Given the present political culture, the idea that the Internet, Web, or evolving information highway could revitalize the public sphere of democracy and civil society seems chimerical. More likely, new electronic media will reinforce the parochialism of identity politics and information consumerism. On campuses across the nation, as in the society at large, the net effect of the computer revolution has been to reinforce educational stratification, institutional conservatism, and traditional hierarchies of control. Influence, authority, and power within colleges and universities have remained relatively untouched, except for new administrative and technical roles and units created to manage academic computing and information services. Academic and financial administrators still control the bulk of organizational decision making authority.
Professors still control the content of their courses and the evaluation of their students.
Contrary to the rhetoric of electronic empowerment, students have not gained more input into these matters, in contrast to the late 1960s and early 1970s when ideology, not technology, produced real student empowerment. Higher education in the 1990s is more technocratic and entrepreneurial than ever before. Meanwhile, lofty commencement speakers and prestigious reports on the reform of higher education airily reaffirm the centrality of teaching, while junior faculty scramble for research support that will get them out of the classroom and up to tenure. Teacher resistance scuttled the instructional television movement of the Sixties. There's little joy in higher education at the moment, and that's a key to understanding our mystifying technical fixation on electronic innovation.