Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 Still, like their counterparts at UNext, Taylor and Allen understood that they would have to trade on the prestige of the great academic brand names. The trick was to sign affiliation agreements that would guarantee access to leading scholars. Earlier this year, armed with a rather crude prototype, company officials began making the rounds of the nation's leading colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Amherst, Swarthmore and, of course, Williams. In most cases, they spoke to the president and provost and a few faculty members. They talked about the Internet's pedagogic potential, about democratizing higher education, about exploring a powerful new medium that was driving the culture. And they offered a deal that sounded hard to refuse: GEN would bear all the development costs while the institution would get a piece of the company and a fraction of the gross receipts. All they had to do was let their professors go. GEN was enthusiastically received in some quarters. Peter Lange, the provost at Duke, said that he had been impressed both with the material and with the message, which he summarized as, "We're seeking to provide distance learning courses in a format and of a quality that will map well onto what you as a top-tier educational institution are doing." But on the very highest peaks of the university world, the GEN officials were essentially treated like ambassadors from a barbarous nation. One prominent university president lectured Taylor and Allen about the dangers of "contamination." Herb Allen sums up the general reaction by saying, "We didn't encounter hostility; we encountered intransigence." While Brown, Wellesley and Duke agreed to sign up with GEN, the company was rebuffed everywhere else. This was a setback, if not quite a catastrophe. Save at the three affiliated schools, the company now negotiates with individual professors, though it is by no means clear that the leading universities will simply stand by while GEN strikes deals with their academic stars. One of the schools that turned GEN down, interesting enough, was Williams. When I arrived on campus early in the fall semester, it was a warm and breezy day, and students in shorts and T-shirts were playing Frisbee on the broad, perfectly trimmed lawns or practicing lacrosse against a dormitory wall. Williams is a paradisal spot. Hawthorne lived nearby, and Melville stared out the window at the shaggy mass of Mount Greylock as he conjured up the looming form of Moby-Dick.