It turns out that the yippie activist Abbie Hoffman was born a few decades too early. In his 1971 counterculture classic, Steal This Book, he devoted considerable space to discussing how to live for free. He provided survival tips, such as how to take advantage of furniture pick-up day in your neighborhood, how to Dumpster dive, and how to enroll for food stamps or for clinics to get a venereal disease cured gratis. But Hoffman went beyond that: He counseled the reader on how to get a free college education.
His methodology was simple: Pick the college you wanted to attend, go to its bookstore, and shoplift the book of classes for the semester (the honest version involves borrowing one from somebody who shelled out the 50 cents). Once you have decided which classes you want to take, just show up. Of course, it’s easier to do that unnoticed in large lectures, but even in small seminars, you could say that the registrar must have made a mistake. By the time anyone figured out that you didn’t belong, you would have completed the 15 weeks of instruction. Just use the resources of the public library to do the required readings, wrote the author, and voilà, you’re a college student! Hoffman even suggested that you could give yourself a degree. Once you had completed 120 credits, or when you decided you had learned enough to merit a bachelor’s degree, you could grab crayon and paper and issue yourself a diploma. (Today you can just order one online.)
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Never mind that by advocating higher education in a book about revolution, Hoffman was, in his own way, buying into the American ideology of self-improvement in a deeper way than he might have acknowledged. Or that his idea of revolution was limited by the infrastructures of the food-stamp system, garbage pickup, and the system of higher education, all of which had to remain intact for the freeloaders to sponge. What he was arguing for was not so much a revolution as a social host-parasite relationship, for lack of a more delicate term.
Fast forward four decades. Thanks to the Internet, Hoffman’s utopia is increasingly becoming a reality. News can be gotten free of charge. And remember Napster, that peer-to-peer music-sharing program that brought the recording industry to its knees? The same thing is happening in higher education today, and we college faculty members are the ones giving away our material.
Led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s pioneering OpenCourseWare project, are we now putting the final nails in our coffin by putting up our content on iTunesU and other open-access sites? Or are we serving the public—and our own—long-term interest by embracing any mechanism that allows us to spread knowledge? Do we have reason to fear that tuitions approaching $50,000 per year are not sustainable when anyone can log on and learn from some of the best professors in the business without paying a dime?
A recent poll conducted by Public Agenda and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education found that a majority of Americans think colleges could spend less and still maintain a high level of quality. At the same time, nearly the same majority thinks a college education is necessary for a person to be successful in today’s work world—up from 31 percent a decade ago. Clearly, Americans see an increasing value in a college education. But they have concerns about the price of delivery.
Like many administrators at tuition-driven institutions, I have my fears about whether we are going to be left hocking New York University sweatshirts to pay faculty members’ salaries within a few years. Yet I have put those fears aside and embraced the online-courseware movement by leading a new project—with a twist. That twist gives me hope that I am not a lemming leading us off a cliff.
Since I can take a course in matrix theory and linear algebra from MIT’s Gilbert Strang—who literally wrote the textbook and is a fabulous lecturer to boot—or learn about health-care policy from Yale’s Ted Marmor, or watch any number of academics debate contemporary issues on the Web site of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, it would seem that higher education has finally been disintermediated, just like the Yellow Pages or the record album or travel agencies. But before we play the swan song for universities—which, by the way, have survived the Gutenberg moveable-type revolution, radio, television, and lots of political changes—we should realize that we have much more to offer than just lectures. In fact, it is our hope that we can deploy 21st-century technology to reinvent the 18th-century university on a global scale.
By elaborating on the courses we are producing to acquaint the public with the wonderful NYU faculty, we hope to develop highly polished, interactive video courses that our own students can take. As an enhanced version of what Carnegie Mellon University is providing through its Open Learning Initiative, these proprietary versions will have pop-up definitions, live links to primary sources that professors mention in passing, and freeze-frame interactive quizzes to reinforce knowledge acquisition. They will also be embedded within an academic social-networking platform such as OpenStudy, developed by Ashwin Ram, an associate professor of computer science at Georgia Tech.
While we believe that this delivery of introductory material may be superior to the twice-weekly, large-lecture format, the real payoff is that it frees up faculty members’ time for one-on-one or small-group instruction. Rather than have to pay our research faculty members to stand in front of a room and teach the same classes over and over (after all, when’s the last time Calculus I really changed?), with fewer courses to teach, they can now take on the role of faculty curators. Faculty curators are essentially souped-up versions of the traditional adviser who signs your registration form every semester and has some cursory words with you about your future. They are not meant to have all the answers, but through weekly interactions—like the Oxbridge dons of yesteryear minus the sherry—they guide a handful of students through the academic wilderness, suggesting, nay requiring, them to drop in on this departmental seminar or that event at the library, or even involving the best ones as research assistants in their own work.
Some of this enhanced faculty-student interaction—which a voluminous literature shows to be key to long-lasting learning—will involve face-to-face discussions modeled on traditional Socratic methods of instruction. But some will no doubt be mediated through blogs, e-mails, Skype, or OpenStudy. No matter the medium, the goal is to integrate the students fully into the intellectual and research life of the institution.
But unlike the 18th-century university, today’s institution is no longer necessarily located in a single place—or any place, for that matter. NYU is seeking to become a global-network university, with portal campuses stretching across the world. By freeing me from standing before 200 students to teach “Introduction to Sociology” each fall, the new project will allow me to spend some time at our study-abroad site in Florence for a weeklong workshop, then visit our Abu Dhabi campus, and perhaps stop at NYU in Shanghai for a third workshop before heading back to my curates in New York.
All these students will have gotten as much from my online interactive lectures as my 1990s students got from hearing me talk in person. They will have access to me through the class Web page and e-mail; they will benefit from a local teaching assistant who conducts weekly discussion sessions; and they will get face time with me during workshops, albeit in intensive spurts. And the whole time, peer-to-peer learning (arguably one of the most important aspects of campus life that cannot easily be replaced by YouTube) will occur through both traditional late-night study groups and online forums provided by social-networking software.
On those forums, students can swap locally relevant content and their diverse perspectives relating to the course themes—which is particularly important in social-science courses.
Most important, they get more interaction—face-to-face time in particular—with research faculty members such as myself. In this way our vision lives up to the principles of good educational practice in a way that befits a global research university. We provide a product that no for-profit, online diploma mill can replace.
Perhaps our vision to make college more like graduate school is idealistic, but it is our job as research faculty members (and yippies!) to think boldly. And perhaps by pursuing the ideal of a global community of young learners and seasoned scholars, we will solve our looming concerns about offering a valuable product for the money we charge.
