."12 (In that case, however, Mendel's neat
results might have been scrutinized more closely.)
In this enthusiasm for the potential of electronic community there is no
recognition that full openness is unmanageable. It is frequently argued that
electronic interaction lacks the vital aspects of face-to-face communication
and its "spirit of life."
Yet this is only partly true, and furthermore misses the major point. First,
interpersonal cues will also exist in electronic form, especially when we will
use also video and multimedia, if we learn to pick up new types of cues.
Second, while some dimensions of interaction are of course lost by electronics,
new interaction is also gained, such as with far-off researchers in Malaysia
and New Zealand one might not talk to otherwise. No, the real loss in an open
electronic system is not due to a decline in the quality of a given
communication, but rather due to the decline in information screening.
Face-to-face communication, through hierarchical control of physical access,
has built-in screening mechanism.
An example: a few weeks ago, together with a Japanese professor, I wrote a
paper on the lessons for communications from the Kobe earthquake, suggesting a
different approach to the present 911 system with its military-style dispatch
system.13 We put this out for discussion on
various bulletin boards, and received many immediate responses from all over
the world and from many societal institutions. Some were excellent. On the
other hand, and not to be ungrateful, many others were not especially useful.
This points to one of the problems of easy and open communication: there is too
much of it, and it is unscreened as to quality. Information is not costless to
the recipients, since they must wade through it, often respond, and are in some
ways obligated to reciprocate. For those reasons, it is inevitable that
scholarly discussions will not be truly wide-open any more than most physical
conferences are. It cannot be manageable otherwise. An unknown monk might still
not be heard. At present, the state of information screening technology is so
primitive as to be almost useless as a solution to this problem of quality.
Therefore, organizational solutions rather than technological fixes will have
to be used to structure the flow of information, which requires an
organizational structure outside the traditional university system.
This gets us to the second function of the community of scholars, the storage
of information. In the past it was said that a university is as strong as its
library. Burn down every single building except the library and you still have
a university. But here, too, the economics and technology change everything.
With the production of scholarship rising exponentially, so does the cost of
acquisition. In 1940, Chemical Abstracts cost 12$ yr.; in 1977 3500$; in 1995
$17,400. 14 At the same time, electronic
on-line services are becoming powerful in technical terms and comprehensive in
content. The rational response of universities is to gradually shift from
physical presence of information to electronic access. This will in time
transform the system of academic publishing and publishers towards one of
deposit of articles by their authors at various specialized and interconnected
cites. And with publications increasingly electronic rather than paper-based,
scholarship itself is likely to move beyond the static and linear print model
to new formats such as electronic and interactive multimedia which we might not
be able to store on paper even if we wanted to.
Thus, two of the three efficiency rationales for the physical university --
proximity to information, and complementarily of research work -- will weaken
steadily, and these trends are, ironically, paid for by the universities
themselves, though they have little choice in the matter. <
This leaves the third function of the university, that of transmission of information,
its teaching role. It is hard to imagine that the present low-tech system will
survive. Student-teacher interaction is already under stress by the widening
gulf between basic teaching and increasing research specialization. This
interaction also comes with a big price tag. If alternative instructional
technologies and credentialing system can be devised, there will be an
out-migration from classic campus-based higher education, at least for
non-specialized undergraduate courses. The tools for such alternatives could be
video servers with stored lectures by outstanding scholars and teachers;
electronic access to interactive reading materials and study exercises; some
electronic interactivity with the faculty and teaching assistants; and electronic
exams when the student is ready. This is not to suggest that this form of
instruction is superior to face-to face teaching (though the latter is often
romanticized). Rather, it can be provided at dramatically lower cost. Such an
electronic curriculum, once established, would not just be offered to hundreds
of students nearby but to tens of thousands around the world. It would be first
offered by some universities themselves, though probably not at first by elite
colleges which guard their scarcity value but rather by mass-attendance
universities seeking additional revenues and reduced cost.
An example, using unspectacular technology, is the Agricultural Satellite
Network, AgSat, permitting two dozen colleges of agriculture at land-grant
universities to exchange their course offerings and "reduce
duplication." Interaction with the professors takes place on a toll-free
telephone line.15 Such
efforts at cost reduction are not welcomed by the beneficiaries of low-tech
teaching, the faculty, which defines the mission and structure of their
institutions, and are as resistant to self reform as most professions are.
Recently, the president of the University of Maine lost his job over that
similar issue the introduction of an electronics-based college.
In any event, the ultimate providers will not be universities (which will
merely break the ice) but rather commercial firms. Textbook publishers will
establish sophisticated electronic courses using the most effective and
prestigious lecturers. At present, private universities change a tuition of
nearly $60 per lecture per student, not counting public and private support.
One survey of consumers found that only about 31% felt that college tuition was
a "good" or "average" value for their money, lower than
telephone service (57%), and higher than lawyers' fees (23%).16 Alternative providers will inevitably enter and
universities will lose their monopoly over higher education. Thus, we may well
have in the future a "McGraw-Hill University" giving out degrees or
certificates. If they are valued by employers and society for their quality of
admitted students, the knowledge they gain, and the requirements that they must
pass, they will compete with those of traditional universities without having
the overhead of physical institutions. There is a good chance that the
commercial publishers will put together a very effective teaching package,
making in comparison the traditional teaching at universities boring, just as Sesame
Street has raised the expectations of pupils for high-paced and lively
instructional style. Commercial providers will cover much of undergraduate
education. Meanwhile, in more specialized graduate education, the academic
"invisible colleges" may offer highly specialized certificates, in
effect becoming virtual teaching departments. And for other instruction,
business firms (or industry organizations) could train their employers rather
than rely on universities.
What is left to the physical universities as instructional institutions? In a
few cases, they can offer the prestige of an institution with a rich tradition,
a powerful network of alumni, and the credentialing value of its selectivity.
But even prestige and selectivity could be created by "virtual
colleges" with big-name boards, a part-time faculty loaded with Nobel
prize winners, and tough admission selectivity. This leaves the universities
with their gatekeeper function to jobs. Today's students, if they seek
prestigious jobs or entry-restricted professions, have no alternative to going
the university route. But this is a weak and mostly legal reed for universities
to lean on. It is only as strong as their control over accreditation and over the
public's acceptance of alternative credentials.
Another reason to attend a university is that the college years function as a
rite of generational passage. This is important, of course, but the shared
generational experience could be replicated in other ways, as it did in the
thousands of years preceding mass college attendance.
If the dominance of universities over higher education falters, the economic
foundation of the universities will be severely eroded, as will be their claim
to public funds. In the days of budget squeeze most universities will not be
able to compensate tuition losses by gaining more public or private funding.
Private donations are likely to decline with the reduction in the universities'
centrality in research and teaching, and with a widening values gap between
mobile money and physical campus. Reduced government spending, partly due to
the end of the Cold War, hurt even major research universities, since the
distribution of public grants must be broadbased to maintain political support.17 And grant money for research is likely to flow
increasingly to stand-alone specialized research centers or to electronic
collaborations among research teams across the country and the world, without
the overhead charges of universities.
The impact on universities will not be uniform. On the teaching side, the
greatest negative impact will be on mass undergraduate and professional
education and on highly specialized and advanced fields. Least affected will be
contact-intensive programs such as selective and tutorial-based liberal arts
education (especially if it is backed by healthy endowments) as well as skill
training requiring hands-on instruction and feedback, and small but stable
fields of graduate study that are not lucrative for commercial providers.
On the research side of the university, the impact of communications technology
will be similarly differentiated. Least affected are fields that do not
experience rampant growth and specialization, and where the various researchers
share a strong core. (Though they will be financially squeezed by the loss of
cross-subsidies from previously grant-rich parts of the university). Most
affected will be highly specialized research with a premium to keeping
up-to-the-minute. In between is research requiring physical teams and shared
equipment, which will still often be located on campus. These research units,
however, will connect more to units at other research institutions in academia
and the private and governmental sector than to the rest of the physical
campus. The university may exist as a physical collection of research units
similarly to an office park, but the primary synergy is with similarly oriented
and specialized units or individuals around the world. Again, this is the
continuation of a trend towards semi-autonomous units in a matrix organization
of a university, each of them a soft-money tub on its own bottom. As
collaborations across institutional lines grow, the separations between the academic,
private sector, and government research sectors blur even more than before. And
if the financial infusions by government decline, as they do partly due to
budget and political pressures, the role of private sector components in the
research network must grow to fuel and maintain this system. This, in turn,
strengthens some areas of research more than others, and shifts the center of
gravity on campus. The administration of universities is likely to
decentralize, too, with universities, a physical archipelago of units owned by
telecommunicating administrators and specialized subs contractors.
All this is a bleak scenario for the future of the university. In making this
argument it is easy to appear to be yet another dismal economist. It is easy to
respond to such an analysis with a ringing reaffirmation of the importance of
quality education, stressing academic values, the historic role of education in
personal growth, and the human need for free-wheeling exchange. To make such
arguments feels good but is besides 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 when electronic communication alters the
direction of information flows. It is not research and teaching that will be
under pressure -- they will be more important than ever -- but rather their
present main instructional setting, the university system.
Of course, reality is rarely black or white, and in any event, these changes
will not take place overnight. People usually overestimate the change in the
short term, but they also underestimate it for the long term. They recall that
earlier warnings about the potential of television as a tool of higher
education failed to materialize, and like to believe that even a vastly more
effective technology will meet the same fate, forever. Yet, the fundamental
forces at work cannot be ignored. They are the consequence of a reversal of the
historic direction of information flows. In the past, people came to the
information, and the information was 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 in the future more than a collection of remaining
physical functions, such as science labs and the football team? Have we reached
the end for a model that goes back to Nineveh, more than 2500 years ago? Are we
the end of the line? Yes, unless we recreate the university. This is the
question that must be confronted.
[1]Adams,
Robert M. "The Origins of Cities" in Brian H. Fagan (ed.) Avenue
of Antiquity: Readings from Scientific American. San Francisco: W.R.
Freeman & Co., 1960.
[2]From British Museum Papyrus 10243
(Anastasi Papyrus II); see Gardiner, Late-Egyptian Miscellanies, 16,
ll.9f.
Gardiner, A.H. (Sir Alan). Late-Egyptian
Miscellanies. Brussels, James, T.G.H. Pharaoh's People:Scenes From Life
in Imperial Egypt. London: The Bodley Head, 1984, p. 139.
[3]Harris, Michael H. History of Libraries
in the Western World. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 4th ed., 1984, p.
17.
[4]Gore, Daniel. "Farewell to
Alexandria: The Theory of the No-Growth, High Performance Library" in
Daniel Gore (ed.) Farewell to Alexandria. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1976, p. 167.
[5]Harris, Michael H. History of Libraries
in the Western World. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 4th ed., 1984, p. 38.
[6]Price, Derek J. de Solla.Little
Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963, 73-74.
[7]Ashworth,Wilfred. "The Information
Explosion." Library Association Record. 76 (4) April 1974, pp.
63-64.
[8] "Description and
Prediction", in Journal of Documentation, 25, 319-343,1969.
[9] Nietzsche, F.W. The Complete Works
of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 11, 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', London: T.N.
Foulis, 1909, pp. 301-306.
[10] Crane, Diana. Invisible
Colleges: The Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities.Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1972.
[11] Lucier, Richard. "Knowledge
Management: Refining Roles in Scientific Communication." Educom Review 25,
no. 3, Fall 1990, pp. 21-29.
Rossman, Parker. The Emerging
Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 55-56.
[12] Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual
Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company, 1993, p. 83.
[13] Noam, Eli M. and Harumasa Sato.
"Kobe's Lesson: Dial 711 For 'Open' Emergency Communications,"
Unpublished paper. February, 1995.
[14] Daniel Gore, ed., "Farewell to
Alexandria: The Theory of the No-Grwoth, High Performance Library" in
Daniel Gore (ed.) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976, p. 167.
[15] Eger, John M, and Joyce M. Gads.
"The University of the Future."Cosmos.Volume 3, 1993, pp.
80-84.
[16] John M. Higgins,
"Customers in Survey Rate Cable a Lousy Value" National Family Opinion Center,
as reported in Multichannel News, Feb. 22, 1993, P. 44
[17] Cohen, Linda R. and Roger
Noll.
"The Feasibility of Effective Public-Private R&D Collaboration: The
Case of CRADAs," Center for Economic Policy Research Publication No. 412,
Stanford University, March 1995.