Virtual intellectuals

John Willinsky fathoms the pitfalls of online learning

On 3 April 2000, the new dot-com start-up Fathom was launched with a press release promising it would "redefine the scope of online learning". Turn the page? No. For once, the hype understates it. Fathom changes the scope not only of online learning, but also of the information economy's public sector.

This super-brand "knowledge and education" outfit lays claim to the intellectual assets of Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, the British Library, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and the New York Public Library. Amid banner ads, shopping opportunities and a 10,000-course roster, Fathom plans to offer free access to multimedia lectures, seminars, databases, publications and performances, as well as a chance for people to "interact and collaborate" with experts.

It's another step in the blend of the public and commercial, presented in a way that makes it seem necessary, inevitable and a public good. As George E Rupp, Columbia University's president, explained to the New York Times, "we want to make sure that our core intellectual capital is not picked off by outside for-profit vendors. But for that, we have to be able to say to our faculty that we will devise ways they can communicate with a wider audience, which many of them would like."

I can forgive Rupp for thinking of his faculty as intellectual capital - they've done it to themselves - but his assumption that universities, even private ones, need a for-profit e-biz to "communicate with a wider audience" is dismaying. What happened to the internet's promise of recreating a public space for the exchange of ideas, of fostering a global community and a democratisation of knowledge and learning? Who will defend and enrich the public sphere within this global space if not the leading public institutions? At first blush, at least, Fathom seems to be all about get-ting in on the action, cash- ing in on the old New York/London cachet.

"It is important that we seize this space," the head of research and project development at the London School of Economics, Neil Gregory, told the Financial Times. "This could be the category killer." Indeed, the LSE (started by the Fabians Beatrice and Sydney Webb as part of the University of London) could prove a killer, in this venture, especially for the category we might call the public interest.

Ann Kirschner, the CEO of Fathom, has warned that the company could well go public. The Financial Times estimates a first-year investment of about £40m, with venture-capital participation. Fathom's requisite start-up board of directors includes business leaders from Goldman Sachs, Shell International and the National Basketball Association. Someone is expecting a considerable return somewhere down the line, even allowing for the wonky bottom-line expectations of e-bizzes. And then there's the spectre of corporate takeovers. Think of AOL acquiring the intellectual assets of Fathom to fill in those content areas (art and literary criticism, philosophy, palaeontology and so on) that Time Warner reluctantly concedes it cannot provide.

It's not so absurd when you consider that, two weeks after the Fathom launch, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London announced their own for-profit start-up. In this case, Glenn Lowry, the director of MOMA, assures us that "we have built in all the appropriate firewalls", which means that "no trustee or their family and no staff member of either museum can invest in this company should it go public". Successful start-ups may reduce the taxpayer's burden, but will at the same time reduce the institution's public accountability and contribution.

I raise these concerns as a caution at this point. I may be too hasty in judging what Fathom means for the public sector of this knowledge economy. If it offers "a more complete and accessible context for knowledge", as Kirschner claims, while sticking to the principle that "generally, what's free in the real world will be free in the virtual world", then it could well prove a source of hope for perhaps even an expanded public sector of ready access to all that these public and non-profit institutions hold.

If, instead, the public sector is further diminished by the likes of Fathom, then it falls to public-spirited readers, scholars, librarians and curators to find other ways of going public with what we collectively know and hold in trust. Inspiration for such initiative is readily found online in the mission statement of the New York Public Library, which currently describes the library as "one of the cornerstones of the American tradition of equal opportunity. It provides free and open access to the accumulated wisdom of the world . . . It helps ensure the free trade in ideas and the right of dissent."

John Willinsky is the author of Empire of Words: the reign of the OED (Princeton, 1994)