Commentary | WJHU FM 88.1
By William R. Brody
President, The Johns Hopkins University Bits, Not Bricks, Will Build the New Academy Looking out the window of his palace at Versailles, King Louis XVI asked a duke standing nearby, "Is it a revolt?" "No, sire," replied the nobleman. "It is a revolution." Sometimes, sitting in the president's office of a major university, I know exactly how he felt. Outside, a societal revolution is raging, touched off by the new way in which knowledge is generated and information disseminated. The university is at the barricades of this information revolution, assaulted by forces powerful enough to threaten its relevance to society. As a new academic year gets under way, it's worth thinking about how the university, and the research university in particular, will have to reconfigure itself to survive in the 21st century. We must come to understand that higher education is now just one player in the worldwide effort to expand, exploit and convey knowledge. So how will we change the way we carry out our mission in an age in which both knowledge technology and knowledge itself are expanding at a dizzying pace? First, I think we'll witness a transformation of the university from an almost purely physical campus to a far more dispersed, virtual campus. It will be a university campus in which bits and bytes replace bricks and mortar, one in which scholars and students communicate and collaborate electronically without the necessity of proximity. To be sure, traditional residence-based education has significant merit and we hope it will continue into the foreseeable future. Second, the university must also expand its horizons and become more global in outlook and outreach. We must capitalize on information technology to reach students from countries that are just now beginning to develop a substantial demand for higher education. Third, we must transform the way we organize and access information. Our libraries are choking on their diet of printed materials. The promise of the future are libraries meant "just for you." Here, faculty and students maintain a database of their scholarly interests and the library will use intelligent searching methods to provide material individually tailored for each person. Such methods are being investigated already on the Internet. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we must view the educational process not as a finite encounter lasting a few semesters, but as a lifelong relationship. During this process, there is a term of intensive collaboration -- mentorship, if you will -- in which we educate students in "learning how to learn." These are the traditional undergraduate and graduate years. They will be followed by repeated, periodic encounters with faculty for continuing education and training. What all of this demands, fundamentally, is a new understanding of the university. In the past, and up to this day, the word university has meant primarily a place. The ivy-clad walls. The stately clock tower. The manicured grounds. We need to change our mind-set that the university exists only as a physical place. It is our fate, and our good luck, to live in time of great change and extraordinary opportunity. Some of that change is bound to be traumatic. But we have within our hands now -- the chance to build the new academy. It will be a revolution not soon forgotten.
September 1998 | 
