SCHANK: Universities will never grow out of their certification mission. Too much depends upon it. It is hard to imagine that as many people would go to college as do now, if no one really cared about whether you had been to college. No one would fight to go to Harvard if going to Harvard didn't matter. But what matters about it? Not the education. No one asks if you learned a lot, they just assume you are smart because you went there. It is time to rethink this.

We won't get rid of certification but perhaps we can contemplate new kinds of certification. Students should be certified as having accomplished something or as being able to do something. Like Boy Scout merit badges or Karate black belts or Truck Driver's licenses, the proof should be in the pudding. A student should show his stuff, he should be able to do something and the attestation to the doing should be the certification.

Such changes are unlikely to occur in current universities. It is the rare faculty member who will willingly stop teaching the same old course he has taught for thirty years and design a new one that will be more work for him to teach because it requires more individual effort. This will not happen unless the venue and the circumstances of education change radically.

Here then is why we can begin to have some hopes for the Virtual University. It is not the case that these changes can occur only at VU. They could occur anywhere, but they won't. The inertia is too great at State U. VU has such promise because VU is virgin territory. There is no entrenched establishment that will block change. John Dewey would have been ecstatic.

JB: In the face of everything you have outlined, why are university administrations acting as though they are paralyzed.

SCHANK: The most well meaning college president can change none of what I describe. The former Provost of my university used to say "with faculty, everything is a la carte." He couldn't ask a professor to do a single thing beyond his normal duties without being prepared to promise something in exchange. As they say, tenure means never having to say you're sorry.

The uproar amongst students and faculty alike would be enormous if grades and tests were eliminated, if lectures were abandoned, if tenure were abolished, if all requirements were dropped, even though it is all these things that keep the universities forever promising real education and only partially delivering. There is simply no way to implement such things. Take tenure for example. No administrator thinks tenure is a good idea. Every first rate university is saddled with "dead wood," — professors who once were good but are no more. There is no way to get rid of them. My university employs a professor who goes around the country denying that the Holocaust ever took place. Can they get rid of him? No. They can't even lower his salary. (Though he hasn't gotten a raise in a long while, you can bet.)