Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 The members of the committee that the Williams administration appointed to study the merits of GEN's proposal did not feel, at least on the surface, that they had to decide on the relative merits of Herb Allen's world and theirs. They rejected GEN's proposal because they didn't think it would do what it purported to do. The head of the Wharton School's online-learning program had explained to the committee that courses were immensely expensive to produce; Wharton had lost money on its program every year. A study by the University of Illinois argued that the economies of scale characteristic of e-commerce don't operate in the case of online learning, since you have to keep adding teaching assistants as the student population grows. And even this was assuming a vast audience. In its final report, the committee wrote, "The frequently imagined audience for 'hundreds of thousands' of students waiting to enroll in such courses, however, simply does not exist." Sherron Knopp, an English professor, says: "People think because it's the Internet it's Rumpelstiltskin and you can turn straw into gold. We weren't convinced there was any gold there." But given that GEN itself was taking all the financial risk -- if the numbers didn't work out, only the company would be harmed -- it seems clear that Taylor and Allen provoked a sense of unease that went far deeper than mere pragmatic calculations. Precisely because GEN was aimed at the very heart of the undergraduate experience, it raised questions about the nature of the university that other Internet companies, seeking to occupy a more peripheral spot in the academy, did not. In essence, the GEN proposal was taken as a kind of inadvertent referendum on Williams-ness. Shawn Rosenheim, something of a Mark Taylor disciple and probably the most experimentally inclined figure on the Williams committee, says that he was "shocked and disheartened" to see how his colleagues stiffened before the prospect of the new. "The academy has become so deeply mandarin," says Rosenheim. "It's really a creature of sub-sub-specialties. Something like GEN would have the potential of requiring our work to be more public, to be accountable in certain ways." That was not, Rosenheim concedes, a widely shared perspective. "The amount of nonsense I heard about Williams teaching was unbelievable," he says. "As if those students who show up at the 8:30 class are there strictly for the love of knowledge."