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The narrow research of faculty members and rigid departmental organization have a negative effect on teaching and students. As the value of research and publication has gone up, the value of teaching has gone down. I will consider this issue in more detail below. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that, while there are many fine teachers devoted to the needs of their students, too many courses represent what the professor wants to teach rather than what students need to learn. Since there is every reason for faculty members to coordinate their research and teaching, many courses for undergraduates as well as graduates have quite narrow parameters. These problems are compounded by the dearth of courses designed to integrate different aspects of students’ education.

I first became concerned about the ways in which specialization was making communication among faculty colleagues more difficult during my stay at the National Humanities Center in 1982. The Center supports scholars working in different areas of the humanities for up to one year. I was struck during my stay by how little participants talked to one another about their work and how much trouble they had communicating on the few occasions when they tried to do so. Fellows rarely ventured beyond their private offices for anything other than social reasons. When I returned to Williams, sensitive to the issue, I noticed the same problem on campus. I therefore proposed a Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences, designed to break down departmental and disciplinary boundaries. Through fellowships for faculty members and undergraduate students, interdisciplinary faculty seminars and wide-ranging public lectures and conferences, the center quickly became the focus for lively intellectual discussion on campus and is still thriving. My experience in designing, creating and directing the Williams Center encouraged me to explore other ways to forge channels of communication among faculty members that would break down barriers separating disciplines and dividing departments.

By the late 1980s, I detected another important problem—with the rapid spread of personal computers, there was a growing gulf between faculty members and students, which seemed to be more than the traditional generation gap. I knew that if I were going to be an effective teacher moving forward, I would have to learn how to bridge that gulf. I started by becoming a student of my students.

The day I realized the world was shifting beneath my feet was November 14, 1992. I was teaching an experimental course at Williams entitled Imagologies: Media Philosophy, with my colleague Esa Saarinen, from the University of Helsinki. Using what was then the latest teleconferencing technology, ten students in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Williams is located, and ten students in Helsinki met weekly for two hours to discuss the philosophical implications of new media, information and communications technology. Our plan was to create a global classroom in which anybody anywhere in the world could sit around a table and talk together about important issues. It was the first time anything like that had been done, and our experiment attracted considerable media attention. At the time the course began, none of the students had ever used e-mail, but within a few weeks everyone was online regularly. Much to my surprise, a genuine educational community unlike anything I had ever experienced began to emerge.

I did not, however, fully grasp what was transpiring until I was talking with students one afternoon in the computer lab. Cynthia Llamas, a young woman in the class, was intently staring at the screen, completely oblivious to what was going on around her.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Playing a MUD,” she replied.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a Multi-User Dungeon.”

“Dungeon?”

“Yeah, like Dungeons and Dragons except it’s a real-time virtual world. It’s interactive and has an online chat room for everybody who is playing.”

“Chat room?”

“Well, it’s sorta like those