UCLA's new venture and similar efforts around the country were blasted recently in an essay by noted technology critic David Noble, an American who teaches in Canada's York University. It's been generating a good deal of discussion among academics. Distance-learning and online courseware are hot topics among university officials. Western Governors University, based in Salt Lake City, grants degrees using online courses, collecting courses from 16 states and Guam. Duke University in North Carolina offers a master's degree in business administration online.
Faculties have many reasons to be alarmed by such trends, of course.
Western Governors University already offers such certification programs. Underlying the misgivings of many academics about the trends illustrated by CETI, the Home Education Network and virtual universities is the suspicion that administrators, legislators and university trustees, under pressure because of mounting technology expenses, are capitulating to the high-tech industry's political agenda, which is clearly hostile to educational principles such as faculty governance and social critique. By now, nearly every faculty member and student in every college and university uses a computer every day. But the glowing screens of those machines may come to represent, for some, the ghostly presence of some alien and unwelcome ideas. Gary Chapman is director of The 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin.