Digital Dreamer

By Jodie Morse

A yacht packed with vacationing millionaires off the coast of St. Bart's is an unlikely laboratory for social-policy reform. So perhaps it was the Caribbean sea breeze or the free-flowing 1945 Mouton-Rothschild that got Michael Saylor, the 35-year-old CEO of the high-tech company MicroStrategy, thinking about how to amend the inequities in higher education. He shared his thoughts over sea bass and chocolate souffle. "And by the end of the evening," he recalls, "I knew I'd hit on the next big thing in education."

Back ashore last week, Saylor took his idea public, pledging $100 million to create a nonprofit "online Ivy League-quality university." And then came an even bigger revelation. He says it will allow everyone, from cabbie in Bombay to housewife in L.A., to earn a top-notch degree--for free. "If you put a professor's best performance of his life online, you can make something even better than Harvard," says Saylor, an M.I.T. graduate.

The number of schools granting online degrees has doubled in the past year, according to a study released last week. The distance-education craze has spawned cyber-only schools like Jones International University, whose Colorado-based operation offers online courses to 500 students in 30 countries. Traditional campuses are also getting wired. Stanford offers a virtual master's degree; the University of Chicago and Columbia, among others, have signed up with the Internet start-up UNext.com to create a for-profit online college. Saylor's announcement ups the ante considerably. He is banking on replacing the world's "10,000 average professors" with an all-star faculty (think Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger), all of whom he expects to teach pro bono.

With warp speed, Saylor's proposal became the talk of the highest ivory towers. And the reactions were mostly of the unpublishable kind. "Saylor's naivete is breathtaking," says David Noble, a history professor at Toronto's York University and a sharp critic of distance learning. "It's the quintessence of counterfeit education." Adds Carole Fungaroli, an English professor at Georgetown: "It's the same as sex on the Internet. You can get it online, but it's not as good as in person."

Scholarly studies on distance learning thus far are scant. But several high-profile distance ventures have flopped, and research has shown that chat-room courses tend to be more costly and have higher attrition rates than lecture-hall classes. And there's the prickly legal issue of ownership: who retains the rights to a Wordsworth lecture once it is let loose in cyberspace?

Saylor's stunning business record may help sway some critics. As the founder of MicroStrategy, he made his fortune--$10 billion on paper as of last week--by counseling clients like Victoria's Secret on how to mine their consumer data. Conceived 10 years ago by Saylor and an M.I.T. frat brother, the company has grown to 2,000 employees and $200 million in revenue. Lately, Saylor has been making his money by selling customers personalized weather, traffic and sports reports. A Roman Empire buff, he convenes a "university week" each summer for his employees, during which they take business tutorials, attend mandatory study halls and sit for finals that Saylor insists "people actually flunk." Even in conversation, he tends to lecture. In a two-minute riff, he alights on Henry Ford, Julius Caesar and Star Trek, comparing their missions to his own.

The inspiration for his latest project was closer to home. The son of an Air Force officer, Saylor attended college on a full scholarship and wants to make a comparable opportunity available to all. But his aims are not entirely altruistic. He has plans to pluck the brainiest students to go to work for MicroStrategy. His headline-grabbing announcement could also have a more immediate payoff. Saylor is recruiting investors for a second MicroStrategy stock offering, a period during which SEC rules forbid him to publicize his company.

At the very least, Saylor's ideas may light a fire under the academy, which has been queasy about entering the online arena. Back at the real Harvard, Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature, has a virtual version of a course on heroism for his continuing-education students. And he runs late-night e-mail symposiums for his undergrads, while in his pj's. "Plato intended Socratic dialogues to be open-ended," says Nagy. "And the debate shouldn't stop when you leave the classroom." Saylor's solution to that problem is simple: lose the classroom.