Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 The campus has ancient trees and old stone buildings and new science labs and one street of extremely modest stores. Mark Taylor has a theory that Williams is the model for Athena College, the bucolic and smugly progressive site of Philip Roth's most recent novel, "The Human Stain." Williams is, at the very least, archetypally related to Roth's invention -- intellectually serious, self-enclosed and self-regarding, at once forward-looking and deeply conservative. It must be one of the very few colleges where professors receive a burial plot as a perquisite of tenure. A place like Williams is plainly and even self-consciously an archaism in the modern world. Should we wish it otherwise? Mark Taylor is, of course, unambiguous on this score. Herb Allen has introduced Taylor to capitalism, and he has embraced its spirit with something of the hyperbolic fervor of the escapee from behind the Iron Curtain. "Three of the fundamental differences between Herb's world and mine," Taylor says, "are speed, risk and competition. Herb's world moves at warp speed; if you're not where there's risk, you're not where you're supposed to be; and competition is brutal. The university world moves glacially; it's risk averse; and once you've got tenure, there's no competition. How you can act creatively and productively in this world when you have that kind of inertia and resistance, I don't know." For Taylor, the Internet, and the idea of the network society, will mean change for the academy on every level. "What would it be like to create an educational institution that looked more like Nasdaq than a Ford assembly line?" he asks. And he knows the answer: no more tenure, no more endless layers of bureaucracy, no more traditional curriculum. Taylor imagines a curriculum "structured like a hypertext," based on interconnections rather than discrete domains. And he imagines a new pedagogy suited to new students and a new medium. "Faculty often convince themselves of the specialness and nontranslatability of what they do," he says. "A lot of it comes back to what Derrida identified as the metaphysics of presence: what is really valuable about what we do is the gemtlichkeit of face-to-face. And what they resist is mediation. We're not doing the same thing; it's different. Is it as good as? In some ways, yes, in other ways, no. It's different, but there's a value to that kind of difference."