Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 Still, the committee did not object to online learning itself. While opposing an institutional alliance with GEN, the majority of the committee enthusiastically supported the use of "electronic textbooks," a category that includes the Internet lectures that Edward Burger, the math professor, pioneered. The only real difference between Burger's material and GEN's is the way they are used. The electronic textbook does not challenge the metaphysics of presence, and that distinction is crucial for those faculty members who do not share Taylor's wish to break free from the confines of the institution. "Our icon," says Steven Gerrard, a professor of philosophy, "is Mark Hopkins on a log" -- a reference to James Garfield's famous comment about Mark Hopkins, then president of Williams, that "a university is a student on one end of a pine log and Mark Hopkins on the other." Gerrard is Mark Taylor's countertype -- a mild, reasonable, bookish soul whose office features a chess set, not a pile of canisters full of dirt from dead thinkers. He regards postmodernism as "a fad." And he feels the same way about Taylor's view of the marketplace as a source of creativity. At a meeting with GEN, Gerrard recalls: "They were holding out to Williams, 'We're going to make you rich.' That's really troubling. I don't think the marketplace of money is a good metaphor for the marketplace of ideas." Fortunately, Gerrard says, an institution with an endowment of $1.5 billion and a student body of only 2,000 can afford to be more or less immune to such blandishments -- though some of the other faculty members were not at all averse to profit-making activities. Gerrard himself has few doubts about the university's detachment from the marketplace. When I recited to him Taylor's catechism about "Herb's world" and "Mark's world," he said, "If that's Herb's world, I think it's my job and the faculty's job to resist that world and to fight against it." But can you? The university has been able to hang on to its posture of unworldliness because its core functions have had very little economic value beyond its walls. What happens when even philosophy and English literature become marketable commodities? What will become of the cozy world of Mark Hopkins on a log? Suddenly the academic can become a free agent. GEN is already working with three professors at Williams and is now negotiating deals with other faculty members there and elsewhere. Competition among the elite universities has already created an unprecedented star system; think how much more supercharged the atmosphere will become when stars can not only play the universities against one another but also the academic world itself against the online marketplace. How does the elite institution keep its most prized members happy without sacrificing the sense of community that distinguishes a university from a publishing house?