As a professor of long standing at UCLA Lanham is able to extend his observations about the new electronic media in important ways to education. What are the implications of hypertext for literary studies? In Chapter 5 he points out how common databases now are, for example in medicine or law (p. 121). Moreover, the use of electronic tools for training has become commonplace -- particularly by the American military. Lanham points out that military education alone trains more students and spends more on training than the entire university system of the USA (p. 122). Since digital technology dominates much of the world of entertainment and business, shouldn't the universities also be training students in appropriate skills now? Why are literary studies still so obstinately classroom and book based?

Lanham points to two standard responses to this question. First, as humanists we should be defending our culture not selling out to the digital world. Or, second, as humanists our job is to critique the ideological conflicts of society and show students how to undermine them (p. 124). I think the proposals that Lanham goes on to make would allow for both of these positions, as well as the position that would find both of these defences out of date and misplaced in the new corporate, electronic world (the position Lanham appears to hold, if I've read him correctly).

His most arresting proposal is for a new hypertext, electronic textbook, open ended, dynamic, multi-leveled, designed for the electronic classroom (pp. 126-7) -- or, I would add, no classroom at all but the virtual meeting of students via a common web site and discussion group (for a start: other techniques will follow). In an electronic environment each student's learning can proceed at a pace that the student chooses. As Lanham points out, electronic resources can also free the student from the conventional one-size-fits-all essay, and permit multiple forms of writing, including the use of graphics or sound, as well as collaborative, group projects that currently are difficult to manage in the world of the graded essay and examination. Such a proposal, depending on where and how it was implemented, might either reduce class time or eliminate it entirely.

Lanham also points to other changes that electronic education will require. Given the common digital basis of the different arts, as well as techniques now well in place in the sciences for visualization and analysis of theories and data, the current disciplinary structure of the university will need to change. Separate departments for separate disciplines is hampering the emergence of the new common languages of digital thinking. In the case of literature, Lanham asks,

If what we hopefully call the 'real world' is moving toward the electronic word, can we continue to plan our curriculum around great books? Can we, in fact, continue to think of the curriculum in our customary linear terms -- preparatory courses, intermediate ones, advanced, prerequisites, the whole big catalogue enchilada? (p. 133)

Lanham's proposed electronic textbook suggests how out of date such hierarchies might be, if students can enter a learning pathway at any point they feel competent; can backtrack to pick up information needed to elaborate a perspective not fully understood; can hold discussions with fellow students or a professor on key concepts; can represent understanding in verbal and/or visual form dynamically on a web site for others to critique or learn from. This might seem utopian or misguided, but then we should compare it with the quality of learning that takes place in the average school or university class. Conventional teaching, as a friend of mine once put it, is giving students answers to questions they haven't yet asked. This is an exaggeration, of course, but my impression is that learning often takes place only to acquire a grade; little of it can later be recalled, and even less becomes internalized so that it plays an active role in the development of new knowledge. The electronic textbook envisaged by Lanham would overcome most of these problems, enabling students to learn at their own pace with appropriate support and evaluation built into the same system.

Lanham also suggests, with some justification, that a university built around electronic methods of learning would find the traditional concepts of originality and intellectual property in need of revision (p. 134). If electronic methods facilitate collaborative work, not only within the institution but between institutions that may be widely separated geographically, then it will become less possible to base evaluation systems on individual performance, as we now grade students and award merit increments to faculty. The 'corporate structure' of the university, as Lanham puts it, will have to be reinvented:

The present university and departmental structure seems as ill-suited for what we will need as the old compartmentalized, seven-tier General Motors management structure was for making cars in a global economy. Academic humanists disdain to view themselves as resembling other large corporate structures in American life, and this disdain has blinded us to how antiquated and inelastic our management system is. (p. 211)

For example, the 'course,' the basic building block of all higher education, will change from its present monolithic isolation into a continually evolving and growing entity. In Lanham's phrase, it "acquires for the first time a history" in which students can review the writings of previous students and, by their comments and interests, help shape the course for themselves and future students (p. 212). Such a course can also more readily make links across disciplines and incorporate information and texts developed elsewhere in other courses. In other words, it will be as interdisciplinary as it needs to be. Indeed, the boundaries between courses will become blurred, and some boundaries will disappear altogether.

The electronic textbook, then, points to a set of changes in education that go well beyond the textbook itself. As I suggested, the humanist defences that Lanham outlined (before dismissing them) can both be incorporated within such a textbook as issues for debate, counterpointed with the arguments against them. A hypertext provides a better basis for such dialectics than most conventional classroom discussions, unless the teacher is particularly skilful and the students particularly well informed and committed. The electronic textbook, as an interactive course environment, gives students a voice and a position from which to speak (perhaps literally, through digitised sound, but probably in the form of electronic writing). The textbook serves a more profound function, however, which, I believe, students will find appropriate and attractive.

As Lanham points out, university structures will have to change as the electronic environment for learning and research comes into being. What this will bring into focus more clearly is the nature of scholarship and its fundamental commitments. This will happen for several reasons. To place a course on the electronic platform (the internet of the future) will break down the walls of the classroom, making the collaboration of students and teachers visible for anyone to see, whether within the university or beyond it. (For example, since I put information about my courses on the web I have had inquiries about them from such places as Australia, Israel, Germany, and England.) Learning will cease to be a 'closed-shop' affair: anyone interested in watching the development of knowledge in a given field will be able to monitor relevant courses. This should also make it easier for those appropriately qualified to join in the learning conversation and to gain relevant credit for their contributions (as is the case with one of the students currently taking this course).

The electronic environment, with its ability to model learning and scholarship, will also help to make clear that our basic commitment as scholars is to the development of knowledge. However we conceive of knowledge (and postmodern theory has complicated this issue), the collaborative nature of the open platform on which we conduct our work, and where we invite interested and competent students to join us as apprentices and colleagues, refocuses attention on the value and significance of the knowledge itself and our responsibility towards it. As faculty we are of course also responsible to the institutions that employ us and to the students we teach, but these commitments are secondary to the responsibility we have for our discipline, that is, they flow out of this primary commitment. Without it these secondary commitments are likely to become corrupted, misguided, or worthless.

Despite the close association of computing and hypertext now with the commercial world, especially since business took to the internet, I am less persuaded by Lanham's attempt to merge training and education (p. 122). While much education involves an element of training (the present course included), the hypertext-based education of the future will be based on dialogue and on issues, at least in the arts. Here knowledge is contested, as a glance at the academic literature in the journals shows. Now, instead of transmitting information to students in conventional lectures and textbooks that tend to deaden or efface that debate, the hypertext medium can model the debate and invite students to join it. The present commentary, and others I have placed on this web site, are designed to be a part of that wider debate, and as a reader (if you are on this course) you know that you have a platform to join in the conversation and to chart your own position.

This view of scholarship that I have outlined is not new: it emerged from principles developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1810 at the founding of Berlin University, through Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University (1852), to such modern treatments as Jaroslav Pelikan's The Idea of the University (1992). Recent discussions of hypertext, however, threaten to undermine its central principle, the distinction between knowledge and information (cf. Pelikan, pp. 34-5). To represent hypertext in information terms may be perfectly correct for many purposes, but for literary studies and related disciplines it misreads the potentially critical role of hypertext in modeling knowledge and providing a framework for its development. Thus, the common clichés that computers are information processing machines or that the mind can be understood as a computer grossly underestimate both the mind and what the new hypertext medium has to offer. And this, it should be noted, is neither to represent knowledge as some grand narrative, nor to proclaim its use-value (cf. Lyotard, pp. 4-5, 37). It is to recognize that the arguments out of which we develop knowledge represent the best hope we have for survival and improvement of the human condition.

Lyotard