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Commencement:Looking
Outward • Feeling
Smart •
Filling Bass Chairs
Student Affairs VP Picked •
Christensen Honored •
Bigger, Better
Bookshelves
Dancing Feats and Feasts
• Accepted
for Admission •
A
Dean for Medicine
Scholars and Fellows
•
Math Champs •
Healing Damaged Hearts •
Backing a Digital Future
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Backing a
Digital Future
proposed $18-billion federal trust fund to underwrite a digital revolution
in America’s public and nonprofit institutions would help make
knowledge produced by the nation’s research universities available
to everyone, says Cathy N. Davidson, vice provost for interdisciplinary
studies at Duke.
Davidson urged support of the trust fund in a background paper accompanying
a report released in Washington by the Digital Promise Project, which
is asking Congress to create the trust fund from monies now being
amassed by the government in auctioning off licenses to the public
airwaves. “The Internet represents the new frontier in education
in the twenty-first century,” says Davidson. “We now have
an unparalleled opportunity to make the knowledge produced by research
universities available to every citizen of the United States and the
world. We can turn the sale of our virtual real estate to a public
good.”
Davidson and other members of the Digital Promise Project seek legislation
to create a new public Digital Opportunity Investment Trust (DO IT).
The public-service venture capital fund would finance innovation,
research, and expansion of new information technologies into schools,
museums, libraries, universities, and other cultural institutions
across the country. Its operation would be modeled after the National
Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
“We are in one of the most promising and perilous moments in
the history of higher education,” Davidson says. “There
is no better time than now to make a major investment in the long-term
future of ideas in America.”
She likens creation of the new fund to passage of the Morrill Land-Grant
College Act in 1862, signed by President Lincoln in the midst of the
Civil War. The act dedicated funds acquired through the sale of homesteading
land to public higher education. Now, the public territory involved
is virtual and electronic. Those taking part in the Digital Promise
Project seek “an electronic land-grant,” Davidson says.
“What the Land-Grant Colleges Act achieved for modern research
universities in this country, the Digital Opportunity Investment Fund
does in our time.” Without such funding, “The question is
at what point will the various demands of the information age begin
to compete with the basic research mission of the university?”
Research universities, she says, have been called on to serve the
public directly: “In the Information Age, a new audience—with
no direct ties to the university—has tacitly been assumed to
be part of the community that
a university serves.” She cites demand for university-based websites,
online library resources, and distance-learning courses for the public.
“In the past decade, research universities have absorbed tremendous
expenses, in both equipment and staffing, in order to keep apace with
the dizzying changes in all areas of computing, from instructional
technology (such as wired and wireless classrooms) to high-speed research
computing. At many research universities (including my own), the cost
of educational technology rose more than 100 percent in the last three
years, and rose the same amount in the previous period.”
Besides escalating costs, Davidson says, research universities face
other difficulties. The Internet was first thought of as a way
for researchers across the globe to communicate with each other, but
now its entertainment and other profitable uses have brought vocal
calls for broadened intellectual property rights and protection for
commercial content. Yet, says Davidson, the Internet should remain
open and accessible to all. A pay-for-service basis will put research
science and free speech at risk: “Research science and the research
university depend on a level of openness, in content and in network
architecture, that the current trend endangers.”
Davidson wrote one of seventeen supporting papers, “Teaching
the Promise: The Research University in the Information Age,”
for the Digital Promise Project’s report A Digital Gift to the
Nation: Fulfilling the Promise of the Digital and Internet Age. She
says she was helped in the development of her paper by a focus group
of twenty Duke professors from law, business, engineering, the humanities,
arts, social sciences, library science, and computer science. Ellen
Mickiewicz, director of the Sanford Institute of Public Policy’s
DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism, is also involved
in the project.
The Digital Promise Project comprises public and private universities
and colleges, public school systems, libraries, public television
stations, museums, and other cultural and arts organizations across
the United States. Support comes from the Carnegie Corporation of
New York, The Century Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and
the Open Society Institute. The full report and background papers
are available on the Web at http://www.digitalpromise.org.
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