From Kant to Las Vegas to Cyberspace: a Philosopher on the Edge of Postmodernism 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR Five years ago, Williams freed Mr. Taylor from a single department. He is now the college's only unattached faculty member. In 1995, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named him the nation's college professor of the year, thanks in part to a "global seminar" on postmodernism that he conducted, using teleconferencing technology, simultaneously with students at Williams and at the University of Helsinki. He plans a similar seminar for this fall with Monash University, in Australia. Late in 1996, Mr. Taylor turned down a job offer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By then, he had become convinced that new technologies could revolutionize higher education. He persuaded Williams to establish a Center for Technology in the Arts and Humanities, which he directs. It's housed in the college's new art building, in a sleek, gray-and-black studio -- a miniature version of M.I.T.'s Media Lab, here to encourage other professors to make use of multimedia in their teaching, their research, and their art. So far, faculty interest has not been what Mr. Taylor hoped. "He's lost all patience with run-of-the-mill academic work," says Shawn Rosenheim, an associate professor of English who worked on a CD-ROM in the lab. "He sees it as a kind of Tiffany-glass making, that we engage in and pretend is central to the world." Mr. Taylor is not about to disagree. "You get to a stage where you see the people you've worked with for years retire, die, leave the profession," he says. "They leave and the institution doesn't miss a beat."