The Challenge of Lifelong Learning for Higher Education

Abstract

5 Implications for Faculty As the courses of superstars are " unplugged " and of-fered on-line by for-profit companies worldwide, fac-ulty teaching roles will change and there will be a decoupling of faculty from particular institutions. The traditional control faculty exert over the curriculum design may become moot as colleges buy " Arthur Miller on a disk " or off-the-shelf products from brand-name curriculum factories like Amherst, Brown, or Williams. The strongest institutions will be these producers and wholesalers—the curriculum factories of the superstars. The rest will be the retailers with slimmer margins and greater dependency. While most faculty will become facilitators of these " world-class courses, " the faculty who provide the in-tellectual capital for these ventures may become free agents teaching at hundreds of colleges and universities at once for extraordinary income from royalties or licenses. The richer the faculty member, the less value and claim tenure will hold. Joint appointments and regular movement between the acad-emy and industry will increase as lines blur between inde-pendent and sponsored research, knowledge discovery, and knowledge transfer. Conclusion These trends and their impact on American higher education are likely to continue unless and until the higher education mar-ket responds negatively to runaway costs among high-end pro-viders, to commercialization and profit motive in higher education, or to less-personalized, technology-driven delivery systems. None of these scenarios seem likely as long as the frontrunners, trend setters, and price leaders accumulate a greater advantage, or un-less and until a demonstrable, empirical case can be made that any of these developments threaten the quality of higher educa-tion as gauged by any of its constituencies.