Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 Two years ago, a few days before Thanksgiving, Mark Taylor, a faculty member at Williams College, in northwestern Massachusetts, received a phone call from Herbert Allen Jr. Taylor is a professor of humanities, a designation Williams invented for him; his sphere of expertise encompasses religion, philosophy, architecture theory and a couple of other disciplines. Allen is the investment banker and plutocrat famous for the retreat of bankers and plutocrats he hosts each summer in Sun Valley, Idaho. Both men had been members of the Williams community for a quarter-century or so -- Allen is a prominent alumnus and donor -- and they have houses about a mile apart in the thickly forested Berkshire hills in which the college is nestled, but they had never met; nor was it easy to imagine that they would have anything to say to each other. Taylor was one of those protean figures who vex campus life -- a perverse and provocative thinker, a guru and a troublemaker. He was flirting with an attractive offer from the University of North Carolina, and a former Williams administrator had recruited Allen to see if he could do something about it. Allen invited Taylor over for coffee. As Taylor recalls it, Allen, a figure for whom "bottom line" is not a figure of speech, said, "What are you doing, what aren't you doing that you'd like to be doing and where is the world heading?" Taylor talked, as is his wont, about Hegel and Kierkegaard and Marx, about religion and philosophy and art and economics. He argued that, thanks largely to the Internet, a new "network society" was emerging in which knowledge would be the most precious of resources, that institutions and individuals would be drawn together in a global information marketplace and that the walls that separated the university from the larger world would be pierced. "Usually, when I would describe to people where I think the world is heading," Taylor told me recently, "the answer would be, 'Not in your lifetime or mine.' "And Allen, in any case, says that he was the kind of college student who would have skipped the sort of classes Mark Taylor teaches. But while Allen had no use for Kierkegaard, he understood marketplaces, and he believed in the transformative powers of the Internet. He said, "The world you're describing is the world I live in." And so, as one of Taylor's Williams colleagues puts it, "he put his money where Mark's mouth is." He invited Taylor to draw up a plan to join the network society.