Corporeal Universities Dying from Information Technology: An Urban Mirage

        Developments of information technology have cast a great challenge to higher education in recent two decades. The state-of-the-art of IT is so powerful that tools of informatics have been pervasive in today's education systems and are further transforming our higher education. Indeed, the distribution and acquisition of knowledge have been fundamentally reshaped due to the uses of information technology. Consequently knowledge become more accessible than ever before: they are no longer solely confined in teachers' mind and books. IT-based instructional systems give new options to students. Place-bound students now have their choices to attend university online; electronic virtual universities are emerging; courseware or some other instructional software developed by commercial learning/teaching companies are playing some of the corporeal universities' roles.
        All these are true, but are they sufficient for us to prophesy the demise of corporeal universities in the new millennium? I would treat this sort of prediction as an urban mirage. It makes me recall some earlier prophets about robotics. When the first robot came into being, people began to imagine that robots could soon replace all the manpower and even control their inventors. However, so many decades have passed, that vision has still not come true. By virtue, today’s IT fetishism is nothing newer than yesterday’s robot fetishism. We keep having new versions of technology fetishism. When we isolate universities and information technology from the societal contexts where they are positioned, the vision of a single pair of the determinator and the determinated could be very appealing.  However, both university and IT are social products ­ by society, in society, and for society. Social facts are all of multi-facets, and can never be simply reduced to a neat linear mathematical model. As Gerhard Casper, the president of Stanford,  clearly expounds in his talk, university as a social product, plays multi-roles in society. I would argue that those socially defined roles beyond teaching/learning can by no means be completed by just a set of electronic learning/teaching wares.  Even for the role of learning/teaching, the use of online learning/teaching system would have both advantages and disadvantages. While it makes higher education more accessible and more flexible to people’s educational needs, it may cause some metal health or other psychological problems for its lacking of corporeal interaction and association that are human beings’ basic psychological need.
        With regard to the existence of corporeal universities in the new century, I have a quite optimistic vision. I deeply believe that  universities as corporeal entities in society will not only continue to exist, but will continue to expand their outreaches, as they are presently doing, by invoking the state of the art of educational technologies. Take a look at nowadays’ computer learning/teaching wares for higher education, we’ll see most of them are actually university-based: produced by or with the help of universities, and largely serving universities as their outreach tools. As well-illustrated by the edge-cutting UI-Online and Stanford’s planned online degree programs,  IT-based educational facilities or systems will enrich universities’ program types, instructional tools, and organization strucutres, and expand their functions, and thus make universities even more important to the society in the new century, rather than result in their demise.