But the AAUP has taken a courageous stance, risking a Luddite stigma, to uphold academic values that have guided Western civilization for over 2,500 years. In non-Western countries that vitality is still to be emulated, so a default context internal to the U.S. may need to be widened to the international level. Critics of the AAUP representatives appeal to American cultural traits such as the defiance of authority, anti-intellectualism, and the ideology of equality. But non-Westerners will be left wondering why change is worshipped for its own sake and why time-honored academic standards and ethics are blithely placed at risk.

Most telling to me was the comment by Mr. Steve Crow, NCA/CIHE Executive Director, that "someone counted two full-time faculty at JIU at the time of the last visit..." Denise Tanguay replied that no one has "provided specific information [requested] about the governance system at Jones, about how academic freedom is protected for both course content developers and for the online facilitators, or about how or if Jones supports the scholarship of the members of its various categories of faculty."

Penn State Education Prof. Ali Carr-Chellman seemed to me most salient, including his conclusion that "if they're making money hand over fist, the chances are excellent that they've taken the labor out of a very labor intensive process and focused more on advertising and marketing than on effective learning."

When tens of millions of US$ are saved on buildings, there is no excuse for not investing in people, that is, not only students but a faculty that is not just a guild but answers to the ostensible universality of the university. Academic as well as economic imperatives are adverse to the unbundling of education into piecework. The fallibility, vulnerability and human imperfections of educators hardly justify assaults on tenure systems. To make it a life with an academic identity, educators need to make it a living. Moreover, online education cannot mature into a discipline until it has full-time practitioners as well as a canon of research findings.

I'm not sure how education could be unbundled unless it were bundled in the first place into modular units, but that would conflate training with education, content or information with knowledge. To shovel a quote from Plato misses the whole point, which is to attain a life of reason, moderation, ethics and reflection. Thanks to such education, albeit with limited access, even as President of a virtual association, the World Association for Online Education, I aim for the disinterested truth. Ulterior purposes make distance education more distant, while the real thing is in evidence when distance is overcome by online education.

-- Steve McCarty, Professor, Kagawa Junior College, Japan (posted 10/29, 10:50 a.m., E.D.T.)

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