Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 Now, many months of Taylor's blue-skying and many millions of Herbert Allen's dollars later, the fruit of that conversation is about to become available for public consumption. Beginning in February, the Global Education Network, a private, for-profit company owned by Allen, will be selling four or five college courses over the Internet. (The company plans to offer 25 courses by next September.) For now, these courses are being aimed principally at the "lifelong learner" market, but both Allen and Taylor talk about ultimately transforming higher education itself. Mary Lefkowitz, a classics scholar at Wellesley, will be offering her class on Greek mythology; professors at Brown, Duke, Williams and other colleges and universities will be teaching courses on Bocaccio's "Decameron," on Alexander the Great, on the literature of Barcelona, on AIDS and on biology. Allen and other investors have already committed $20 million to the project and is likely to run through many more millions within a few years. You'd probably have to go back to space travel to find an innovation that has abetted millennial fantasies as much as the Internet has; we live in an age of technological utopianism. Nevertheless, it's perfectly possible that if GEN doesn't bring about the revolution its founders have in mind, one or more of its competitors will. Online learning is already a $2 billion business; Gerald Odening, an analyst with Chase Bank, predicts that the figure will rise by 35 percent a year, reaching $9 billion by 2005. There are already online law schools and business schools and Ph.D. programs, as well as thousands of individual courses. Online education has the force of inevitability. But is it good? It would, of course, be a fine thing if thousands of people could take Mary Lefkowitz's course on mythology; and perhaps it would also be a fine thing if classics departments started making enough money that they could afford to keep teaching classes that only six people care about, as Mark Taylor believes they will. But what about those walls, which among other things provide a little bit of protection from the all-devouring marketplace? As Charles Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School who has given a lot of thought to the Internet, asks: "What happens if you convert the university into a production house for making knowledge products? The university starts to look less like a community of scholars and much more like a drug company that has work-for-hire knowledge workers producing proprietary research." Who will bother to come to the university's defense once it starts behaving like every other institution in the culture? The Internet constitutes a much more profound challenge to the university than do, say, rising tuition costs or affirmative-action programs or speech codes -- because its promise and its threat are one and the same.