Discussion by Andrew Delbanco

GOOD MORNING. I want to add my thanks to everyone already mentioned and, indeed, to everyone involved with this series of lectures. Daphne and I talked over the plan for this morning’s session, and we agreed tha t I should go first since there’s some risk that I may sound a down note on which we wouldn’t want to end. But perhaps it won’t be quite as down as you might anticipate.

First, however, I want to add a more extended thanks to President Bowen not only for these very helpful lectures but also for his innumerable contributions that, for many years, have elevated the national conversation about higher education. He has made the case for race-conscious admissions not only as morally imperative but also as effective social policy. He has argued (to use his own formulation) for putting a “thumb on the scale” in the case of low-income students hoping to become the first in their family to attend a selective college. As he mentioned yesterday, he has made the case for favoring high school grades over standardized test scores as better predictors of college success. He has alerted us to the problem of undermatching and its negative effects on time-to-degree and graduation rates. And he has been frank about the corrosive effects of college athletics on academic values. That is, of course, only a partial list of Bill’s interventions in the public debate. For all of these, we should be grateful. I hope we will also heed the warning he issued yesterday about the danger of accelerating stratification in higher education. This is something to which I will return in my comments.

I’d like to begin with a little exercise in iconography, focused on two images drawn from two recent magazine covers. I was excited about the idea of showing you PowerPoints because, as a resolutely low-tech type, I have never done that in a public talk. So there is perhaps some irony in the fact that when I came out here to Stanford—a leader in both the conceptualization and the implementation of technology—I was told that it would be simpler if I provided paper copies. In front of you, therefore, you should have a piece of paper with two color images. On the left, you see the cover of Tina Brown’s latest editorial project, Newsweek magazine, which is, incidentally, about to cease paper publication (figure 6). We may have mixed feelings about Tina Brown’s history as a media trendsetter, but it’s hard to deny that she has been well attuned to public sentiment; and I think this picture captures quite well something that has been alluded to over the last couple of days, namely the public mood toward our colleges and universities. Consider the velvet lawn, which looks as if it could be the work of the greenskeepers at Augusta. Strolling across it is a solitary student couple (either they are late, or everyone else is still in bed) making their satiated way through Eden toward class, where, given the widespread fact of grade inflation, they seem likely to get a pair of As without too much exertion. It’s an image that nicely captures the public perception of college as essentially an expensive dating service for pampered students. President Hennessy was quite convincing yesterday morning that this picture is in fact a gross caricature of the lives of most students, and he was persuasive, at least to me, that the proverbial climbing wall in the dorm and the café in the library are not very significant drivers of college costs—at least not compared to some of the other factors that we have been discussing. The truth is that many, if not most, American undergraduates experience nothing like what’s illustrated on this magazine cover. Something more than a third attend underfunded, overcrowded community colleges with few amenities and certainly no luxuries; and a growing portion of those students are adults with jobs and families that leave them little time for anything but work and more work. Yet however much it may be at odds with reality, this picture does capture the widespread perception of college as a wasteful indulgence—a perception which, as Bill rightly said in his first lecture, undermines public support and could eventually endanger every aspect of higher education from Pell grants for needy students to NIH funding for research scientists.

Figure 6 Newsweek cover, September 11, 2012

Now let me show you a second image, which speaks to the theme of President Bowen’s second lecture. Could there be a technological fix for the twin problems of college costs and weak learning outcomes? Here, the iconography gets a little more complicated (figure 7). We have a young man who appears to be Asian, or perhaps Eurasian. Either way he represents a kind of benign convergence of cultures that are sometimes seen as in competition or conflict with one another. He is a good globalist. He consumes American products. (Note the Apple logo on his laptop.) He is left-handed, which signifies, at least to left-handers, that he is exceptionally gifted. He is disciplined: you notice that he’s eating a healthy breakfast, some sort of high-fiber cereal sprinkled with fruit, very different from the high–sugar and carb breakfast I ate this morning; and he is studying on a schedule dictated by his own biorhythms rather than by some arbitrary classroom schedule. He is a good student, or at least he aspires to be. (Note the Stanford-of-the-East logo on his coffee mug.) And, as suggested by that reassuring symbol of domesticity, the dog sleeping at his feet, he poses no threat to traditional American values. You could push this analysis even a little further and note that he is sitting at a folding movable table that’s been interposed between two heavy old-fashioned tables—a suggestion, perhaps, that some heavy lifting was required in order to create the new online educational space that he now occupies. Yet to my eye, the most striking thing about this picture is that the young man is alone. Any connection he has to his peers is, as we say today, a virtual one; and it should also be noted that he inhabits the same space where he goes shopping, socializes, seeks entertainment, and, if he’s at all representative of many computer users, sneaks a peek at pornography now and then.

Figure 7 Boston magazine cover, September 2012. © Scott Nobles

Our question over the last two days has been whether this second image holds promise to remedy the problems implicit in the first. The first thing I want to say is that there have been others before us who think the answer to that question is yes. I stumbled recently on a report issued some fifty years ago by the Ford Foundation on the potential of new technology for improving higher education. At that time, the new technology in question was television. Its potentialities seemed much like those of the Internet today: “This new technology,” the authors wrote, “would extend the reach of the superior teacher to greater numbers of students,” and would “improve and extend the quality of teaching” by relieving the professor of the “semester to semester parroting of himself.” In other words, we have here an early version of what today is called the flipped classroom. The idea was that introductory instruction—drudgery for the teacher and duty for the student—could be delivered over the airwaves by an especially talented lecturer, allowing the face-to-face classroom to be reserved for higher-order activities. And not least among its promises, according to that report, the new technology promised to save institutions from the spiraling cost cycle that was already felt to be a problem in the early 1960s.

Now, the explanation of why none of these things happened will seem obvious enough: the technology back then was simply not up to the task. By comparison to what we have today, television was rudimentary and primitive. It did not allow for interaction between teacher and student, or for what I like to call lateral learning—dialogue between student and student. We hear the same explanation today for the failure of some early attempts to harness the Internet as a force for transforming higher education. At my own university, for instance, there was an effort some fifteen years ago to start a company called Fathom.com—an online enterprise from which Columbia hoped to earn money that would help close the gap between our financial resources and those of our better-endowed competitors. After that effort collapsed, one of Bill Bowen’s collaborators, a young Columbia alumna named Taylor Walsh, examined what had happened in a valuable book entitled Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses (2011). In that book, she quotes an explanation for the failure of Fathom from one of the project leaders: “We were pre broadband, pre video casting and iPods and all the rest.” Now, to my mind, the trouble with such an explanation is that we will always be pre-something. The real question today is whether, after many false starts, we have finally acquired the power to realize the deferred dream of transforming the quality of, and access to, higher education via technology. Bill Bowen himself has gone from skepticism, as expressed in his Romanes Lecture delivered at Oxford twelve years ago, to the cautious optimism we heard from him yesterday evening that the new technologies may hold promise for ameliorating, if not eradicating, the “cost disease” that has long plagued our colleges and universities.

The famous Baumol-Bowen theory about the etiology of that disease makes an analogy between professors and musicians—a comparison to which Bill alluded in his first lecture on Wednesday evening. Four string players, he reminded us, require as much time to play a Beethoven quartet today as would have been required in the nineteenth century, when the piece was first composed and performed. Like teaching and learning, music making is not an area of human endeavor where one can speak intelligibly about advances in efficiency or productivity. It’s not clear what such an advance might mean.

Yet in listening to Bill, I was reminded of something I heard from one of my high school science teachers back around 1968—a prediction that seemed fanciful and fantastic even at that time of big dreams. This teacher (who was also a good musician) said, “Look, it won’t be long before you won’t need to travel to Carnegie Hall and pay to hear some future Heifetz or Oistrakh play the Beethoven violin concerto.” He was making that claim early in the computer age, when no one had yet heard of a PC, much less a tablet or smartphone. Yet he was confident that sooner or later we would have a relatively cheap technology that could reproduce the sound of the greatest instruments as played by the greatest musicians. The whole notion of in-person virtuoso performance would become obsolete, and we would get the Carnegie Hall experience—minus the cost and the coughing—in our own homes. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re certainly a lot closer than we were when my teacher made that prediction forty-five years ago.

To return to the sphere of education, let us assume that we have indeed arrived at a moment when it’s at least plausible to imagine some version of the technological fix—that we will have a new tool for ameliorating, if not curing, the chronic disease of high cost and low efficiency. The future may not be quite at hand, but it may be close enough to allow at least a glimpse of what it will bring and what it will mean. President Hennessy tells us that when it arrives, it will have the force of a tsunami. That’s an interesting metaphor, since, as far as I know, the effects of tsunamis are highly destructive. It’s a metaphor in keeping with what one advocate of the online movement, the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, calls “disruptive innovation”—a variant of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous description of capitalism as a continual process of “creative destruction.” In light of such predictions, it would seem that one question we should be asking ourselves is, what will be disrupted or destroyed, and what will be innovated or created?

If we can disrupt, even if not destroy, the cost disease, that would be terrific. If we can destroy obstacles to educational attainment of the sort that Bill has enumerated, that would be great. I am impressed by the serious engagement of many faculty, some of them here in this room, who are trying to deploy these new technologies toward those ends. I also sense in them a sincere conviction that technology may lead us to understand better how students learn and that it can be deployed not only to create a new kind of educational experience but, through “hybrid” or “blended” forms, it can make the traditional kind better. I am convinced that Daphne and her colleagues have ideals as big as their dreams, which became clear to me the other night at dinner when I had the pleasure of sitting across from Daphne—an experience that I’m tempted to describe as classic face-to-face learning.

At the same time, to consider a little longer President Hennessy’s metaphor, it seems to me we ought to acknowledge that tsunamis are not exactly known for their selectivity. They do not pick and choose what they wash away. So I want to make two points about what else, besides the cost disease, may be in danger of disruption or destruction.

First, let me say something that may be screamingly obvious: the faculty as we have known it is at risk. I think we should be candid about the severity and imminence of the risk. In responding to a question at yesterday morning’s session, President Hennessy rightly asserted that we must get used to the idea that faculties will shrink as technologies grow. Some months ago, at a gathering somewhat similar to this one, I heard an even blunter assessment from Paul LeBlanc, president of the University of Southern New Hampshire—an institution that has moved strongly into online education—who said that the new technologies pose to faculty nothing less than an “existential threat.”

I think he was right. For one thing, there is the prospect that the new technologies will greatly increase stratification, not only among institutions but also among faculty members within institutions. There is also large potential for accelerating the movement of faculty toward extrainstitutional affiliations and loyalties—a process that has been under way since the professionalization of the academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, when faculty began to think of themselves less as members of a local college or university community and more as geographically scattered professionals whose first loyalty was to their shared discipline. In many ways, this development in faculty culture was a good thing. It reduced provincialism, dilettantism, and institutional inbreeding. But it also planted the seeds of today’s star system—creating opportunities for the absentee professor, the “Logan” rather than “local” professor to whom Howard Gardner alluded yesterday. By the mid-twentieth century, this process was well along, and Clark Kerr was describing the Berkeley faculty as “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” By the late twentieth century, Henry Rosovsky, the long-serving dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, was accusing the Harvard faculty of making “its own rules” with regard to teaching loads, outside business ventures, consulting time versus teaching time, and so on.

I suspect that the new technologies have considerable potential for strengthening these centrifugal forces that drive faculty away from their home institutions. Star faculty with a web presence will command large speaking fees and will have more and more incentive to spend time on the road (actual as well as virtual) because people will always pay to see celebrities in person. Just last night, a lot of people in Brooklyn paid $350 per person to hear and see Barbra Streisand in the flesh despite the fact that she sounds better on the CDs she made thirty years ago than she does in person today. Though minimal by comparison, similar opportunities (or temptations, depending on how you look at them) are already available to academics. One Day University, for instance, a low-tech enterprise in which I have participated myself, charges admission to a few hundred adults who pay to attend lectures by college professors, who receive, in return, a not-negligible fee.

It’s safe to predict, I think, that for some faculty, opportunities of this sort will grow with the expansion of online education, while others—whose star power may be smaller but whose intellectual power may be as large or larger—will be consigned to second-class status simply because they teach an arcane or difficult subject with less public appeal. For still others—language faculty, for instance—there’s a prospect not only of diminished status but also of obsolescence. The French teacher of the future may be a French-speaking version of Siri on your iPhone. If I am right about these trends, we should be worried about the persistence of academic community in anything more than the nominal sense.

Now, Bill has spoken of the urgent need for reconsidering the structures of academic governance to enable institutions to grapple with these and many other implications of the online revolution. Yet universities have so far done little to redefine conflict-of-interest principles to fit the new reality that is already upon us. If nothing is done, the already-fragile coherence of academic institutions will come under intense new pressure. On the other hand, if new definitions become too restricting, the most sought-after faculty will simply jump ship and go to work for themselves as freelance online celebrities. In some measure, it’s already happening. Yet these prospects, along with many attendant questions, have so far failed to provoke much discussion inside or outside academia. Perhaps most important, we should ask how the training of future faculty should be carried on in this new context. What are the implications for aspiring academics? Will they spend years in graduate training in order to become glorified teaching assistants to a few media stars?

I want also to say that I’m a little surprised that our focus on the MOOCs over the last few days has not prompted much comment about the parallel rise of the for-profit entities that call themselves universities—enterprises such as Phoenix, DeVry, Strayer, and the rest. There has been mention of the role of for-profit “universities” in worsening the student loan problem, and Bill has always expressed caution about the implications of profit-seeking in academia, as when he spoke, in his Romanes Lecture, about “the limits of markets as definers of values and allocators of resources.” Yet as we all know, a lot of smart people are betting on the profit potential of the new technologies that are taking hold within and around academic institutions. As time goes on, it seems inevitable that we will witness a merging of cultures between traditional nonprofit institutions and the rising for-profit sector—a merger in which there is surely risk of loss as well as gain.

Of course, if either the promise or peril of the new technologies is to be realized, significant revenues will have to be found, and no one seems yet to know where these revenues will come from. They may come from charging fees for certification, through in-person supplementary experiences, by providing screening services for potential employers, or contracting with textbook publishers, or some combination of such strategies—as well as, no doubt, many more. Whatever the future holds, I worry that it won’t be a simple matter to retain the high-mindedness that characterizes the best of today’s pioneers of Internet learning.

My second point is about the promise or peril of the new technology for students themselves. In that mid-twentieth-century report on the educational promise of television to which I have alluded, we find the key question: “How effective is this instruction?” The technology has changed, but the question ought not to change. Yesterday, Bill gave us a provisionally positive answer based, in part, on a careful study of the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative. I take encouragement from that study, but I think we would all agree that many questions remain about who learns what and how much—especially from the rapidly proliferating MOOCs. How can we apply traditional measures such as retention or completion rates to these new educational “delivery systems”? And if we can’t, how can we assess their educational value alongside their revenue-producing value?

Moreover, even as we look for new ways to answer this imperative question—“How effective is this instruction?”—I feel the need to demur from the terms in which it is formulated. My demurral concerns the word instruction, which takes me back a few weeks to a class in which I was discussing the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson with my undergraduates at Columbia. At one point, I called to their attention a statement Emerson made to the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity School in 1838. “Strictly speaking,” he told those aspiring ministers, “it is not instruction, but provocation that I receive from another soul.”

For me, at least, Emerson’s point brings sharply into view the question of how online education can, or can’t, serve those fields of learning that we customarily call the humanities. In this matter, I don’t think it is possible to overemphasize the distinction between instruction and provocation. It’s a distinction that can be restated in many ways: facts versus knowledge; skill versus wisdom; discipline versus inspiration; information versus insight. Thoughtful writers on education have explored these distinctions for many centuries. The categories of instruction and provocation are certainly not mutually exclusive, or even oppositional, but neither are they identical; and I think we can agree that a true education in any field—scientific as much as humanistic—entails both. Moreover, whichever terms we prefer, it seems uncontroversial to assert that education in the United States, not just in higher education but also K–12 education, has been moving lately toward the first term in the pair and away from the second. I believe that the online technologies are likely to move the needle further and faster in that direction.

Let me try to be concrete about this point, at risk of being mawkishly personal. If I am asked to illustrate what a real teacher-student exchange can mean, I think back to a moment in a seminar I took early in my years as a graduate student working in the field of early American literature. I was very fortunate to encounter at that time a great teacher who had noticed that I was putting up resistance to the predestinarian doctrines of the Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards, whom we were studying. I did not like Edwards’s determinism (although as I speak to you this morning, it occurs to me that there’s more than a little determinist flavor in my own remarks), and toward the end of the semester, this teacher turned to me and said, “What is it exactly that bothers you about Edwards? Could it be that he is so hard on self-deception?” Now, here was a teacher who had been paying attention to what I had been saying, thinking, and writing in the course of the seminar, who had a real sense of who I was, or, as the phrase goes, where I was coming from. The question he asked me has stayed with me ever since. Maybe it will be possible to preserve that kind of experience in the “flipped classroom” of the future. I hope so.

A lot of people seem to think so. David Brooks had a column not long ago saying that technology will enable us to clear more space for this kind of encounter—for provocation—by relegating instruction to the online platform where it can be provided more efficiently and economically. But I am not convinced.

I’m not convinced in part because it makes little sense to me to organize our teaching in the humanities into the categories of “introductory” and “advanced.” There is, of course, a certain sense in which humanistic learning is sequential (one needs to know Shakespeare, for example, to hear the Shakespearean echoes in Melville), but this is true to a much smaller degree than in the sciences. In the humanities, description is also and always interpretation. But the key point here, which Bill touched on poignantly toward the end of his lecture yesterday, is that the humanities have to do not only with cognition and comprehension, but with values. You will recall that story he told about the ten-year-old Jeff Bezos proudly informing his grandmother of how much she was shortening her life by smoking cigarettes, and his grandfather saying to him, “Someday you will realize that it’s harder to be kind than to be clever.” My question is, can we preserve an educational environment where teaching kindness as well as cleverness is a serious part of our collective aspiration? Can online instruction foster that kind of teaching? Let’s hope so.

I am going to ask for your indulgence just a little longer because I want to read a portion of an e-mail that one of my teaching assistants received last week after he had led a discussion about the same writer I mentioned earlier, namely Emerson. Here is the e-mail:

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that our section meeting tonight had a really profound effect on me. I scribbled down four pages worth of thoughts and my copy of the book is probably unreadable through all my comments in it, but the way you spoke and the energy our class had really moved me. I am not usually one to feel things, especially deep existential emotions, but tonight I feel connected to the text and I owe a lot of that to you. I walked the whole way home staring at the sky, a probably unsafe decision but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I actually cannot wait for next week’s class so I can dive further into this. I just wanted to send you a quick message, thanking you, letting you know that this 50 minutes of class has affected the rest of my life. Sorry if that is weird but some fire was lit within me tonight and I guess I am blowing the smoke towards you a little bit.

I am sure everybody in this room agrees that we want to do everything we can to preserve the kind of experience this student describes, so that it will be available in the future not just to privileged students attending institutions where person-to-person teaching remains affordable but to as many students as possible. The online future is rapidly approaching and, in some respects, is already here. I only hope that when we look back at the superseded past, we will not say, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride upon the railroad, the railroad rides upon us.” Thank you.