What the Internet again does is to give institutions like Harvard a chance to reach out to important constituencies that could benefit from their teaching and find a way of reaching them without forcing them to spend amounts of time and travel that they simply don't have available.

There's much greater interest now in learning throughout the lifetime than there ever was even 30 years ago. There is a kind of educated community - I suppose at the core of it are our alumni who are also worldwide but it extends far beyond that. These are people who have a good deal in common - they usually share knowledge of the English language, they have a lot of intellectual concerns, educational needs in common - we can take advantage of that and create more active engaged communities that are in touch with one another, learning from one another over a period of time. We're already in the process of creating networks of various kinds that enable people who have studied here to remain in touch and remain in active intellectual engagement with their fellow classmates and others here in the university. So it's absolutely undreamed of opportunity...

I think one of the most worrisome trends is the effort by a number of universities to form partnerships with for-profit institutions that do have the advantage of giving them ready access to large amounts of capital, but of course in return you have to conduct these ventures with the hope of making very large profits. If experience is any guide the profits are likely to be... to turn out to be unrealistic. But I think the disadvantages of teaching for a profit will not disappear and the danger of course in this kind of technology is that you will try to invest a good deal up front in making rather flashy and superficially attractive courses that will engage large numbers of students so you can spread your course costs over a large audience, but what will be lacking will be the kinds of feedback and individual engagement with the student which we increasingly recognize to be essential to really good teaching. So in other words if we don't find a way of organizing our use of the new technology that does not create what I ultimately think are the false incentives of the marketplace, we're likely to make much less than the best use of the opportunities the technologies has given us.

Harvard for better or for worse, and it works both ways - does have an unusual opportunity to attract attention by what it does. And that makes it all the more important that we set a really positive example in how we go about doing this - how we create a really productive environment for our professors to work in and use technology imaginatively, but also how we organize the venture so that we don't end up trying to make money with an inferior product, but we create models that will really make the best possible use of the new technology. And I think in all that what we do will have an influence, and that imposes an obligation to be even more careful than we might otherwise be in trying to get it right.

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