Dr. Seymour Eskow
President, The Electronic University Network

Reprinted with permission from Cutting Edge Technologies in Community Colleges, edited by Dr. Ervin Harlacher, professor of Higher Education, Pepperdine University, published by the American Association of Community and Junior Colleges (Fall 1989).

Older colleagues who lived through those first radio days, and younger colleagues who know the history of educational technology in America, remember the hopes for radio, the predictions, and the wave of experiments. Radio was to dissolve the barriers of space and time and cost that had previously limited educational opportunity. It would bring the best minds of Harvard and The Sorbonne to the small towns and small colleges of America; the best music, the best poetry (read by T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats) would be in our dormitories, our homes, and our curricula; and the curriculum committee would reshape the study of the arts and sciences so that they would embrace the literature, the history, the sociology created by radio.

One might consider that the ability of radio to deliver on those early promises is still there; if the colleges of the United States wanted to harness that power, radio could be used to create a learning network of great value. However, such a learning network will not be created, and if educational radio were to disappear tomorrow, most professors and students would not know that it was gone.

Is there any point in rehearsing the radio days, the television days, all of the failed utopias of yesterday? Of course. We continue to teach history in our colleges because we believe that yesterday is the only compass and map that we have to chart our course today, and to predict where we will be tomorrow. Indeed, we deliver Santayana's warning to our students: who does not know history is doomed to repeat it. If we do not remember the radio days, we will repeat them as computer days.

Our sense of the past becomes our guide to the future; yesterday's scenario becomes our script for tomorrow.

I suggest that those who believe in the power of the new technologies to transform education have a view of the past that has become their folklore and conventional wisdom-and their guide to the future. After a brief sketch of that interpretation of yesterday, I suggest another: our view of the past leads to other proposals for the future. Some of them are outlined here.

Radio Days: The Conventional Wisdom

There are at least two versions of the standard script. The first, and by far the most common in the literature of academic innovation, argues that our colleges are in the grip of a professorate determined to maintain its domain and dominance, unwilling to consider seriously any changes that depart from those styles of teaching and learning common in the Middle Ages: the professor as actor performing before students as auditors and audience. The professors have used their control over the curriculum and the methods of instruction that have a pedagogical power far beyond that of the lecture, the text, and the chalkboard. Supporting and extending the power of the professors are the external agencies that monitor, regulate, and finance education: the accrediting agencies, the licensure boards, the state departments of public instruction-bodies that refuse to accredit or license or fund instruction unless it is delivered by a professor in a classroom on a campus, denying to uncounted students the teaching power of the new technologies.

There you have the basic script. Typically, it is embellished with personal accounts of dreams and schemes foiled by the English department or the curriculum council or the faculty senate. What reformer does not have stories to tell? (One thinks of the hero in Stringfellow Barr's Purely Academic, who spent every other year trying to persuade the curriculum committee to change the curriculum and the alternate year in drinking.)

Another version of the script locates the resistance to change not in the professorate, but in the intellectual technology that has been the organizing principle of the American college at least since Charles Eliot's time. That technology is perhaps best summarized and symbolized by the schedule of courses and classes that come about after "registration:" higher education as five courses of fifty minutes each, each offered three times a week for three "credits." The schedule embodies all of the ways in which the higher learning is organized in the United States: knowledge organized into "departments" as well as disciplines, each with its own department head; an elaborate system of academic accountancy grounded in the fiction that an education can be pieced together from interchangeable parts; a system, as has been often pointed out, that shares much of the culture of the factory and the assembly line. The language and style of the factory color such a system: the buildings on campus are the "plant," students are "personnel" or sometimes "raw material," and learning is a "product" that can be produced, controlled, and measured with the tools of engineering.

It is this tightly organized and coherent system, then, that resists any change that is not congenial, that threatens to disrupt the orderly flow of work and the distribution of roles and rewards. And it is not only changes in the academic style proposed by the supporters of educational technology that are not welcomed; such purely conceptual changes as independent study, learning contracts, credit by examination, or service learning, which require no radios or computers, are also not compatible with the system and are not widely embraced and endorsed.

While the two scenarios have much in common, their differences are significant for reformers who would bring computers to the campus. Those who locate the resistance in the professors believe that appeals, persuasion, and programs of faculty education can change the nature of college instruction. The other view sees the professors as part of a complex technology that is maintained and controlled by forces within and without the academy.

Newman's Idea: The College As Community

In one version of yesterday, then, it is the professors, fearing for their power or their jobs, who have kept the new tools of learning away from the campus.  In another, it is the system of teaching and learning designed by the professors that rejects any new pedagogy that does not fit easily into the old system.

We propose here another version of history, one that casts the actors differently, and one that points to a different future for the campus and for the new technology.

In "Sign of the Times," a prescient essay written in 1831, Carlyle demonstrated that "the mechanical principle" was invading every sphere of life, that the logic and the style of the factory were reshaping all of the world's institutions and relations. The college and university were not exempt; they too would be reformed by the mechanical principle.

It was against those who applauded the reshaping of the university to conform to the spirit of an industrial age, including Carlyle himself, who believed that the university of the future would be a collection of books, that Newman (1938) upheld the older vision.  A university, he said, "is a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse."  There were other important ways to learn:  skills and recipes from books, manners from the court, style from the city; and Newman would make all of these way of learning widely available to those who preferred them or had no choice:

such certainly is our popular education, and its effects are remarkable. Nevertheless, after all, even in this age, whenever men are really serious...when they aim at something precise, something refined, something really luminous...they avail themselves, in some shape or other, of the rival method, the ancient method, of oral instruction...between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of a discipline (Newman 1938, p. 32).

Some of our professors may indeed be Luddites, resisting machines because their jobs are threatened. More, we think, share the Newmanian vision of the campus as community, as a place where teachers and students come together to talk, to work, and to learn. The mechanical principle has already disrupted that Community: the fragmenting of the curriculum and the organization of the schedule disconnect teachers from students and students from each other. Radio, television sets, and computers on campus threaten to finish the work of anticommunity: each student in a carrel, with earphones, watching images and words on a screen, listening to disembodied voices, pushing buttons quietly.

The overriding question, then, for those who believe in the liberating power of the new technology, is this: what is the vision of the campus of the future, and how does that campus adapt to and harness the new technology?

Our own answer is this. The campus of the future will be a place where men and women come together to learn together. Discussion and dialogue-talk will be the way learning is carried on. There will be rooms, halls, and buildings designed to support and encourage many conversations. Surrounding these central buildings will be libraries, bookstores, and centers with radios, television sets, and computers, and men and women will move easily from the places of conversation to these stores and centers in search of books, speech, and images as they explore matters of concern to them, or in search of the kind of tutoring and drill and practice that machines can provide.

Most of our students of the future will not, however, use the new technology on campus. They will have learning centers with computers and videotape and interactive videodisc players in their homes and in their workplaces, so that they can do independent research, be tutored, sharpen their skills, or learn new ones at home, at work, or in hotel rooms when they travel. Most important, the computer will allow them to communicate with their teachers for personal tutoring and to share ideas with fellow students through electronic classrooms, so that teachers and students dispersed in time and space are still collaborating in the work of learning.

The design of the college of the future as I see it, then, has oral community at its center, and technology at its borders and dispersed throughout the community, so that teachers and students talk together on campus and use the new technology to create new kinds of learning communities that are not grounded in time and place. We call that college of the future "Telecommunity College." What follows are notes for an agenda of issues and concerns raised by such a view of the future.

The New Community College: Forces and Influences

1. From an Intentional Community for Youth to a Lifespan College.
The forms of the American college-and all the world's colleges-were shaped by their mission as communities for the instruction of youth. The new college is a place for all of the adults of the community, and this new commitment will change the look of the campus, the relations between teachers and students, and the styles of communication and instruction.

The classic college was a total institution, with its own living quarters, entertainment, and community services; the gown did not need the town. The lifespan college will be a learning community, sharing its students with churches, employers, and human service agencies and collaborating with those agencies in the design of learning.

 

2. Open Admission and Open Learning

The image of the "open door college" is the self-image of the community college: the image of a house of learning opening its doors to receive new guests. Adults need to learn in many other settings: in their homes, their churches, their places of business. The new community college will open the door outward, so that teachers, students, and learning can move out from the college and into the community. The new community college will be a richer learning environment; it will also end the notion that learning takes place only on a campus in groups of thirty under the watchful eye of the professor.

• Open admission. The door opens in. Open learning. The door opens out.
• Open learning. A student with a learning contract studying at home, in the community, anywhere in the world. He or she has a mentor back on campus, finds books and colleagues, learns in and from the world: travel, work, service, the action curriculum.
• Open learning. A student at a computer, at home, at work, traveling, in a hospital, prison, in an army barracks. The student types an essay, asks a question, hits a key and sends the essay and the question to an electronic mailbox. A professor at a computer, reading an essay, noting the question. The professor types comments on the essay, answers the question, assigns new work, hits a key and the words are sent to the student. (Question: is this exchange more or less personal than sitting in a class of thirty? Is the technology dehumanizing teaching and learning or restoring the tutorial role of the teacher?)
• Open learning. The external degree. The British had a long tradition of external degrees before Open University. Thomas Edison College, Regents College, and a handful of American colleges and universities offer external degrees. How many community colleges have done away with residency requirements and offer external degrees? (Residency requirements restrict student mobility and do not create community.)

3. Three Partners

• The idea of teaching partnerships. Some of the best teaching and learning results when we partner, formally or implicitly, with noncollege agencies. The teaching hospital: a compact between the agency and the college to work together to train future doctors and nurses: cooperative education. The longstanding partnership with textbook publishers: those provide dollars and expertise and create learning materials while colleges provide the store on the campus and help them sell those materials to the students. Cultural programs on campus often are designed with, and income shared with, talent bureaus and booking agencies. The new community college, the lifespan college, needs the collaboration of three sectors of society.
• The colleges. To create the campus as a place of assembly; to bring together libraries, laboratories, and other tools of learning; to provide the credentialing structure; to house the teaching faculty; to provide the links between the faculty and other agencies of the community.
• The agencies and institutions of the community. The home, so that the homes of the community become learning places, extensions of the campus: perhaps the real residency requirement is that the student be able and willing to study at home. The computer and modem allow the man or woman with child care responsibilities to have personal tutoring without leaving the home; the elderly, the incapacitated, can take part in learning, earn credits and degrees, learn new skills. The hospital as part of the campus. The prison, the military base. The church. The workplace: the factory, the office, the store equipped with computers, tape and disc players, the telephones become places of learning linked to teachers, libraries, information. We have telemarketing, telecommuting. Why not telelearning?
• The learning businesses. Since the learning community on campus is primarily a face-to-face community, we do not need many tools: the book and the blackboard. To move ideas, knowledge, and skills into homes and workplaces will require that we partner with those who own and manage telephone networks, create software, and design learning systems incorporating several communication technologies. They are eager to work with us, and will if we understand and accept the principles that motivate the private sector. And of course they will have to understand and respect the values and the culture of college.

If the colleges can learn to link their resources and skills with those of the other agencies of society and those of the learning businesses, they will invent adult learning systems we cannot now imagine, ways of learning appropriate for a society that must view lifetime learning as its ultimate resource.

• International Networks. In the last twenty years the community colleges have come to agree that localism is not provincialism, that each community in the United States depends for its security and work on the state of the world. Perhaps three hundred community colleges of the nation help students spend one or more semesters in another country and culture.  (There is work to be done here:  some states still require that courses be taught by state-certified teachers, so that instruction offered by Oxford dons cannot be recognized.)

The world is increasingly wired together, with copper wire and fiber optics with uplinks and downlinks.   Instruction can move easily from the the United States to Japan or Colombia or England or the U.S.S.R., to our students in those countries, or to students from those countries who choose to become our students. And, of course, instruction originating in those countries can move to the United States and to our students who want to learn about other countries and cultures.

International Telecommunity College needs no new technology, no great fundraising effort.  The infrastructure is in place.  All that is required is imagination, organization, and will.

Designing the New Community College

The diffusion of knowledge.  Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and most of the founding fathers were interested in the distinction between instruction that went on in schools and colleges, and the diffusion of knowledge, which used agencies like the Junto, the subscription library, the town meeting and the free press.  The new community college will create a rich academic community and will take responsibility for the diffusion of knowledge, using the new technologies as well as the classic forms of extension and dissemination.

The Community College as the New Chautauqua. The Chautauqua movement, once the largest and best known adult education enterprise in the world, was a place-the institution in western New York state that still flourishes as a learning community-and a circuit of culture tent shows created by entrepreneurs that moved lectures, drama, debate, and entertainment to the remote places of the United States. The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circles were study circles that once involved hundreds of thousands of people around the world in reading and discussion. Chautauqua, then, was both a place where people came to learn and a force that moved learning around the nation and the world.

The place Chautauqua might be the form the new community college campus should take. It is not a campus but a community with housing of every kind, stores, and all the services and amenities of a community, and threaded throughout the community are places designed for learning: the amphitheater, small buildings for study and discussion, a library, a bookstore. One gets up in the morning and decides whether to attend a lecture or go to the library or go boating or visit friends or take a class; learning blends into the other activities of adult life. While activities are scheduled and announced, they are not packaged in fifty-minute segments

Thoreau proposed, in Walden, that every community become a university. Although he was a Harvard graduate and used the Harvard library throughout his life, he did not use Harvard as his model for the community university, but the Concord Lyceum.

Telecommunity College. For those in the community who cannot come to the place of learning, or who choose not to come, the new community college will help create such places in their homes, workplaces, or institutions.

The distinction between high tech and high touch is misleading. The telephone, high tech, allows one to touch children, parents, friends; without it, one would touch them only by letter, also a form of technology, and without the technology of mall one would have almost no way of reaching those cared about. The media of communication allow touching those one cannot otherwise reach.

Telecommunity. We no longer must be near each other to establish human communities of mutuality and concern. The computer-mediated conference allows the forming of a community of common interest with people never seen, in one's own town, throughout the nation, around the world.

The community college changed the face of American postsecondary education after World War II with this bold assertion: everyone could learn and should have access to learning. The logic and rhetoric of the community college movement is now more than forty years old, and much has happened since the first announcement of the vocabulary of open door and equal access, and terminal and transfer curricula.

The new technology might allow our campuses to be made more humane places of learning for adults. And it might allow fulfillment of the old pledges in new ways, by circulating and communicating data, information, knowledge, and wisdom to everyone who wants them.

We can invent Telecommunity College.

Newman, John Henry, "The Idea of a University" in Essays English and American (New York: Collier), 1938.