Does the campus have a future: looking backwards

Summary form only given as follows. With the growth of networking, an institution´s academic life already extends far beyond its physical campus. That´s true even for the academic lives of “resident” students and faculty. Several pressures force institutions to support academic work even when “resident” faculty and students are off-campus, and even when tools and resources are off-campus. So institutions have an incentive to use electronic resources. Once institutions can get such resources, it becomes easier to share them with staff and students who are also at a distance, working at night, etc. Facing forces like these, one wonders whether campuses, as such, will survive. It helps to look backwards. At least twice before, higher learning has gone through major, technology-enabled changes in its character and organization: first when reading and writing became integral parts of what had previously been an oral “Socratic” system and later when educators organized themselves to share a library, a campus, and cohorts of students. Similar questions of change and stability, gain and loss, were raised by those two revolutions and by the one we seem to face today. These include: (1) character, richness and effectiveness of learning, (2) who can learn, (3) power and accountability, (4) scale and distance learning, and (5) cost and employment of educators. This paper addresses these questions, and compares the answers to these questions among the three revolutions of past and present