The Academical Village in the Internet Age
Saturday, November 13, 1999
9:00 - 11:30 a.m.

Edward L. Ayers: Good morning everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the University of Virginia and our discussion of the Academical Village in the Internet age. This morning we're going to be wrestling with the place of the University of Virginia in particular and higher education in general in the era of the new media that are transforming so many things around us. We're looking forward to an active discussion this morning. We're looking forward to taking questions from you folks, to wrestling with some of the problems as well as possibilities of this new era in higher education, so we look forward to your active engagement in this entire discussion. I'd like to begin by asking our panelists to introduce themselves by telling us their relationship to UVA and to the Internet. If we could, let's begin with Brandy.

Brandi S. Hughes: Good morning. My name is Brandi Hughes. I'm a third year undergrad in the college. I'm actually an English and American Studies major and I'm still a baby in this apprentice stage for Internet users. I actually work with the Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Virginia Center for Digital History to create a database for the Race and Place Web site. My particular work is on African American landowners in the city of Charlottesville at the turn of the century.

Jahan Ramazani: Hello. My name is Jahan Ramazani. I'm a faculty member, Professor of English at the University of Virginia. I was an undergraduate here. I graduated in 1981, and like so many of us at the University, I'm trying to improvise new ways of making use of this amazing new medium-- the Internet-- in my teaching and in all kinds of ways. Although, I think probably my role here is: the moss growing on the back of the rock, as a liberal arts professor, and to raise some skeptical questions.

Jeffrey D. Nuechterlein: My name is Jeff Nuechterlein. I am also an undergraduate graduate of the University of Virginia in 1979 and also a graduate of the Law School in 1986. I'm an investor in early stage Internet companies and I have spent most of my career in technology. Once as a lawyer I represented the U.S. Semiconductor Industry and then also worked on Capitol Hill in the Senate Technology Law Subcommittee.

Mark B. Templeton: My name is Mark Templeton. I'm a 1978 graduate of the Darden School. I like to think that I came to UVA to get my culture because I got my "agri"-culture at North Carolina State where I studied design. I'm President and Chief Executive Officer of Citrix Systems. We build the virtual bricks-- the mortar for this new media age. We build all the stuff that's up underneath this exciting Internet we're facing today. What we like to think is that even though it's the wild west and there're a lot of covered wagons going out there, and a lot of pots and pans being sold, and wagon trains and towns being built, that we're selling all of the supplies to all these guys and whether they're successful or not, we're going to be successful.

Ayers: My name is Ed Ayers. I am a history professor at the University and have been for 20 years. I didn't have the good fortune of going here as an undergraduate. I've been trying to compensate for it ever since by learning as much from the students that I have here as I can. For the last 10 years or so, I've been very active in trying to imagine what digital history might look like and thinking about how we blend the traditional disciplines of narrative history and analysis with media and computers and networks. I'm the Executive Director of the Virginia Center for Digital History here at the University.

U. Bertram Ellis, Jr.: My name is Bert Ellis. I am a double Hoo as well so I am '75 graduate of the College and a '79 graduate of the Darden School. I am now the Chairman and CEO of a company called iXL Enterprises, which is shorthand for an e-architect. We build the web applications for several hundred companies in the Fortune 500 as well as the pure law .com start up field. We're also a venture capitalist investing fairly significantly in the start-up area in .coms.

John M. Unsworth: I'm John Unsworth. I'm a professor in the Department of English and also Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology and the Humanities, something that was started by Bill Wulf and Ed Ayers among others and housed in Alderman Library. We work with faculty in many different departments in the humanities on research projects that use information technology.

William A. Wulf: I'm Bill Wuff. I have the privilege having been the first Ph.D. in Computer Science graduated from the University in 1968. I must admit I was somewhat bemused that the panel yesterday kept using phrases like back in '94. To the best of my recollection, I sent my first e-mail message across country in about 1971. I also had the privilege of being the assistant director of the National Science Foundation as we were planning the transition of the Internet from being a government-run organization to being a privatized one. I happen to be on leave from the University at the moment where I'm a professor in the Computer Science Department to be president of the National Academy of Engineering which is a schizophrenic organization. It is simultaneously an honorific organization and advisor to the federal government on issues of science and technology.

Peter E. Brownfield: My name is Peter Brownfield. I'm a fourth year history major. I've taken a digital history class with Mr. Ayers and I've worked at the Virginia Center for Digital History for the last two years

Ayers: So you can see we have a wide range of experiences and degrees of engagement and degrees of enthusiasm for all these things and my job this morning is going to be try to coordinate as fluid a discussion as we can. I'd like to begin by asking a question of our three alumni visitors and then ask the faculty members and students to respond to them in an engaging way. The first question is what did you study at UVA that helped you to see the possibilities of this new medium when it came along? Jeff, would you be willing to start?

Nuechterlein: I'm happy to. I think there're a number of ways to answer that question, but one is just to recognize that we have a self-selected group here--the applicants that apply to Virginia. Those that are admitted are obviously the top, so we start with a great foundation, and of course, we have one of the best faculties in the United States. So we have the environment to produce great graduates to begin with, but I don't think that the key is so much what individuals are studying at the University in the sense of what specific classes they are taking. I certainly think that it's useful to have classes like finance and accounting and engineering while you're here, but my thoughts on this are generally that it's much more important to just learn how to think and how to create in your mind and I thought the best training that I had while I was here in that regard was to take a broad range of subjects across the disciplines, so I'd recommend that students take at least one class in history, philosophy, politics, physics, literature, music, art, and so forth, not the least of the reasons being that even if you're interested in technology, but when you go to Carnegie Hall, you want to have an appreciation for what you're listening to and certainly that's something that you can gain here and in a number of other areas. The other thing I would say is that Virginia taught me, anyway, how to write well. As a venture capitalist, one of the things that can make or break you if you're an entrepreneur is whether or not you can write cogently and concisely. I look at over a 1,000 business plans a year, and generally, if it's not well written in the first page, it's often that I won't go much further with the business plan, so you have to basically grab your potential investor right up front in the executive summary and my experience with looking at plans written by the Virginia graduates is that they're generally very high quality.

The other thing I would say is that Virginia is terrific in my mind in producing leaders and allowing people to develop leadership skills and I think one of the ways that Virginia does that is by having so many different organizations that students can get involved with and take leadership positions in. I also think that Virginia's great on developing teamwork and interpersonal skills, and again, I think that that's partly a factor of having all of these groups that students can be involved with.

And communication skills are equally important and I think that Virginia has the characteristic in classrooms of encouraging people to speak up and get experience speaking. I think that what I would say in general is that Virginia to me is great at giving people a broad base of knowledge while they're here. I don't think that we teach our students in a rote manner. Memorization is not what we're about; what we are about is putting things together in our minds from trying to accumulate knowledge in different areas and seeing the interrelationship of subjects and, in my mind, that is what has made a lot of Internet pioneers so successful--that ability to think outside of the box and move beyond just what's already established.

Templeton: Having gone to Darden School, I think there probably wasn't anything specific there that prepared me or encouraged me to go into the technology industry but I would fully agree with what Jeff said. It's not what you study. It's how you study and the process. The Darden School built on the case method I think was an incredible experience in terms of being able to get an experience of ownership around a business problem and a situation and have to actually wrestle with it and do something with it and I think it's great preparation for the technology industry because as we were talking yesterday, you have to do things. You have to actually make something happen that's real--that you can put your hands on--and it's great training for that. When I went to North Carolina State at the School of Design, it was built around pedagogy that was an extension of the Bauhaus, which was the first school of modern design, and its whole theory was that you teach creativity first. Then you teach application of that creativity and what I noticed after the first couple of years where they throw everyone into one single bucket was that what the process was about was sort of undoing all of the stay-between-the-lines kinds of things you were trained to do through your education up 'til that point and that's how you get an ability to think outside the box and you can actually train people to think outside of a box and think creatively. I think it's incredibly important and then sort of how you vector off into the industry, I think really the UVA experience, you can come from any direction.

I think a lot of the people you've heard speak at this conference are showing that whether engineering is your starting point of business or the liberal arts, it doesn't really matter, but it does bias you. There're two sorts of fundamental places you can go in the industry. You can go onto the content side, which is all this great new media stuff, and sort of what the face of the Internet looks like and then there's the other side of it which is sort of the software side of it. It's the engines and stuff that's underneath all this stuff and I think the content, a liberal arts education with a good exposure to technology and what's possible is really powerful and then on the engine side, a good exposure to technology in terms of debt of understanding with the right kind of business training is the way to kind of bring those things together. I think all in all, if you look at people who have been successful in the technology industry you'll find a couple of really key things--curiosity and passion. It's curiosity around how this stuff works, why it works, what's possible with it, that really leads people to do all kinds of interesting things with respect for the kind of undergraduate training background that they have, in fact, and when they can exercise that curiosity in a university environment, I think that where you can start to build passion that people actually then will take and do something with and go act on it. You've seen a couple of entrepreneurs right here in Charlottesville. The guys at [WHAM] and the guys at Raging Bull that left the University environment because they had a passion and a curiosity about something and they're off charging and drilling on that real hard for themselves, so I think that's what the University can do to somehow encourage that.

____________: And aggressive names for a company seem to be very helpful as well.

____________: Absolutely.

Ellis: I can probably just follow on with both of their comments and just say ditto and leave it there. That's wouldn't create much of a passion [laughter], and I also, as I answer this question a lot, I always think back on some comments somebody gave me that I think is very appropriate at least for myself 25 years ago was college is a marvelously rich experience wasted on 18 year olds, and I'd love to come back and have a chance to do it again with a little more discipline in what I did and from a single course in my six years here that I would look back and say was the best for doing what I've done would be the A&C course at the Darden School and I would urge the undergrads to put that into the first year curriculum. A&C, Analysis and Communication, is speaking and writing, learning how to do it concise, using the King's English, get your point across quickly, and learning to be comfortable in front of people making your case. It's something that if you're going to be an entrepreneur, if you can't do that, you can't be an entrepreneur, but from a standpoint of the answer and I will be a disruptive panelist and seque into one of your other questions, Ed, with my answer here,

____________: This goes into your permanent record by the way.

Ellis: Fortunately you can't do anything to be any more, but it's all part of the whole experience at Virginia and I am unabashed fan of all my six years here and it comes down to the overall academic environment and the academic village and Mr. Jefferson's whole idea and I think it's real and it was real then and it's real now, combined with the other aspects that surround this wonderful place and that, in my view, I think in somewhat of an order, first and foremost, the Honor System and I cannot overemphasize that and how that affects everything I do as a businessman and as an entrepreneur and in my entire relationship with my investors and my partners and my employees is one of trust. I've approached everything in my life with I trust you until you give me reason not to trust you, so you have to prove the contrary and that's a different way that I approach business and I think it's the better way to do it. People argue. That's my personal point of view, so everything I do in life is affected by the way this University treated me and raised me, if you will. Surrounding that from an academic standpoint, the Echols Program and the Honors Program were those that allowed me to experiment more and with less downside risks, if you will, and those were wonderful opportunities. I thought the fraternities were an important part of this University and that's a contrary point of view right now in particular because I built some of my best friendships around stuff that I think college student shouldn't do and I think college students still should have fun and do the wild stuff that you need to get out of your system. At least, you need to get into your system and maybe get out of your system and that's a contrary point of view and I understand that and I debate that with my wife and my two teenagers as well. And then the experience of running a student organization here in an environment where this University gives the students the opportunity to actually run the student organizations, and then, finally living on the Lawn. The absolutely best year of my life was living on the Lawn and that whole experience and it all came together right there in that village that Mr. Jefferson put together, so you put that all together and then once again, completely wrapped with the Honor System, that's what I believe is in the water here in Charlottesville.

Ayers: Which of these inflammatory comments would our other panelists like to respond to?

It seems unfair to put the undergraduates on the spot first, but this a question about undergraduate life. Did your own experience correspond with this, that we didn't hear about hands-on experience about the new medium Do you believe what you just heard or do you disagree?

Brownfield: I agree entirely with Jeff. I think he makes a great point saying that you have to take classes from broad range of areas and you can't specialize too early and you have to really learn about a lot of things. I think that's one danger in education today is that people are specializing immediately. People are only studying engineering or only studying business instead of studying all the liberal arts and I think while the technology is important and you should take classes in those areas, that taking classes in all these areas is really what's going to make you successful and then what Bert was saying I also agree with. I think that people run down some of the traditions at UVA and some of the things that we have going here and these are all things that contribute to the success of UVA students, so that's my take.

Hughes: I agree as well. I think the only thing that I would question is when you talk about exploring and making sure that you keep a broad-based view of your academic company here, how does that relate to some of the requirements that are required for a major when you have to declare a major and there are requirements that you have to fulfill? How do you feel that that should be navigated, and personally, that's one of the reasons that I choose the American Studies Program because that gives you an opportunity not to just specialize in one thing but have a broad-based range, so how do our majors correspond to that?

Ellis: We had that discussion yesterday at lunch with Ken Elzinga in the audience and I concur that there's a trend in education now to make people, kids, figure out what they want to do too early, all the way back the whole drill about which preschool do you try and get our kids into. It goes way too early, but in college I think that you and your colleagues should be encouraged to experiment in those first couple of years. I also happen to think there should be some required courses that you just can't opt out of. I would say A&C or the equivalent thereof would be one that should be there in your early years because there're certain things as a parent now and an old fart that I think 18-year-olds like me back somebody just needs to tell you do it. Just trust us. Just do that one, but otherwise I don't think you should be put into a box where you have to figure out whether you're going to be even pre-law or pre-med or pre-commerce or pre-this or that. You're just pre [laughter] for the first two years. Just be pre. Just take stuff that you'll never ever use because you'll just never have this chance again.

Templeton: I think you really have to be careful with this. Again, I'll be a little bit of the curmudgeon as it were because kids-- I have three children and each one has a different perspective and the University really has to serve a broad kind of set of students, some that want to be a doctor and have a passion about being a doctor or a lawyer and there's a subscribed and a well-understood sort of way to get there and that's great for that kind of a student and the University does an incredible job around that, but there's this sort of other kind of student that really has a different kind of a perspective on life and I think parents giving guidance to their children going forward and sending them to a university environment like this that really can get that kind of a exploration experience needs to be part of it. I don't know how you build that. I think I guess the University does have the Echols Program that allows for some of that, so it's like some of this stuff needs to be measured against the reality of we still need doctors and lawyers and etc., even in this new media age.

Nuechterlein: But along those lines I will say that if you're pretty well directed early on, I think that if for instance you want to be a lawyer you ought to go to the law school and sit in on some classes and see what that entails and you probably ought to spend time with practicing lawyers just going around with them for a couple of days before you make that final decision and my experience was a lot of people end up in law school or business school or other schools just because of some influence early in their life--

Wuff: Do you think anybody would actually want to be a lawyer if they did?

Nuechterlein: I actually enjoyed but I just thought there were a lot of people that were with me in law school and that were with in the legal profession that maybe didn't understand what it entailed on a day-to-day basis before they made the choice, so my feeling is that you've got the time while you're at Virginia to experiment and see what different professions would entail by (a) going to classes while you're here and (b) using your free time effectively in your summers and what not, to take jobs in a law firm or with a doctor or in a business and just see whether or not that's something that really is going to make you happy later.

Ayers: I haven't heard anyone say engineering yet? Would anyone respond to that challenge?

Wuff: Well, actually, I was thinking about something slightly different and that is I feel a little bit of dissonance here. Yesterday, we heard a lot about moving fast, about failing fast, about not suffering the possum syndrome of being captured in the headlights and just sitting still and not moving, and I have the sense that a lot of this technology has potential for profound impact on the University but what I'm hearing from our entrepreneurs is a nostalgia for the way things are and not moving the University very much and I guess I'd like to tickle out from them is it really the case that the University should be moving fairly slow in the face of you moving fairly fast.

Ellis: No. I mean I hope I didn't give that impression because if I do I take it all back. I don't anything that I talked about that I based my standards and my style on and to which I attribute what success I've had is going to be, has to be impaired by moving faster with better technology. The drill is how you can incorporate some of those into a less personal world which the technology will create, the ability to one-on-one interact from afar as opposed to in an academical village in a classroom, but I think the University absolutely has to adapt to that and I think you can still have students take a broad range of studies, including engineering for sure and/or computer sciences and other things that seems to be more technically oriented than taking a philosophy course, but I think they can certainly be taught in a high technology way so that you're creating that exposure all at the same time, but the University absolutely cannot divorce itself from this sea change in the world.

Wuff: I have a good friend who likes to remind me that it took something like 30 years from the invention of the movie camera to the invention of the close-up, so I think that one of the challenges for the University is how we recreate the academical village experience.

____________: I agree

Wuff: In a way that scales, that distributes it, to a much larger and potentially physically dispersed--

Ellis: Even in the way we run our own company which we try and incorporate technology, we've got 19 offices and 2,000 people around the globe and we try and use every bell and whistle known to man, but there is at the end of the day no substitute to getting 50 people together in a room and meeting each other and talking with each other and I haven't figured out a way I can convey personality and style and I like my style and I want my company to convey that Honor System style and if I have that style and the next level of management below me does not, I can't punch through to my line level people, but I can't get that through a computer. This is here for effect [laughter] and maybe we'll figure that out certainly before 2020, but the way we address that is at least quarterly bringing everybody together in bonding sessions and you do fun stuff and you do business stuff and you go out and have a drink together. I mean, you just really get to know each other and I think the University's got to incorporate that into everything it does. I would not want anybody to take a course at the University of Virginia of without having a chance to touch the Rotunda, even if you don't know what the Rotunda's used for.

Ramazani: This is music to my ears to hear you saying this because it's seems to me that the University really faces a challenge of moving fast obviously on the technology front. We can do extraordinary things in terms of increasing the transparency of what we do to the rest of the world, opening the village as it were, but we have to balance that with what we've always done well and making sure that we try to do that better and better. A physical space that has an extraordinary effect on I think the people who live within it as Jefferson intended--the harmony and the order and the beauty of the space. The face-to-face interaction that's at its best quite intense between faculty and students in a seminar setting or even a 50-, 60-person class, where you might have students engaging each other as well as yourself and also through student organizations cultivating on the one hand the kind of leadership that Jeff spoke about eloquently the kind of self-reliance as well that obviously can lead into successful careers of all kinds. At the same time, kind of cooperative collegial experience among the participants in those organizations, but to go back just briefly this question of speed, I think there is a little bit of a danger of being so caught up in the thrill of the speed, of the movement, and so forth, that we forget the virtues of slowness, pondering reflectively qualities that civilizations for thousands of years have thought important in, say, a beautiful work of art or a poem or something like this, learning to thrill at beauty or to experience awe and wonder, so there are some things that can be replaced, some things through these new media, but maybe others that can't be.

Templeton: The way I think about this is there's sort of training and then there's learning. I think that the technologies should be intensively applied to the training aspect of the University, both the engine that's here today and make it better, more scalable, more efficient, etc., and for the new opportunities sort of reaching beyond the walls of the University, but then the learning part is the experiential part that you can't do it in a virtual kind of world and learning is about human experience and building relationships that last a lifetime and I share all of Bert's perspective on that and that's not nostalgia. That's sort of understanding the difference between getting data and processing it through your brain and becoming a richer, broader more experienced person where you're starting to build on the most precious thing in the world that the Internet hasn't been able to do anything about and that is wisdom, and so with all this great technology which I love and I'm in the middle of, it has its limitations and that's what makes the human side of this thing so incredibly interesting to me because wisdom comes from the human mind.

Nuechterlein: I do think that technology has had already a positive effect, back to your question, Bill, with regard to distance learning. I had the opportunity to see a class taught from an office in New York by a UVa graduate who's a hedge fund manager. He did the entire thing by video from New York to students in the McIntire School and he was able to pull as guest lecturers all the best hedge fund managers in the world who happened to be within a 10-block radius of his office who probably would not be likely to come to Charlottesville to do a guest lecture and that's that sort of thing I think technology is going to open up to our students and we should continue to push that frontier.

Ayers: I think that the spirit of the Lawn has infused of us with this very rosy view that we share of what the University's like but you read and I'm living in Silicon Valley this year at Stanford and 1 block away from the Stanford Research Park and read the San Jose Mercury News every morning which is basically .com [laughter] on every single article and so I'm look at for this from the point of view of many people, we're a dinosaur. The University is just sitting here just sort of munching away on soft vegetation while the climate's changing and we're not realizing what's going on, so without taking away any of what you said of the obvious and wonderful things that the University teaches, how long can we stand up to our knees in this rising water? Are we going to be endangered if we don't react sooner or do we hold onto to the more traditional values all the more tenaciously for them?

Ellis: My answer is you adapt immediately. You adapt or you fade.

____________: Well, Bert, you said that the high point of your life was living on the Lawn and--

Ellis: I wouldn't close the Lawn down.

Ayers: Well, over 60% of college students today are non-traditional age and The University aspires to be a national and world leader, I don't see when I walk down the Lawn many 60 year-old people in those Lawn rooms. How can we combine the very real virtues of the UVA and enlarge the mission that we might play?

Ellis: Just take Jeff's idea. Technology allows you to bring people into the university easier than getting into Charlottesville's airport.

Ayers: Well that's allowing us to bring traditional teachers into the University. What responsibilities does the University have to reach a larger audience beyond the walls?

Ramazani: You know, just playing on something that Bert mentioned yesterday. It may be, for example, that some of our great lecture courses taught by luminaries like Ed Ayers, for example, could be transmitted quite successfully quite broadly, so, again, I think one has to have a balance. There're some things that can be made accessible to the multitudes out there, but at the same time, when it come to your 14-person seminar and you want to push students really hard and make them push each other in close interaction with each other and you want them to have a little casual conversation with each other on the way out the door that might make the lightbulb go off, those are things that are easily replaced it seems to me.

Ellis: From a personal standpoint, I want my children to go here and attend class and do exactly the way I did it, but with the technology integrated into everything that they're taught but this is 1999 last I checked. We're still thinking about 2020. I mean, who the heck knows? And we have to be able to handle whatever this world's going to look like then and believe me, it's going to change a lot. So I think we have to make sure that we can do it any number of different ways but I don't think there's any replacement for the intimacy of coming here and attending college, but we can teach to people that either get it before, i.e., me later, I mean, I'd love to take the courses that I even took as an undergrad. If someone could give me Irby Cauthen's course again, please do, because I didn't take it with anywhere near as much import then as I would now knowing how good a professor he was, but my dad-- My dad would love to take these courses and he'd pay a lot of money to do it sitting in Richmond doing it. I mean, I think you can expand your entire audience you're teaching to and I think what's going to happen is the really good professors that know how to broadcast their course are going to be rock stars. I mean, they're going to be able to teach to the world and if this University doesn't give them a platform and a technology to do so, they will go where they can. You therefore lose the really good professors, so that's my view of you have to adapt this if we want to be a university on a world stage and if don't we want to be a university on a world stage, I think we'll fade.

Nuechterlein: There's always going to be a place for great universities like Virginia. Clearly we have to change with the times. Jefferson would have expected us to. He expected that we would look at the Constitution every generation and see if it fit the people at the time and I think we have to look at the University now and see if it fits this changing environment that we're in but you don't learn leadership, interpersonal and communication skills sitting in your room in a house and just learning over the Internet for four years. You've got to come to this type of environment to get those skills and those are the sorts of the skills that we talked about earlier as being so vital for succeeding in this new information technology.

Templeton: Yes. I think this is a classic market segmentation kind of a situation where the University has all these incredible resources and knowledge, bricks and mortar, etc., and an incredible brand if you think about it. The number one public university brand name in the world and there are some customers out there. There's the sort of 17 to 21 year old. That's a customer. Then there's sort of the alumni. Then there's sort of another set that we've talked about, the 50-, 60-year-old person that wants to get a different view on life and I think in each one of those cases the needs that the customer has is different, so how can the University take a combination of what makes it great and its core assets today combined with all the incredible possibilities of leverage that technology can provide to reach each one of those kinds of customers.

Ellis: Just think about the issues that the University's facing, Ed, you in the College. You don't have state funding any more. You've got to find new sources of revenue and now you've got a whole population that you don't have to fit into one of these seats that can pay for courses and a very academically-oriented group 55 and over. There're going to be very active on the web.

Wuff: To pick up on Mark's point about market segmentation, there's been a notion since you asked about engineering before, somebody defined the term the half-life of engineering knowledge--how long it takes for half of what an engineer knows to become obsolete and the remarkable thing is that the estimates on that vary from 7_ down to 2_ years, very short because the technology is moving so fast. That raises a serious question in my mind about the responsibility of a state institution to provide really high quality lifelong learning activities, experiences, for folks like engineers. I don't mean exclusively engineers, but by the way, 2_ years was for software engineers as you might expect.

Unsworth: I want to go back to actually Brandi's question about requirements and something that Mark said too. I've been doing a lot of first year advising and major advising in the last couple weeks and I think the College requirements are intended to provide breadth and they do good job of making sure that even if you don't like math, you have to take some. Even if you're not really crazy about humanities, you have to take some of that too, and the major requirements are usually intended to provide depth and they sometimes do that well and sometimes don't, but these are part of an educational structure which we know can't make people learn. It provides an opportunity and sort of encourages you to do certain things and not to do other things. In another context recently, I've been wondering how you structure institutions that encourage people to take risks because that seems almost like a contradiction in terms--institutions don't usually encourage people to take risks and educational institutions usually encourage people to emulate and affiliate and try to become part of the structure rather than thinking outside the box, so my question for Mark was I wondered if you could tell us a little bit how creativity is taught in the Design School that you were talking about at N.C. State where I also taught and had some very interesting students from that school.

Templeton: Well, a couple of things. First of all, a general comment is and this is strategy or a philosophical thing. The University needs to probably decide what kinds of things it can impact in a student. What's genetic versus what's not. Risk taking and those kinds of things tend to be sort of wiring where there's a whole lifetime behind that that comes from a home and so forth, where kids are taught to take risks or allowed to take risks, so I don't know what you can do there but certainly in the teaching of the creative process and the way it basically works it's very much the case method but for creative kinds of learning and it's real simple. A problem is proposed and you get two weeks to work on it and you can do anything in the world in sort of being outrageous is one of the measures of how well you do, and what a key part of that training is something called the jury system actually, a critique and at the end of the two weeks you have to stand and deliver. Here's the problem as I understood it. Here is my solution to the problem and how I got there, and I'm there and I'm being analytical and communicating and presenting my ideas, and you do that for four years That's really good experience and over time, you get more and more specific about your interests. My interest was product design, but some of my colleagues went into architecture, landscape architecture, visual design, those are some of the disciplines within the school there, so--

Ellis: The genetic--can you train or do you grow or do you burst an entrepreneur? I argue that all the time. Is it in the genes from the get-go? I've tried for the life of me to try and figure out why I'm an entrepreneur and the only thing I can attribute to is I'm the second child of three and that usually is the odd ball, because my dad had one job in his entire career as a lawyer so it isn't that, and my older brother who's had one job since he graduated from here as an engineer, and so I'm just different, and--

____________: That's my point.

Ellis: Different driving people nuts, but the experience here was different too, and how do you encourage people to take risk is give them the chance to take risk which is what the Honor System does, and you as the institution, have to be willing to take the consequences of that risk. Now, for me running my company, I can't get 2,000 entrepreneurs moving at the speed of light to make their own decisions if I'm going to second guess and if I'm going to bash them when they screw up and I've got to have a support infrastructure and I've got to be willing to step in and fix the screw ups but without blowing everybody up. The Honor System is one of the things that you've got here where you're willing to accept the consequences of that and you as a student can go take your test anywhere anytime and turn it in and say on my honor I did not cheat and you accept that and that is taking risks. That is encouraging risk. You can put other courses around that, but that style is what the University has.

Nuechterlein: There're also tangible things that the University can do in this regard. It was mentioned earlier yesterday about having University-wide business competition where students would be encouraged to come up with ideas and competing against each other before entrepreneurs or venture capitalists. Other universities have done that and done it very well. The other thing I would encourage the University to do is to invite lots more entrepreneurs to come in. Obviously you've done that over the last couple of days, but why not make this a regular series of entrepreneurs coming through the University working with students and doing lectures, doing seminars. I think that having classes in entrepreneurship would be something that obviously would happen at the Business School but maybe think about doing that at an undergraduate level as well, something that touches on some of the characteristics that we've been talking about.

Ayers: We heard people talking yesterday about the way that the net, the web, this accelerated digital media causes people to think in a new way. We've all seen young people thinking in a new way. Much of what we've been championing around the table this morning are older ways of thinking. There's risk taking but we're still talking about getting in touch the traditions thinking sequentially, linearly and so forth. Do we have to believe in some ways this new medium is actively opposed to the virtues of a liberal arts education? We're talking here a lout about entrepreneurial abilities and so forth, but at the same time we've also held out the ideals of broad learning. Do any of you around the table worry that we're actively breeding a culture that's directly opposed to the values of the University is based upon?

Templeton: I can't resist, because I lived in Silicon Valley for a while. Ed, you've been drinking the Kool-Aid out there way too much. I don't worry about that at all. I think that this University is providing fundamental tools for people to achieve their dreams and thinking and that's just not going to change. The new media is all coming out of the minds of these people and ideas of these people.

Ayers: But it's coming out in very short pieces.

Templeton: Right.

Ayers: And it is commonly acknowledged that the screen's not yet a place to read a book or even a short story. Instead it's a place to read a product announcement or something, and those of us, including Randy who've worked in the grain of the new media have wrestled with how do we make the historical argument in this new medium, so maybe it runs deeper than just the strategies that we have in the classroom where we maintain a cultural among the students, maybe there is some-- We were talking a lot yesterday about the sea change, paradigm shift, and what I'm wondering is if that shift does not present a deeper threat to the things that we teach that we're acknowledging.

Wuff: There's another possible interpretation and that is that we have allowed a distinction to become popularly believed which is in fact is a false distinction. You asked me about engineering before. It strikes me that if you think about what it is that identifies humans, it's the use of tools. Engineering is in some sense the most humanistic of all possible activities and yet it is popularly believed that there are the liberal arts and then there are the professions like engineering as though that distinction was real. Maybe it's that distinction that we ought to challenge and that's just been the popular belief and, in fact, that that distinction is breaking down and that we're coming back to something which is, in fact, closer to a correct interpretation of what makes us human and what is part of the humanistic legacy.

[Unsworth]: Take that further. Where do you from there? Because I think I agree with it.

Wuff: Well, one thing is I pointed the Dean of Engineering out here. I think that the Engineering School ought to be teaching engineering as a liberal art and I think it ought to be a piece of every literate person's experience, the notion of creating useful artifacts that make our quality of life better is something that everyone ought to understand at some level in the same way they ought to understand Analysis and Communication and I just think it is part of being a cultured human being.

Nuechterlein: I would completely ditto that comment and I don't know if there is a class that would be presented by the Engineering School currently that would be open to liberal arts majors but there ought to be something that would give liberal arts majors an overview of engineering and that's something the University ought to work towards.

Ellis: The interdisciplinary study--this is where we're going with this--I think it's absolutely the way to go and it argues against having separate engineering schools versus the College versus-- I've always argued against having the North Grounds and taking all your graduates and sticking them somewhere else, but so physically we've created barriers that we probably can't solve on this panel but certainly having-- My brother and I argue about this all the time. My brother was a four-year toolie and that's it and he does not read as much as I do, just doesn't like it, and he didn't get as much exposure to the humanities through the curriculum in the Engineering School and he regrets that. I didn't get as much exposure to engineering, none, and I regret that too. I don't know what I would've done with it, but I wish I'd had more exposure and putting more of the courses interspersed amongst each other in physical proximity makes it easier, but part of mixing the curriculum, I think, is something that would be very beneficial.

Unsworth: Can I put in a plug for media studies here? We're trying to develop both undergraduate and graduate programs that cross precisely that line actually between Arts and Sciences and Engineering as well potentially other areas--architecture, law, business, and calling that Media Studies and part of the program for Media Studies is to make people understand that technology is a made thing, not part of nature, that human beings made it and that we need to be a little self-conscious about how it's made and how it's used and the effects that it has on us, and we talked a lot about a generation of children coming up and entering college now who were raised with computers and raised with video games and to whom this is all natural and it is. It's exactly that. It's natural. They have no idea for the most part what goes on under the hood and if it doesn't work, they're stumped largely. They know how to use interfaces and they know how to use software, but they're not really that aware of how the thing is put together and I think we still have a job to do there.

Brownfield: I may I say I ditto Bert's point. I think that we don't have enough interdisciplinary studies here. I think that too often the students in the Engineering School, the students in the Commerce School, don't have the opportunity to take literature classes and history classes and they really feel that their education, that they're lacking something by that, and in the same regard, those of us in the College do need to do more in the sciences, especially this advancing technology, and then back to the point that you were talking about and we need to make sure we remember where technology fits into this so we don't move away from our traditional methods and I think that there is a danger that we start to study technology rather than we start to study history or English or any of that, that we forget that technology is really a tool to study these other things. While it's great to have an opportunity to bring a professor in from somewhere else to teach they could not otherwise teach, you don't want to have a situation where you're only learning that way, where that's replacing it, and I think that in many ways this technology can increase human contact. In other ways, it can decrease it. Maybe we're e-mailing our professors instead of actually visiting them. Maybe we're checking things on the web rather than actually doing them, so I think it's important to keep all this in perspective that we don't only focus on the technology and forget about everything else that we're trying to do here.

Templeton: In some ways the conversation reminds me of sort of the distinction between sort of legacy organizations and sort of the new organization. Legacy organization is typically organized in these stovepipe kinds of models very much the way a legacy university is sort of sales, marketing, engineering, customer service, finance. The new company is organized across that way and by subject matter, by business objective oftentimes in sort of these virtual teams that come and go over time according to what the business environment is and so maybe the way to attack this is I'll lay it out there and come up a V.scholar kind of diploma where you actually connect the dots across the disciplines that the University can offer with an outcome that you're looking for whether it's to be a new media type or a new infrastructure type or whatever those particular--

____________: Academic scavenger hunt.

Templeton: There you go. Something like that, and then that can get everyone engaged in it. Use all of the tools that are there both virtual and physical and start the experiment.

Hughes: For those of us who won't have the opportunity to take what the Media Studies provides a balance between what I think you said was training and learning, how do you propose that we spend the rest of our time so that we're not so far behind in that we spend our time here wisely and that we can market ourselves because it's well to have and to learn how to analyze slowly and deliberately, but if you're in this digital world where they're telling you to think fast, how do you blend the two, and also if you're blending the two, how do you learn the technical skills so that you're learning them well, not just quickly? And that what you're learning will be relevant later on? Is that possible anyone?

Unsworth: I think there are courses all across the University that integrate technology and you can usually find them and pick them. I don't think you really learn without having a project to do and having hands-on engagement so you have to create that engagement for yourself and in the absence of a program that encourages that or courses that require it, you might have to propose it as part of a course. Can I fulfill that requirement for this course this way, please? And I think you'd probably find that people would be receptive to that because that will strike them as an initiative and creativity and those are generally rewarded. Not always, but generally. But I would also spend as much time as you can in the library and with the library systems because that really in the most general sense is the technological heart of the University right now from a learning point of view. There're a lot of interesting digital and traditional print resources there and learning how to use this will have value in lots of other contexts later.

Ellis: Do we have a course here that actually or even a section that teaches someone to surf the web? As a personal user, I had no earthly idea how to use the web other than just get on there and bang around until one of our propeller heads came and just actually taught me how to use the search engines efficiently.

__________: I teach a course that teaches students how to surf the library, but--

Ramazani: Certainly we have short courses. The library offers them in just sort of basic areas and you all have presumably taken classes as well that integrate this at an early stage anyway in the course work.

Hughes: And I have had the opportunity even working with the Virginia Center of Digital History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute to have that opportunity to learn or to see how they can be done, but I'm not sure if the University as a whole does because I know a lot of my peers who are majors in liberal arts don't tackle the technical side at all or aren't aware of the short courses, even though they're broadcast. I'm not sure if the University as a whole is making use of what is being provided.

Ramazani: My answer to your question would be it's so important to just strike a balance and if you find that you're spending so much time scanning documents and this kind of thing that you're kind of technical work that your development of your analytical; skills, your critical skills, your skills of writing, that all of our panelists have said are just fundamental to making it in the world, then there's something wrong. If, on the other hand, you don't have a clue still how to surf the web then that's a problem too, so striking a balance, and we also have to remember that not everyone here necessarily is going into technologically related work. I mean, probably all lines of work will make some use, obviously, of the new technologies but we have to have a curriculum that meets all different kinds of needs.

____________: Everybody, irrespective of what you're going to do, has to know the technology.

Ramazani: Right, but I just think one tendency, for example, is to say, well, we have to have these things. Therefore we have to invent a course everybody has to take that's identical across the curriculum in these areas and I think we have to instead-- My sense is that I think a number of my colleagues feel this way too, that it's much better to integrate it into the teaching of the content depending on what the content is that the student is interested in--what skills.

Ellis: Technology is a content in itself for those people that want to be propeller heads, but technology is a device to teach and research for everybody.

____________: Right. I agree.

Wuff: Aside from objecting to the phrase propeller head,

Ellis: In our business it's a very endearing term. I use it with the highest of respect.

Wuff: I think it's not just an issue of knowing how to use the technology because promise the technology five years from now will be so radically different from today's technology that anything we could do here just in teaching people how to use the technology would be obsolete. It would be the wrong thing to do frankly. I think the more important issue is that the technology is transforming virtually every aspect of one's life and one needs an understanding adequate to understand how to take advantage of that, how to make all of our lives better by virtue of exploiting the technology, so it's not an understanding of how to use the technology, but some level of understanding of what the technology is and what it can do, what can be, what can we create.

Ayers: So, we've raised, albeit in a very genteel and collegial way, a lot of issues about priorities, about balance, about degrees of preparation, about reorganizing the University, if you listen to what we're saying being cast in a way that these stovepipes have been organized for a long time. I'm hoping that all of you have been in the last hour engaged in honing sharp-edged questions that you will be handing to us during the brief 10-minute break we're about to embark upon and give those questions up here to the front and get a chance to see how everyone here will respond to them, if everybody can drop off their question and answer form at the front, take a break and meet back in here in 10 minutes. We look forward to seeing you again. Well, I must say that virtually everyone here gave us a question. I have an entire table covered with penetrating questions from every point of view and my challenge is to try to weave these together over the next hour, which is a challenge indeed. One question that I got both writing and verbally is, boy, all this sounds great. How in the world are you going to pay for doing everything and not giving up anything that you want to do, so we want to have small classes, we want to have interdisciplinary majors, we want to keep all the traditional skills that we long developed. We want to have technology integrated into every classroom. We want to reach broad parts of the world. We want the broad world to come into the University's classrooms and all that sounds great, but as a leading member of the administration once said to me when I was asking for something, what are you willing to give up in order to get that? So, I guess the first question I would ask and I think all of our answers need to be punchy here since I have so many things to get into it, is how do we establish priorities to get all of this? Should a priority to be to creating graduates for 21st century to take advantage of the changing world that Bill Wuff is talking about or should it be keep our eyes on the fixed star so we don't lose our way with the ephemera of changing technology and remain devoted to the to the traditional virtues of the University? Does anybody have an idea of how to go about garnering the resources, both of money and of time, both of faculty and students to do these things that we're talking about?

Unsworth: Do you think we could persuade the state to invest more than 13% in the University?

Ayers: I'll pass on that question to the state.

Unsworth: My answer is no. I don't think you can.

Nuechterlein: Actually that leads to one of the big answer is the involvement of alumni. Alumni have to be more involved in the University than they've ever been before. The state's not going to take a larger percentage of its budget. I just can't see that happening. If anything, I see it being less over time, so it's great to have so many graduates that love this University, and now is a time to step up and to help fund some of these programs that are not getting funded by the state.

Templeton: I'll put it in N.C. State terms. This is the blind dog in a meat house problem. This is the possum metaphor from yesterday. These are hard choices and I think it's interesting to try to engage and try to get more money from the state and alumni engagement, but in the end, I think it's a resource allocation issues and you probably need to look at the way the University is allocating resources. Sort of how much do I want to spend on legacy--everything. And how much do I want to spend in this sort of new world that I'm trying to forge my way into and this is the classic problem that every legacy business has out there as the Internet sort of attacks them at the core, so they're having to make choices like this and guess what? You go into what's called a cash cow mode on some things and you don't invest any more in that and you take what you were going to invest there and put it out front, and those are hard choices.

I have to tell you that it was until I was here last summer I hadn't been back to Charlottesville in about nine years and I had the opportunity to meet John Casteen and I think we've got a leader there that knows how to do that. It's incredible what John Casteen has done for this University in this amount of time. I'm just really astounded by the amount of change he's been able to bring here and I think this is probably the next wave, the next challenge, to figure out how to reallocate those resources in ways that move us forward and it's exciting. It'll be exciting if people will sort of let it happen and sort of let go of a lot of those preconceived ideas about change.

Ellis: Having spent all my life raising money it seems, that I think the money you're going to find it going to be the easy part. I think there's tons of money available to fund this kind of effort. It's the vision. It's the vision thing.

Ramazani: But it's great to hear, of course, but there is the money out there, but at least working in the College, we're reminded every day when you go by Fayerweather Hall or if you work in any number of the buildings here, or if you contend with the student faculty ratio we have now, or what-have-you, and it's not exclusively the College that we're really strapped and it looks in some ways like we've got a huge amount of money coming into the University, but as you all know, we're the most efficient university so-called of the top 20 private and public institutions in terms of our use of resources, so I think we first have to see that there are, and in terms of actually the-- What are we? Number 60, I think it is, 63 or something like that, in terms of resources that we have although we're number one or two in terms of the quality of the public institution that we have, so I think we have to recognize that we're dealing with a severe set of resource problems here and that if they continue the way they have in a longer term, there will be some erosion, but at the same time, I think in terms of this question of where do you put those resources that you have, I couldn't agree more. I mean, this is what we pay greater administrators like John Casteen who just missed this great paean to himself, but is now come entering the room-- Do you want to repeat?

Templeton: I'd love to repeat it, but for the sake of time. See, I think what you just said is really the magic and it's not how much you spend. It's what you spend it on, and so this University--look at the reputation, look at the results. We're way down the stack in resources, but up the stack in results, so you have to ask the fundamental question--does more resources get you more results? Bill, I will defer to you on the mythical man month, but there's this whole idea in the technology business called the mythical man month and I'll put it in more easy-to-understand terms. It's like nine women cannot produce a child in one month, and so throwing more resources at something doesn't necessarily accelerate or get better results. It's what you do with the resources and there are examples all over the place of this, so I think it's a matter of what the University chooses around allocation and, of course, you always need to do new and more, but--

Nuechterlein: A perfect example of that is all these computers in classrooms without teachers able to actually instruct students on how to use them. You can't just get halfway. You've got to see it through.

Wuff: I think this discussion is not unrelated to the one that I think Mark raised before about market segmentation. If all we do is continue to serve our traditional audiences or traditional customer base, that's one thing, but there are other markets that are anxious for the kinds of experience that University of Virginia can provide and we may have to make one-time investments to get ourselves into those marketplaces but in many cases, they've been shown to be very self-sustaining or even cash cows.

____________: Right.

Ramazani: Just one quick parenthesis. I want to just finish one other thought which I completely agree and I think part of the University's vision along these lines has been picking centers of excellence, islands of excellence, whatever the latest metaphor is for that, and building in those areas and maybe letting other things go by the wayside and obviously the 2020 project is about focusing on particular areas where we can be particularly strong and building on those.

Ayers: There are so many great questions it's really hard to try to put them in different categories. Maybe ones about money since this is what we're talking about right now might be a good segue from this. Someone pointed out the University is not a business and in fact, using business metaphors to describe what we're doing doesn't really make much sense, that we don't really have the same need or desire or ability to liquidate ways that we do things that have developed over the millennia for good reasons and will be here long after what we call the web has come and gone. Why do we think in this moment of super-heated passion that business should be the model for the University and we shouldn't be steering by a different light? Have any comments about that?

[Ellis]: Because you don't have the state providing 100% of your funding anymore. I mean, the world change. Sorry.

____________: Amen.

Ayers: Jeff, do you agree with this?

Nuechterlein: Well, I don't think we're saying that the University should become a business. I think it needs to be run from an infrastructure perspective like a business--efficiently--which is being done. Jahan gave you the numbers. It's a wonderful-run place, but what we're talking about is how the University ought to react to this technological change and if we don't move with the forces, we'll be left behind and we will be legacy system and we can't afford that.

Ayers: Someone thought that none of us were suggesting that we weren't moving quickly enough and I'll read this directly. You all have described an isolated academical village, one that may take several days by horseback to reach the technology center of northern Virginia. How does UVA become more like the great universities of Stanford, Harvard or MIT integrating their ideas and people with the great companies like Yahoo! and ideas of D.C.

Nuechterlein: Well, first of all, the University of Virginia is a great university like Stanford and MIT to begin with.

Ayers: I'll just point out that I'm the messenger in all of this.

Nuechterlein: Secondly, what I would say about that is I think the University is making an effort and should continue to make a very significant effort in linking to the technology corridor in northern Virginia. We are producing graduates that are being employed by those companies and we have to be connected to them in substantial ways going forward.

Unsworth: One problem I see with that kind of connection is that somebody needs to play the devil's advocate here and this comes out of experience over the last six years in the Institute for Advanced Technology and the Humanities and trying to find business partnerships of the sort that we're talking about is that in the current business climate businesses are frequently interested in products that can come to market in six months rather than in basic research and another way to put this question about the role of the University versus the role of business is to think about the role of basic research versus the role of short-term product development and in general terms, over the long haul, the University's been in the business of basic research and there's still a value to that, but it's sometimes difficult to find the connections of the sort that are being proposed in that question when the focus is on what can you give me that will be a product by Christmas.

Wuff: I'd like to kind of go back to that first question about the business metaphors as well. I certainly don't want to defend the proposition that business metaphors are appropriate for the University. On the other hand, I do want to add a caveat to the second half of that question which talked about the University's having been unchanged for I think it said thousands of years or hundreds of years. I think that's wrong. I think that at least U.S. universities have changed dramatically about every 50 years for the last 200 and the notion of secular liberal education comes about around 1800. The land grant schools and the notion that there was responsibility of universities to agriculture and industry comes about around 1850, 1860. The introduction of graduate education profoundly changed the universities and that's a 1900s phenomena and of course, the notion that universities had an obligation to research is a 1950s change that profoundly changed the universities, so that the notion that the university is this unchanging thing through all time is just wrong.

Nuechterlein: I want to make just one additional comment about the question about Stanford and MIT. I think that what the writer of that question was getting at is Stanford and MIT have a wonderful relationship with business in their communities. The technology transfer between university scientists at Stanford and MIT and private industry is enormous and that's something that the University of Virginia is doing well and needs to continue to make strides to do. It's actually a great strength of the American economy because we don't have the hostility between academics and business that you would see in Europe and Asia and we need to be a forefront of universities in the U.S. that are enabling our employees to commercialize their research.

Templeton: I think I'd try to remind everyone that there's a huge difference in the second quarter of this year in Silicon Valley--$2.6 billion went to start-ups in just the second quarter of this year. In the entire southeast U.S., the number was a little over $300 million, so there's almost a 10X sort of relationship there, and if you look at Stanford from a physical location perspective, you can have a great idea no matter what year--you can be a first-year student, you can be in graduate school, you can get on your bicycle, ride across the street to Sand Hill Road, pitch some venture capital guys, pick up a check and go back to the university and get a place to work to run with your ideas and you can ride your bicycle a couple of more blocks down and probably find a reasonably priced place to go even further and there's a whole infrastructure there that doesn't exist here in Charlottesville and I think that northern Virginia is interesting, but it's physically probably too far away to be the place where the University tries to bind to and I think it's more likely that the local community needs to come together and figure out how to bring those elements together and encourage people to stay because when I was here and graduated, I didn't want to leave and you find that in Silicon Valley as well--people that go to Stanford want to stay. The lifestyle there is just fantastic and I think it is here as well, so--

Ayers: I'd like to make a commercial advertisement at this point. Living right now in Silicon Valley, I see that the Charlottesville and the University of Virginia community have wonderful opportunities to grow and expand because in many ways Silicon Valley is a victim of its own success. I agree with everything you said, except finding an inexpensive place to live. A house around the corner from us that would be about $200,000 or $300,000 here is on the market for $1.8 million and we just walk by and look at it.

Templeton: The first round deals are $20 million now out there. It's no problem to get a space to work.

Ellis: I want to jump in on this run-the-University-like-a-business notion and why does that seem to have, when you say run it like a business or incorporate business notions, why is that seemingly so unsavory and cause the hair on the back of academics' necks to rise like what are we going to do. I mean, let's reverse the tables. What do I do? I have 2,000 employees, the average age of which is 28 and my goal every year to make them smarter and more mature, so what am I doing differently than what you're doing? Now, I have to pay the light bill and I have to build them buildings and I have to buy technology for them and I have to communicate with them and I have to create a culture and I have to create an environment, aren't I running a university? I mean, tell me what's different. What is different about that?

Ramazani: I find myself in some agreement with you. When we were talking last year to the state a blue ribbon commission, looking into higher education, I found myself actually after many years of opposing business metaphors using them because it seems to me in our discussions with the state if only we were allowed to compete freely, to price our product as it were, when it comes to in-state tuition, for example, and to compete with other universities that we would be in great shape if we were allowed that kind of autonomy in terms of running ourselves like a business to that extent, but I do think that there might be some ways in which the education that at least in liberal arts we're trying to offer might not always lead to vocational or business skills, say, or to pre-professional skills of one kind of another, at the same time that we've all talked about the virtues of reading, writing, analysis, communications, all of which are fundamental to what I try to teach my students. There might also be certain other things that we're trying to teach--citizenship, for example, or an experience of insoluble dilemmas and an ability to ponder those in deep reflective ways.

Ellis: I have to have people that just think. I have to have engineers and artists and all that just sit around and think, that I can't bill out. I have to figure out some other way to pay for them. I have to have that too, and I have a whole raft of people that work for me that couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper bag, but that doesn't mean they're not very valuable to my organization so what's different? All we've done is we've taken a whole boat load of funding away from you that had so many more constraints on it. I sit on the Georgia Tech Advisory Board and Wayne Cluff would like to have your problem. He would like to have less state. Now, he doesn't want to do it like overnight, but I mean, he'd like to have more flexibility.

Ramazani: But, see, we have less state funding but we don't have more flexibility. That's the dilemma we're in.

Templeton: If the objection to the business metaphor is around sort of for-profit, it's probably that for-profit thing. Hey, in the new age,

Ellis: None of us in the Internet make any money [laughter]. I mean, we're exactly like you.

Templeton: There you go. So, we're converging, but look, the business metaphors are about something really simple and that what a business does is it takes a set of scarce resources and applies them in a way to get a certain set of results that are articulated. That's it, so sometimes the result is to build brand and not make a profit. Sometimes the result is to make a lot of profit and don't worry about the brand and everything in between and so here the issue here is around what's the vision, what's the mission, and how is all of this is changing out from under us in some ways and what are we going to do about it with the resources we have and the results we want to get?

Ayers: Well, it's funny you should say that, Mark, because the next group of questions I have address that directly and I would like to get Peter and Brandi involved in these and I'm going to read four questions which are interrelated. One, should UVA have a five-year undergraduate program? Would we prepare students better if we red-shirted them like the athletes to give them more opportunity for liberal arts core courses? I had heard about a technology skills certification exam for liberal arts majors. Is this exam useful for prospective employers? Do you think such an exam is needed? Once the on-line activities of teaching face-to-face have been completed, do you think UVA will move to allow testing or exams to be completed over the Internet? What about the American Studies Program as a model for integrating the new technologies into the humanities and finally, there's so much more knowledge now than in Jefferson's time that we're forced to go way more in depth through one subject in order to have a good knowledge of anything in particular. How can we now do in four years equivalent of what used to be done in four years? Isn't this why a bachelor's degree doesn't mean as much? Why you seem to need the Ph.D. now for so many more things? Is there anybody that would like to address that? Do you feel that the line's been speeded up on you and there's no way to keep up?

Hughes: I don't know where to start. I guess I'll start with the five-year question and that speaks back to the question that I asked before, is how you find the balance because I know that the way that technology has been integrated in the humanities courses that I'm taking is that you take the analytical processes that you're normally taught, to do your research and write your paper and then you take the paper and you put the paper on the web and that's the way that you use technology to broadcast your skills. The only problem with that is when you have a semester course where you're trying to do the research and you're trying to build the web, necessarily something is neglected in that composition and often I feel that in the rush to learn the technological skills to produce something on the web, you're not learning it well, and that's why it sounds good to find this balance and it sounds even better if you have balance in the class but I'm not sure if we have the time limit and time is allowing us to find that balance.

Ramazani: My understanding is that technology is advancing so that maybe it will help us get beyond some of those problems. One spends a large part of a course, say, of the kind that you're referring to now and maybe teaching HTML for example, but it might be possible quite soon to do these kinds of things that you're talking about without having to learn HTML. That will have been a waste of time, so it might be that certain of these technical things will be much more quickly learned that you can spend more of the time doing what you really want to do under the wonderful pressure of knowing that your writing is going to be read potentially by millions of people which I think does tend to focus students' minds on the quality of what they're saying and they're writing.

Brownfield: I think it's important to require everybody to take courses in these areas. I think having a technology requirement for the liberal arts would be a great idea. I think having more liberal arts requirements in the Engineering School and the Commerce School would be a great idea also, but I don't think that we need to take something out in order to do that. The University doesn't have an overwhelming number of requirements right now. I think it's possible to add a few and keep what we have and I think that would be a great way to move in that direction.

Ayers: You don't want us to add another year to your degree right now?

Brownfield: I don't think I need another year. I think I'll be all right.

Ellis: I had a lot of fraternity brothers who were on the seven-year program. I thought it always existed.

Ayers: We now have a 97% graduation rate within four years also for the commercial aspect of that. Other comments about the way we might think about recasting the undergraduate program for certification, things that are taught, more years.

Templeton: The certification idea, I don't think is too relevant. When we're recruiting people and we recruit here at Virginia, we start with is this a really smart person. High clock rate. Lot of capacity. Second, is culture. What kind of person is this? Will they fit our company and the way we do business? Good news is Virginia grads fit incredibly well in the kind of the culture we've built at CTRIX, and the third is, what do you know? Sort of skills, and I'll tell you, if you clear the bar in the first two, you're about 80% there and then you can hardly get out of this University without having some really awesome core skills and you're there, and I don't think certification on being able to use PowerPoint or Excel or Word or please don't teach anyone HTML because it's a dinosaur now. It's irrelevant.

Ayers: How about the idea, Jahan, of talking about maybe using the new technology to introduce efficiencies into what we do? How about having people be able to take exams and things like over the Internet? What do you think of that?

Ramazani: Sure, why not. I mean, as I say, if we can find areas where we can deliver what we want to deliver more efficiently so we can spend more time on the things that are really meaningful and that can't be delivered through the technology---that face-to-face interaction with students or just sitting down with the students saying not only giving written comments on their writing but working them through the thought process paragraph by paragraph about how to sustain an argument, something like that, but I think things like delivering lectures, giving exams, getting responses from your students in terms of evaluations on what you've done. You can save an enormous amount of classroom time by making use of the technology in those kinds of ways.

Ayers: One of the questions points in this direction with a direct intent. What would be the digital equivalent of the Lawn?

Ellis: There isn't. There are some things where the answer is none [laughter].

Ayers: There's another group of questions that point in a quite different direction. Those were sort of the internalist's questions about life in the University, but these point in another direction. How can the University of Virginia teach students to use technology to empower the underprivileged? What steps are being taken or could be taken, for that matter, to ensure that the new "technological culture" that is being created by the educated elite do not leave the rest of the world, the digital have knots behind? How are their concerns presented worldwide? This discussion was heavy on academic, light on village. Where is the University Jeffersonian mission to bring the surrounding community into the wisdom conversation carried on in the classrooms of the elites? How can UVA actively utilize the Internet to make its resources available to a broader audience? Should there be a capacity for recording broadcasting and archiving conferences, lectures and classes for the Internet? There are others that I could ask but all point in the same direction.

Unsworth: One of the things that I think anybody who's put even course materials up on the web finds is that you have many more readers out there for that material than you have students in your class and I think whatever the University can do to make events like this or its publications or its proceedings and other venues available on the web is good outreach. In answer to this first question, there was an interesting but brief mention in a panel I was on yesterday with John Griffin about doing outreach and mentoring through the web and through e-mail from corporate America to people to underprivileged kids who're trying to get there and providing advice about how you get into the business world and what matters, just the kinds of things that you're talking about that I think in the same way that this technology makes it easier to bring outside speakers into the classroom, it probably also makes it easier to cross some other kinds of boundaries, some of which are geographical and some of which are social economic if we think about creative ways of doing that, and one of the reason that it's attractive for an outside speaker to come to a class is that I don't have to get in a plane and fly to the airport in Charlottesville. I can sit at my desk in and do this in 45 minutes. Well, in the same way I think it makes outreach from the University to the community and mentoring from the University graduates to other people a good deal more feasible if we just think about actually doing that.

Wuff: Some related comments. First of all, the University is a member of a consortium of universities which are bidding for a public access channel on lower __________ broadcast TV, the small dish TV, the idea of which would be precisely to make things like this and everything from research colloquia to highly polished Discovery Channel quality programming available to a much broader audience. That's comment one. That is pending at the moment. We're kind of holding our breath to see if we're going to get that channel or not. Second, it seems to me that there are things like lower __________ telecommunications which open up the possibility of delivering the Internet to sub-Saharan Africa, to all of the interior of South America and so on, so that in one fell swoop, we will be able to communicate with, deliver content to, interact with, understand the problems of a population which if we'd had to wait for land lines to be laid, we'd be talking about many decades. Now, we're talking about this year, next year, the year after that. I think there's a tremendous opportunity there.

Ayers: Other thoughts about extending the benefits from this extraordinarily privileged place to the rest of the Commonwealth and the rest of the country and the world.

Hughes: I think that leaves a great room for students to have a participation as well because the knowledge that we're attaining even if it's not to the cutting edge level that what we know we can take out to the community into the local schools and we speak about teachers who have the computers in the schools and don't know how to train the students but I think that's a role that students can come in and play, that what they do know that they can help and supplement what the teachers lack.

Nuechterlein: I'd say a perfect example of this is the cameras that are in this room right now. They're beaming this onto the Internet. It's available to people in southwestern Virginia that can't come to Charlottesville. Assuming they have the ability to get on the net, knowledge is being democratized. So much now is available on the Internet whereas before you had to run to a library and it may not have been as convenient so I think that this conference and the way the University has broadcast it is a good step in that direction.

Ellis: One of the questions within that was what can we do to make a difference? How can we extend technology to less privileged? How do we address the haves and the have nots? What I find is the huge opportunity and the huge opportunity were I sitting in your seat, Ed and/or John Casteen's seat, in addressing the issues of how we do good for society and how we do good for society within an academic institution that now has to raise its own dough, is that we have created an industry in three years that has created some phenomenal wealth for very young people and I would include myself in one of those. I made a lot of money I think because I was smart, but I made a lot more money because I was lucky and in the right industry at the right time, and maybe I was smart to be in the right industry at the right time, but there's an awful lot of us that have a phenomenal amount of money and have no experience in giving it away. And no possible way that we as an industry can consume what we make. And it is going to be up-- It is the perfect blend between what you do and what you do and you do to help give us a way to do it. All we've got is smarts and energy and money. We don't have the vision how to deal with some of these other things nor do we have the time. Maybe you have the time, but that's what I think is the-- All of us and every one almost there to a man this weekend and everybody I talk to in this industry who's addressing the fact that there're very few of them that I talk to that want to just take all we've got and just give it to the kids, if you will. I hope my daughters aren't listening to this [laughter] because all of us have, many of us-- I can't speak for all, but many of us subscribe to the notion of don't deny your own children the right to be successful on their own by giving them too much, so what are we going to do with it? What's Bill Gates going to do with $80 billion? I've got some great ideas.

____________: He's giving a tremendous amount of it away.

Ellis: He can change the world and those of us that are in this business can change the world in our own-- He can change in on a world stage. He's got enough zeros to change it on the world stage. The rest of us can change it on a smaller stage and I think you will find an audience that wants to do it, but it's an immature audience that doesn't know how to do it.

Templeton: I agree with that. This happens to be a personal deal for me. I have an awfully hard time giving money to the benefit of the most privileged people on the earth and those are the people that we all know and we are all collegial with, and I have no problem doing things that benefit someone that doesn't have anything, that what has the horsepower, the interest, the heart and the soul, to go after their dream, they just don't have the resources, the guidance, etc., and I think that it's the obligation of the digital haves, but it's the obligation of the haves in society in general to do something about this, and I think that over time if we don't, it's not going to be as good a world to live in and I think the University can be a part of that, but I think there's a whole bunch of just raw infrastructure-related stuff that has to happen and some of it is money and some of it's cultural to accelerate this. The ability for a kid to have a screen in their home that plugs in the wall without having to pay for that screen and without having to worry about loading software and again, learning about a computer but computing is what it's going to take.

Ayers: So what does the University need to do to take advantage of this non-profit impulse and the obvious and great need? How do we build the bridge between those two?

Ellis: One thing is the vision. Something that's tangible.

Templeton: You've got to identify your target and shoot at it and you may just need to target Albemarle County to start with. I think having lived here five years, there are a lot of underprivileged people right here in Albemarle County so build a computing center, bolt it to the Internet and give screens to people right here that connect back and get that knowledge and organize the knowledge in a way like Yahoo!. Build an educational portal for these people and target them. Are we going to target kids or older people, so forth, the wide variety and sort of do a mass customization of that to that audience organizing everything the University has. I don't know what the issues are around sort of diplomas and funding all those kind of things, but that's why I'm in business and not in academia. I don't have to worry about that stuff.

Ayers: Any thought by anyone else within the University of what we need to be doing to build these bridges between this impulse and the need?

Nuechterlein: Well, my comment was going to be that one of the things that we've done at the University is created the Jefferson Scholarships and that's an example of bringing in the best and the brightest from around the country that maybe would not have come to Virginia for geographic reasons or economic reasons, and in my mind, we should continue the idea of endowing scholarships for those that maybe can't afford to come to this University and just build on what we've already started.

Ayers: One question seeks to be using the growth of the new technologies in a more direct way. If the Internet is inevitably moving toward taxation by government, why would the information industry not form a consortium of good will that'll allow them to grow the infrastructure instead of paying taxes and passing the costs on to the consumer? For instance, instead of [ISPS] being taxed for usage, why now allow them to opt into a program which allows them to use that money to provide bandwidth, tech education, etc., to those who would not otherwise have access. This would allow firms to make a difference in leveling the playing field much more effectively and efficiently than government tax dollars would allow. That may be a bit much for us--

Ellis: Put that one over there with the others. We don't have enough RAM here for that. Our apologies to the author of that question.

Ayers: Two related questions--one, picking up on some of the more technical language that we've promulgated this morning. The faculty propeller heads are here. How do we get to the rest is a question. And tied in, what do we do about professors who do not know about technology well enough to incorporate it into the classrooms? Computing and communication are making revolutionary changes in business, science and engineering. At UVA, there's no revolutionary change in instruction but there should be. How can the University move faster? I wonder from the students' point of view--is it this case that you find that our professors lagging behind demand of students? Are we outstripping it, sometimes giving you things you don't want? You're almost out of here, Peter. How many people can you offend here?

Brownfield: Oh, I think there's certainly a combination of some professors who are--

Ayers: We've trained you well.

Brownfield: Yes, exactly, and then there're others who don't know anything about technology and then there's some in between, but I'm not sure that in every division you need to have technology. I'm not sure in every class you need to have technology. I think that's okay. I think that having a variety of skills the way it is now is all right.

Ayers: And so it's a mistake to do what some universities have done and dictate that all professors have a web page and all classes have a web page? You would resist that sort of innovation?

Brownfield: Yes, I think so, although we're moving in that direction already. Most classes, it seems like, do have web pages.

Ayers: So the invisible hand is putting up those web pages.

Ellis: It depends on what you use the web page for. From an administrative standpoint, just to find out when classes are and what the assignment is and stuff. I think every class ought to have that. I'm not sure if that's incumbent on the professor to do that, but I would not necessarily make the professors do that, but I think some courses don't need to be absolutely high tech.

Templeton: I'll be slightly provocative on this one. I think as opposed to certifying students, I think the faculty should be certified.

____________: Ohhh-- Next question.

____________: Session ended at 11:00.

Templeton: Let me tell you why, all right. The technology that's out there-- If you see some of this stuff I get to see out a year ahead of its availability, it's phenomenal and it's amazing that sort of the tools then inspire thinking about, thinking differently about, what can be done, so if you're sitting here completely sort of almost illiterate in it, you never get a chance to experiment with that mentally or in a practical way, so I think that it should be a requirement so that that experimentation can happen and people can move out of the box.

Ramazani: I guess I-- It's interesting. I'm not sure I buy the idea of requiring it just because I think you'd be amazed at the kind of pressure that faculty members feel from one another in terms of competing, competing for students, competing to not look like the mossback on the back of the stone, and also competing in terms of their research, so I think inevitably over time most faculty members are going to realize that they have to do this if they're going to maintain their self-respect and then it's incumbent upon the University to provide the kind of infrastructure that makes it possible whether it's a uniform platform or whether it's providing in each department someone who can, if you're a little confused about something, and don't want to embarrass yourself by asking, you can turn to that person. An idea that is dear to Ed Ayers is hard, and also the University has done thing such as the TTI Fellowships so that supporting faculty members who want to make a major investment of their time and in some way to become leaders in these areas and also on a smaller scale, the Faculty Senate is now doing a third round of applications that many of which have been for putting up a web page of this kind of thing, integrating technology into the classroom,

____________: So enabling those who really want to set the standard for the rest.

Templeton: This is just my business world perspective but I think you have to go