PrintImagine you are an English major, newly declared. We’re happy for you, your parents say, but how will you find a job?
Though some might argue that practicality is hardly a cornerstone of a liberal arts education, the rising cost of college makes it an important consideration. Since the 1970s, the average price of four years at a private school has outpaced inflation by 440 percent. If current trends continue, that amount of schooling will run over half a million dollars by the late 2020s, and three quarters of a million dollars by the mid 2030s. Though studying the humanities preserves our cultural heritage, majors like classics and medieval studies are quickly losing ground to degrees in law and finance. The trend away from the studying of the archaic past to the more relevant issues of the present is one that could have serious implications for public policy—if fewer students study the thinkers of the past, who will be qualified to evaluate the problems of the future?
One possibility is to make the humanities more attractive. Closing the link between old perspectives and current events could make liberal arts degrees more practical (and perhaps marketable) by bringing considerations of application into the classroom, a place they have not inhabited since Immanuel Kant’s 1798 plan for the modern university divided the pursuit of knowledge from its practice. As Mark Taylor, chair of Columbia’s religion department, notes in his latest book, Crisis on Campus, texts from the past have a great deal to teach us about the present. “When I write books on theories of complex adaptive systems,” he says, “that’s the writing of Hegel … What I try to get students to see is the way in which these thinkers illuminate the condition in which we find ourselves.”
Of course, finding a teacher capable of connecting the past and present in meaningful ways is difficult. Understanding the context of a work of art or literature that takes place in a different time and country can require outside information that is often difficult to come by without travelling. How completely can art history students, for instance, grasp the relationship between the Parthenon and its surroundings without visiting Athens? While photographs and books provide some degree of experience, neither is a perfect substitute for visiting.
As Taylor points out, however, the internet is a viable alternative to travel. With tools like video, photography, audio, text and videoconferencing, all of which can be linked together, a platform exists that can pluck information from its resting place and deposit it at the user’s fingertips. Though electronic media cannot perfectly recreate objects from the past or distant locations in the present, the new array of tools can passably imitate—and in some ways enhance—traditional modes of learning. As Columbia students know, panoramas of the Parthenon on the Art Humanities website provide better representations of the building than do slides on a projector.
In addition, online education has the potential to drive down the cost of a university education. Since online courses can be taken anywhere, they eliminate the need to travel and live on a school’s physical campus. Moreover, courses designed for online consumption require less upkeep than traditional classes. While seminars will always require copious personal interaction, lectures could reuse portions of their structure and format from year to year, making their initial creation a single expense that could be divided over their lifetime. The combined reductions in university and student expenditures could substantially reduce the price tag of a school like Columbia.
Naturally, trepidations about the use of new media as a replacement for classroom teaching exist. As Frank Moretti, the executive director of Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, pointed out in an interview, the difference between going to college and learning online is like the difference between living in a community and reading about one. “Even though the way that I make my living is promoting the purposeful use of digital technologies and new media,” he says, “I’m not quick to dismiss what it is we’ve been doing for decades and centuries, which really does involve the contention of individuals with one another in social contexts.”
Those social contexts are complex—as Moretti noted, the history of Western education is predicated on small, interpersonal discussions, dating back to Plato’s Academy in Athens. The goal of those discussions is to promote dialogue between a student’s interior and exterior landscapes, a dynamic that relies on the quality, not the quantity of information. If education shifts from the classroom to the chat room, would the serendipitous interaction between students and faculty—the office hours and hallway chats—that allows academic communities to thrive still exist? Online courses permit students to learn on their own time, but education, Moretti explains, “is more than the communication of information.”
In addition to concerns over diminished social contact on the internet, there are a number of legal issues that could arise if educational material goes online. As Blake Allmendinger, a professor of English at UCLA, said in an email, it could be unclear who owns online lectures. “As far as I know,” he says, “the issue has never been litigated in the courts, so I’m not clear as to who owns my lectures. It’s different with books. If I write a book, it’s copyrighted in my name and so it’s my property, not UCLA’s. But my lectures aren’t copyrighted. Would they be if they were online? I don’t know.”
“In theory,” he continues, “my lectures are my own intellectual property, my ideas, my interpretations of literature. But if they’re made available online, anyone can have them, potentially even students who aren’t in the course.” As Allmendinger states, anything online can be easily duplicated and transmitted. In the future, schools could find themselves struggling against illegal downloads that cut into their income. Like record companies today, colleges and universities could run into serious difficulties once their products are competing with free facsimiles. How many file-sharing websites would fill up with lectures and course materials if elite schools posted them online?
Furthermore, there is the question of certification. Degrees from schools like Columbia and UCLA mean a great deal on the desks of future employers. Would a recruiter examining two students from comparable schools devalue the student who had taken a portion of his courses online and rate higher the student who could pay for four years on campus?
These are all critical issues, and Taylor takes them seriously. As he acknowledges in Crisis, “These [technological] developments do not offer a panacea for higher education and it remains important to preserve what is valuable to the policies and practices of the past.” That said, his book offers several compelling reasons to incorporate new media into higher education.
While Taylor admits that no online school can provide the same environment as a traditional college, his personal experience suggests that strong bonds can be formed between students and professors who interact online. In 1992, while at Williams College, Taylor and Esa Saarinen, of the University of Helsinki, used teleconferencing to bring 10 students from each school together for a weekly seminar on media philosophy. By the end of the semester, several students had formed close relationships, and on the final day of class, the Finns announced they would visit Williams after the winter holidays. Though Taylor acknowledges that teleconferencing is an imperfect substitute for personal contact, he and Saarinen were surprised to find that it effectively imitated classroom debate. In Taylor’s words, “In a very, very short time, you forget those people [on the computer screen] are not in your room. It’s like having them right there.”
In addition to creating vibrant relationships, Taylor’s course deepened his students’ understandings of the world. In a discussion of cultural critic Jean Baudrillard’s America, the Finns and Americans disagreed about the natures of their respective countries. While the Finns accepted Baudrillard’s critique of America as crass and unintelligent, the Americans dissented and shot back that Europe had passed its prime and entered a period of decrepitude. Instead of simply absorbing information about European beliefs, Taylor’s students were forced to re-examine their own culture through an outsider’s lens—precisely the sort of introspection that Moretti considers integral to a liberal arts education. Rather than end a tradition of stimulating conversation, Taylor’s course brought students from different countries together to enhance it.
While Taylor’s experience with online learning may be a workable exception to typical e-college, the legal issues that Allmendinger pointed out are still an open question. As he noted, it has yet to be decided who would earn money from downloading educational material. Would professors receive royalties from their lectures? Would they have the right to choose how their courses were distributed? Could they refuse to make their content available? Conflict between administration and faculty over the pricing and delivery of e-college seems inevitable if the future is as full of cash-strapped endowments and underpaid adjuncts as Taylor predicts.
In regards to theft—another issue Allmendinger raised—it is impossible to guarantee that educational materials will remain safe online. If Ivy League schools made it possible to earn a degree on the Internet, the demand for stolen diplomas could be significant, considering their worldwide reputation and the weight they carry on the job market.
The question of certification is likewise unresolved. Taylor imagines sidestepping discrimination between physical and online degrees by graduating students based on the depth of their knowledge instead of their total of credits. While such a program would honor the changing nature of writing and reading in the 21st century, allowing students more latitude in the design of their education than ever before, it is an approach perhaps better suited for performance programs like music and dance. Who in such an arrangement would decide whether a student demonstrated mastery of her subject material? Couldn’t ideological differences gain a powerful hold in the evaluation process and limit the avenues faculty allowed students to pursue?
The amount of time required to tailor degrees to students’ abilities could also be problematic. While demand for the teachers required to implement customized education could provide gainful employment to adjuncts and graduate students, it seems unlikely that schools would choose to pay more for a service they can currently obtain without great expense.
Evidently, there are strong benefits to online learning, but deep pitfalls as well. The rising cost of college, however, may soon make it a necessity. If costs continue to escalate, schools like Columbia will have to provide a cheaper product or rapidly lose the socioeconomic diversity they have spent decades assembling. In a world where environmental, financial, and social problems cross international borders, it makes little sense to retain walls around an institution whose entire purpose is to spread wisdom to those who will address these problems.