Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 The issue has already been joined. Last year, Arthur Miller, the Harvard Law School professor known to the public through appearances on PBS, provoked an uproar when he agreed to teach a course at Concord Law School. Miller was rebuked by his dean, and Harvard issued an updated version of its guidelines explicitly stating that faculty should "not be deflected from their primary commitment to educate Harvard students by assuming competing obligations to teach for other institutions" -- including online ones. Miller has been muttering furiously about intellectual property rights since then, asking whether there is any meaningful difference between the videotapes he markets as students' aids and the essentially identical videotapes that Concord markets as a "course." Even colleagues of Miller's who think a person of his intelligence should have no trouble recognizing the distinction -- one is offered for credit at another degree-granting institution and the other isn't -- are convinced that Harvard's prohibition can't last for long. GEN is now in negotiations with Stephen Jay Gould, a biologist who is an even more prominent public figure than Miller. When I mentioned to Harvey Fineberg, the provost at Harvard, that at least one of his faculty members was in discussions with GEN, he looked surprised and said, "When it comes time, I hope the faculty members will read the guidelines." But do they apply to Gould? Or to Alan Dershowitz or Henry Louis Gates? In this new era of academic brand power, the university may be at the mercy of faculty members who are brand names in their own right. The internet will have a very different effect on the most prestigious institutions from the one it will have on those in the middle and lower echelons. The Harvards and the Williamses are in no danger of virtualization, because both their communal life and their intellectual life are integral to their natures. They will be the brand names coveted by students at the less grand institutions, not to mention by lifelong learners. And they will, if they wish, earn lots and lots of money, which in turn could permit them, as Herb Allen and Mark Taylor suggest, to lower tuition and thus reach out to a wider, or at least different, audience. Or perhaps all that money will encourage them to behave like the market actors they will have become. Once a university permits itself to be subsumed into its brand name, it becomes, as Charles Nesson puts it, "a production house for making knowledge products."