Online U 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 The university can not afford a simple yes to this proposition, and it cannot afford a simple no. It can not allow its faculty members to function as free agents, but it can not bar the door to GEN and its ilk; yea, not even Harvard. Universities are already in the business of selling knowledge products, whether it's licenses and patents to scientific or technical innovations, or academic periodicals or casebooks. They can not draw a line around a certain kind of knowledge and say that the marketplace doesn't belong there -- not, in any case, if the market wants to be there. But as Dan Moriarty, the assistant provost at Harvard for information technology, puts it, the university must distinguish between activities that "preserve" the brand, and those that "harvest" it. Of course, that's easy to say if you have a $19 billion endowment, as Harvard does, and you can afford not to harvest your most precious asset. Everyone else will face some very hard choices. Mark Taylor is a restless searcher after truth, and his passionate adventuring makes him an extraordinary teacher. Steven Gerrard, the Williams philosophy professor and critic of post-anythingism, says that he saw Taylor as an all-too-clever phony until he asked Taylor to talk to his class about Hegel. That 50-minute lecture, Gerrard says, was "the most impressive pedagogic performance I've ever seen." I had a chance to see Taylor in action during my visit to Williams. He was teaching a course called Cyberscapes, certainly the only course in Williams cross-listed in philosophy and studio arts. There were maybe a dozen students, which seemed pretty impressive considering the terrifying reading list. That morning, Taylor was discussing Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology," a work of numbing opacity. Taylor, in jeans and clogs, in spectacles and silver pompadour, strode back and forth as he talked. Sometimes he made a move for the blackboard and then, arrested in midsentence by a contrary thought, swung back to the class. He was so adrenalized that he seemed unable to catch his breath, and his words toppled over one another. The students watched him, agog.