The marketing of Speaker Gingrich's course on renewing America has already provided a model. Admittedly, using the Internet is not as yet suitable for presenting some courses. Laboratory experiments that cannot be readily simulated, aspects of physical education, ROTC, dance, engineering, architectural design, and the use of musical instruments, for instance, still require facilities where students and instructors meet one another in person. A well-managed university, however, should be able to keep courses that require these facilities to a minimum. With proper planning, the savings generated from eliminating lecture halls, classrooms, and most undergraduate laboratories should be second only to those realized from downsizing faculty and outsourcing courses.
Research represents the third area where savings can be achieved.
Traditionally, American universities have underwritten scholarly projects for which funding from external sources has not been available, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. They have maintained elephantine research libraries and expensive computer centers, which members of the university community could access without charge, and they have set aside internal funds, which faculty and affiliated researchers on campus might tap. Undergraduates, who comprise the universities' principal clients and customers, however, usually have little or no use for these facilities. In this era of global competition American universities can no longer afford to offer researchers such freebies. As researchers in the physical, engineering, and medical sciences have long understood, the only research worth doing is that which others are willing to pay for.