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Academic Exchange
September 2000 Contents Page

"The Net becomes a great projection of what we most hope or fear, but it's simply a new tool-'simply,' though, in the way that the car was simply a tool in 1920."
­David Batstone, National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at the University of San Francisco and a founding editor of Business 2.0 magazine, speaking at a workshop on "Citizenship in a Network Society," sponsored by the Ethics Center

"One reason to be cautious about interdisciplinarity and curricular reform is that as interdisciplinary approaches become institutionalized, as has happened with women's studies and American studies, they tend to reproduce the fragmentation and incoherence they were designed to mitigate. They don't function to integrate the curriculum because they're not connected to the disciplines or to other interdisciplinary programs."
­Gerald Graff, associate dean of the curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, speaking last April as part of a symposium on the organization
of knowledge in the "new" university, sponsored by the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts

"Scholarly communication has in some ways stepped away from libraries. The National Institutes of Health and other large science organizations have science databases, such as genome sequencing. This is happening with humanists, too. Professors are building web sites for their teaching and research. But while the scientific databases have big, institutional support, the others have flaky or no institutional support, and this information is in great peril. Will that information be supported and preserved? Will that professor get tenure for his scholarly work?"
­Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, speaking last May as part of a symposium on "Scholarship in the Digital Age: The Future of Academic Libraries"