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Philharmonic and Chicago History Museum. During the second semester, both presidential fellows and students would serve as visiting faculty members at other institutions, where they would offer seminars for colleagues at those schools derived from their work at the Academy. The selection of participants in these campus-based courses would be made by their home institutions and determined by both merit and interest. Faculty members would receive a one-course teaching reduction, which would be funded by government grants, to take the seminar. Particularly able faculty members who attended the Academy and proved to be unusually effective teachers would have the opportunity to become presidential fellows.

This program is obviously very ambitious—but it needs to be to meet the challenges we face. As more and more people attend the Academy and take its courses and teachers begin teaching teachers, a network will emerge that can provide continuing education and necessary support for the people charged with teaching future generations. The lack of mobility in the current job market makes it unlikely that faculty who attend the NTA will leave and makes it all the more important for colleges and universities to develop continuing education programs for their faculty.

The renewed emphasis on teaching must not, of course, detract from the continuing importance of research and publication—serious research and publication, not make-work. But here too changes must be made. Universities in the United States have long led the world in the research and development of the very technologies that are creating new opportunities to extend traditional research and publication methods and transform teaching practices. Ever since the Middle Ages, a doctoral dissertation has been meant to present original work. Graduate students in the sciences conduct research, which is often collaborative, under the direction of a “mentor” and publish their work in multiauthored articles. Humanists and most social scientists are also guided by a tenured faculty member but work in isolation and are required to produce a heavily footnoted dissertation that eventually might be published as a scholarly monograph. In practice, however, this rite of initiation produces little of lasting value.

Students working at an advanced level should not be limited to a traditional dissertation format. Monographs represent a financial failure except in the rarest of instances. Perhaps there are other formats where that won’t be the case. Moreover, to compete in the workplace—academic and otherwise—students need skills above and beyond those required for producing scholarly articles and books. The best and the brightest students often feel stymied by the imposition of outdated requirements by mentors more comfortable using traditional methods and imposing their personal authority than with nourishing the creativity of young people who want to do things differently.

Working with students in media labs and on multimedia projects, I have come to appreciate alternative ways of writing and publishing. No longer constrained by words in black-and-white, ordered in straight lines and right angles, you become free to reconfigure words with any color, image or sound in designed texts that can be layered and even set in motion. Multiple narrative possibilities not afforded by the traditional book emerge. If constructed thoughtfully, texts composed in these media can reach a level of complexity that takes interpretation and critical thinking to different levels. Alternative media create great possibilities.

Mark Danielewski’s remarkable seven-hundred-page book, House of Leaves, is a case in point. Designed around the conceit of a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, this book combines detective fiction, adventure story and psychological thriller with sophisticated philosophical analysis and literary criticism. Danielewski integrates creative and critical writing with graphic design techniques borrowed from film and video to advance the narrative of the work. The