Mr. Jefferson’s University and Disruptive Technology in Higher Education.

As many of you may know I received my graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) from The University of Virginia.  However, more than just providing me a credential and a couple of pieces of paper to hang on my wall, my six years at “The University” had a greater effect on my development as a person than probably any other period in my life.  As a consequence of my experiences there, Mary Jo and I often take a break on our trips north and spend the night in Charlottesville.  While it is a convenient half-way point to and from central New York, it also provides me the opportunity to tread the brick walkways upon which Jefferson once passed, admire the Serpentine Walls he designed, and reflect upon the intellectual growth I experienced in that place.

Due to my strong feelings for UVa I have paid a great deal of attention to the recent events at the institution that have led to the ouster of its recently appointed President, Teresa Sullivan.  While I am not privy to the discussions that took place among the Board of Visitors (Trustees) and their Rector (Chair), a great deal of information has been published about the discussions that led to her resignation.  At its simplest level there seems to have been a disagreement between the Board and the President about the pace of change at The University, particularly as it pertained to the adoption of on-line education.  In particular, email correspondence seemed to indicate that the board was concerned that some “bricks and mortar” institutions were moving decisively in the direction of on-line learning (Stanford was mentioned specifically) while UVa was not.  If we leave aside the notion of whether two years is a long enough period for a President to assert a particular academic vision, the issue of whether web-based and internet technologies are in fact a disruptive technology that will permanently alter higher education, as the Board of Visitors apparently felt, is an issue worth some discussion.

One article that was mentioned in the emails between the two Board members, was an op-ed piece by David Brooks that appeared in the New York Times some months ago.  In this article, Mr. Brooks asserts that just as web-based and internet technologies have completely disrupted the business of gathering and providing information (creating a serious challenge to traditional print media), these same technologies are going to disrupt higher education, permanently altering how learning is accomplished.  Further, any institution of higher education that ignores on-line learning does so at its own peril.

The question I would ask, and ask us all to reflect upon, is: Is this true?  Does the advent of web-based and internet technologies mean the end is near for the traditional notions of university and campus?

I admit I come at this from a particular point of view that holds the traditional university in extremely high regard, and as a consequence I may be blind to the current realities.  However, one reality I am not blind to is that those of us that work within the structures of the traditional university are the defenders of a thousand-year tradition; a tradition that forms a foundation of our civilization,  This is a human tradition that should not be lightly discarded.

If one looks at aspects of our humanity that tie us together within a university community, one of the things that I am struck by is that people seem predisposed to make connections, to view patterns in the world.  Evidence for this can be clearly seen when you look at the night sky.  While each individual star may be separated by thousands of light years, our perception, and our desire to make connections between these randomly scattered dots, creates the constellations and the stories and myths on how they were placed in the sky.  On a more worldly scale, our ability to connect facts and historical occurrences into conspiracy theories also speaks to a human desire to connect the unconnectable into a coherent framework.  While my discipline is Neuroscience, I am not a Cognitive Scientist but suspect that this ability to make connections is a consequence of how our brain works and is a key aspect of our human nature.

As the examples of the constellations and the conspiracy theories might suggest our ability to connect random features of our experience may not be predictable.  That is, the story of the pattern in the sky was developed as a consequence of viewing the supposed pattern.  The story emerged as we viewed the complex features; the myth is an emergent property of our civilization as we attempt to create order in the world.  In addition to the stories about the constellations, we make more rational, yet still serendipitous, connections as we develop our intellectual abilities over our lifetimes.  In my view, traditional universities are created to foster these connections in a way that is not predictable.  If these connections are lost, we will lose something as a civilization, just as the expansion of web-based internet technologies has destroyed some valuable aspects of traditional print media.  As an example, in my personal experience I owe a great deal of my scientific career to random connections between disparate facts that would not have occurred within the current, largely electronic, system of disseminating scientific information.

Back in 1988 I was looking in the journal “Science” for the registration form to apply to attend a Gordon Research Conference in Chronobiology (at the time I studied circadian rhythms in marine snails).  As I looked for the page where the form was located I landed one page too soon.  On that page was an article concerning the mathematical modeling of the cell division cycle.  In the abstract of that article the authors described the nature of their model which reminded me of something I had learned back in graduate school about how circadian clocks were analyzed.  As a consequence, I began a series of studies that attempted to tie some of the biochemical processes that controlled cell division to similar processes controlling circadian rhythms. Ten years, two NSF grants, six papers, 11 presentations, 2 graduate students, and 16 undergraduates later I moved fully into academic administration after an enjoyable and productive research career.  The important point is that I never would have embarked on this journey today.  Today I would have gone on-line and down-loaded the form.  I never would have skipped the page with the registration form; I never would have seen the article on cell division; I never would have been reminded of an obscure fact from six years earlier in graduate school.  Also, no search engine would have been able to make that connection.  No matter how much Facebook or Google knew about me, they never would have tossed a cell-division article into the column of “sponsored ads” or “featured links” on my computer screen.

This superposition of randomness leading to a transforming experience happens every day in a traditional university.  Just yesterday, at the first-year orientation event in the Edwards courtyard, I was speaking to a group of Marine Science students when Dr. Renee Smith came by with a flyer outlining the various courses and programs available in the Philosophy Department.  Being somewhat of a “philosophy groupie” I listened and agreed with her as she explained how many of their course offerings were relevant to students pursuing degree programs in the College of Science.  As the students listened and looked over the brochure one then asked: “what is Metaphysics?”  To this Dr. Smith began a detailed discourse on the nature of reality, existence of God, the value of perception, and the meaning of perception.  The students stood in rapt attention, and clearly had their minds opened to the intellectual possibilities that come about when interested minds meet interesting people.  The most important thing about this interaction is that it never would have occurred if the students were sitting at home in front of a computer screen looking at an orientation web-based tutorial on how to access their grades on the Blackboard course management system.

Now it is clear that web-based and internet technologies will play a prominent role in our ability to access information; particularly as we require the incorporation of new knowledge into our own particular intellectual framework over our lifetimes.  However, if we replace all aspects of education by a packaged and predictable system of access, that throws away the random connections that occur in physical spaces as we interact face-to-face, we will lose something extremely important.  We will lose the ability to make connections from seemingly random facts, and as a consequence never see pathways worth exploring, or beautiful patterns in the sky, as we grow as intellectual beings. 

It is not that we ignore web-based and internet technologies at our peril as David Brooks wrote.  In truth, we ignore the traditional university at our peril.  Without the delightful randomness of the interactions at the university we will ultimately fail as a civilization.  This is the tragedy taking place at the University of Virginia; that the leadership of the Board of Visitors failed to understand that you cannot necessarily predict, plan, market and sell, those things that make the University of Virginia, and all universities, a great and enduring foundation of our civilization.

MHRoberts UVa ’81, ‘84