Cyber schools will crash the system

Pity the non-photogenic lecturer. In the good old days of "Ivy-cover'd professors in Ivy-cover'd halls," he could burrow into a tweed jacket at the front of a crammed hall, fill a pipe with tobacco and plant pedantic seeds in young minds. Now, if technology giant Michael Saylor has his way, the first fully functional cyber university will be online within a year, professors will be taped at a studio in Washington, D.C., and broadcast to a projected audience of millions—and plastic surgery will become de rigeur for the tenure track.

As the CEO of Microstrategy in Vienna, Va., Saylor is one of those digital evangelists who wants the Net to invade your privacy every way it can. Microstrategy specializes in developing portable Internet devices, most recently a receiver with an ear hook-up that can whisper current information to you straight from online sources. The potential for efficient business and easy access to knowledge will be unprecedented. In the past, the little voice in your ear used to be called a conscience; soon, it'll be called NASDAQ.

Saylor, who cashed in on the Internet explosion, is one of the richest men in the world. But money (even $13 billion worth) is not enough for the more ambitious megalomaniac. Saylor has compared himself to Julius Caesar and Gandhi in recent interviews, and hopes to "spread civilization" and "purge ignorance from the planet" as he told Newsweek in a January interview. His idea is to donate $100 million to found a cyber university of "Ivy League" caliber, which may be named after its chief donor, just as everything at Yale is. According to details in an interview with the Washington Post, students will attend lectures at their computers and will have only final exams, not essays. Those without the requisite time or money will have access to a first-class education. Although nothing has been set in pixels, Saylor expects that "geniuses and leaders" will contribute their services for free for the opportunity to be heard by a world audience and to contribute to the general betterment of mankind etc., etc.

Calling Saylor's scheme idealistic is like saying that the Donner Party had bad table manners. For one thing, the best teachers aren't always the ones who are capable of offering themselves pro bono. Being a faculty member of Saylor University does not carry the cultural capital necessary to survive for the long haul in today's cutthroat academia. And in today's market, even altruism comes with a price tag. No one offers intellectual property for free after years of hard work, insight, and tedious progression up the professional hierarchy. I doubt that Harold Bloom would have written The Anxiety of Influence if he thought it would end up as an MP3 file on some kid's hard drive.

A larger problem is the uneasy marriage of corporatism and philanthropy that underlies the whole project. Big business has always extended a charitable arm toward progressive causes like education; Philip Morris is one of the biggest supporters of free speech lobbyists, mostly because they want the freedom to say what you want is associated with the freedom to smoke. Its influence, though, has rarely been this blatant. Since the primary function of dot-coms seems to be to create the most high-tech flea market in existence, the mind reels at the opportunistic possibilities of an e-school: Amazon.com as the student bookstore, financial aid from Citibank.com, Milton and Chaucer replaced by Salon.com and Wired. It likely goes without saying that Saylor's own ultra-futurist agenda won't go unheard. Having to buy the latest gadget from Microstrategy will be the equivalent of having to buy your prof's book for his course.

Perhaps Saylor's biggest blunder, though, is that he doesn't understand the nature of education in America. The recent public fascination with school vouchers, charter schools, and economic sanctions for under-performing public schools—since denying money to a school will obviously make it better—indicates that our hearts are simply not in an egalitarian education for all.

Of course, as a Yale student, I must oppose the cyber university on personal grounds. I question the validity of the education it will offer and the true knowledge base that a cyber-degree can confer. I also believe it will lack the picturesque quality and invaluable social camaraderie of a proper four-year college education. Furthermore, I abhor Mr. Saylor's apparently profit-minded motives. Knowledge is a sacred thing; it cannot be assigned a price. For those of us who have had to struggle through top high schools and Kaplan SAT courses, and who have committed substantial time and money to its preservation, Saylor's scheme is an insult. Anyone who would offer it at such a cheap price clearly does not understand its true value.

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