Regarding the role of universities: the major role that I unintentionally neglected to mention is that of (scientific) research. At present, universities still provide the major context for theoretical research in our society, though they are facing heavy competition from the business and industrial sectors. I suspect that the reason universities still have such a gridlock on research is due to interdependent factors: State support and the relatively low cost of funding research at universities. Researchers are already supported on State salaries, and the workforce of students doing research is paid so little it’s negligible, from a macroscale. I don’t think that the Internet is going to replicate or compete with universities on this major role, but I think there are other threats to cause concern here.

You’re also quite right that I don’t mention much of the roles of the academic institution today. Part of that was just due to a really ambitious idea getting ahead of me, but on further reflection, I worry that it will be very difficult to provide a general answer that’s both determinative and informative, but if you get to specifics, it won’t be general enough and helpful. For instance, when talking about the individual academic institution, we’d have to consider community colleges, state universities and colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities, private religious colleges and universities, and research institutions. Each provide a different function for our society, so trying to find the one over many here will take awhile.

I think, though, that by focusing on something like academia=”the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship,” we’ll still have a pretty good working idea of what’s going on. It’s the latter two functions that I think the Internet is most threatening. I’ll also have to reconsider the academic institution from the sociological perspective, so I may need to chase down some sociology of education resources.

I agree that books have always provided an alternative outlet for education, but the threat wasn’t as pressing for several reasons. Firstly, books are limited in scope of information coverage; though it’s possible to find anything in a book, one has to spend a lot more time trying to find the information. In the time that it takes to pull the books off of shelves, a competent web-researcher has already found the answer and moved onto three related links. That’s really, really powerful when you think about it.

Secondly, and relatedly, the information contained in books are tied to one spatio-temporal location, i.e. if your library doesn’t have it, you have to request it, wait, read, and return the book. I use both the public and university library for research (still), but am constantly frustrated by return dates, forgetting where a particular book is and so forth. This is not really an indictment against libraries, as much as a positive feature of information available on the Internet. Public libraries are especially bad about having short check-out times, which works okay for melodramas, comic books, and children’s books, but it doesn’t work well for reference materials that you’ll have to refer to over the course of months. The only way to cover that is to buy the book.

Which leads me into the third reason why the effect of books on academia is not as severe. Books are relatively expensive. For instance, if I wanted to teach myself classical Greek, I anticipate it’d probably cost a couple hundred dollars in books to become proficient. But I know that information is free online, because I’ve bookmarked a sight that has lessons that compare to the physical books or are the author’s release of the same content in books on the Internet. I know this because I’ve compared them. I’m not neglecting the fact that the Internet still costs money if you pay for it at home, but I’m looking at the return on investment (research-wise) as making the cost of the information available negligible.

So my contention is that the Internet threatens academia in the way books do not because the information is quick to find, widely accessible and retrievable indefinitely, and free.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by the classes under discussion being in wholely separate domains. Do you mean they are not separate from each other, or they’re not separate from the physical product-based classes?

You’re also correct that the form of communication is different on the Internet than it is in the classroom. Regarding the student-teacher divide: you’re right that ensuring you get valuable information can be difficult, but there may be some benefits from not having the student-teacher relationship, as instead of the “fountain of knowledge” pedagogical style, you get the “community of knowledge” style. From my experience, students learn more out of the latter style than the former style, but it takes me all semester to break them from the former style because that’s how everyone else teaches.

Regarding getting lost in a mass of comments: often times you can chase down the more helpful commenters back to their sites, contact them, and ask a question. So, where you may have been wanting to hear “the Steve’s” answer, when you recognize there are alternative “experts,” you can often times get more valuable information than you were going to originally get. Of course, the trust of the information comes up here, but I think that should be a general worry that we have of any “teacher.”

I appreciate your comments, and I’ve got to go back to the drawing board on some of my original points. Thanks for keeping me on my toes.

I’m not sure I entirely agree (an to an extent understand) some of this post.

Firstly, it seems odd that you’re describing the roles of a university from primarily a historical (that is, founding principles) standpoint. When you’re arguing that the Internet may be competing with or supplanting universities /today/, surely you should work on contrasting their stated roles and functions today.

Moving now onto the point you made which I find most questionable; you speak of the Internet as providing a new place for people to better educate themselves, without the need of academia. While this is true to a point, books surely cover this territory, and have coexisted for a good while now with universities; with libraries allowing one access to such knowledge for free.

Also you mention the creation of jobs based on ideas allowed by the Internet. Apologies for the use of a popular buzzword here, but the argument that much of Western Europe and America is going the way of the ‘knowledge economy’ seems to at least have some weight to it, with people working at ever-greater remove from the production and distribution of physical commodities. The classes you mention are certainly the purest form of this, as indeed are Internet workers, but I wouldn’t say they were in wholely separate domains.

One other thing, you talk of the Internet as a place allowing for the free discussion of ideas. Of course, I cannot disagree with you, but direct equivalency with the communication to be had in a university context–at least at present–seems to me to be questionable. There is a less clear student-teacher divide, which can make things more difficult to get advice you know to be reliable online. While of course the writers of popular and respected blogs fill such roles somewhat, many times one is likely to be lost in a mass of comments if attempting to ask a question of a blog post.

Interesting ideas, but they don’t to me seem strong enough to support your conclusion of great competition between academia and the Internet much more than magazines and books.