'The only point in having real live professors around instead of just computer terminals, videotapes and mimeoed lecture notes is that students need to have freedom enacted before their eyes by actual human beings. ... Such enactments of freedom are the principal occasions of the erotic relationships between teacher and student that Socrates and Allan Bloom celebrate and that Plato unfortunately tried to capture in a theory of human nature and of the liberal arts curriculum. But love is notoriously untheorizable. Such erotic relationships are occasions of growth, and their occurrence and their development are as unpredictable as growth itself.

Yet nothing happens in non-vocational higher education without them. Most of these relationships are with the dead teachers who wrote the books the students are assigned, but some will be with the live teachers who are giving the lectures. In either case, the sparks that leap back and forth between teacher and student, connecting them in a relationship that has little to do with socialization but much to do with self-creation, are the principal means by which the institutions of a liberal society get changed. Unless some such relationships are formed, the students will never realize what democratic institutions are good for: namely, making possible the invention of new forms of human freedom, taking liberties never taken before.'

...[O]ne of the chief things that [older students] come to class for is something that a tape or a TV or even the best virtual connection cannot ever provide: The bodily presence of others. It is one thing to listen alone to a videotaped lecture, it is quite another to hear the same subject expounded by a flesh-and-blood human being standing there before you -- someone responsive to your questions, attentive to your particular concerns, capable of cracking jokes about the events of the day, someone with the full range of human quirks and oddities, and yet also someone for whom the subject forms a living and present reality, and with whom you can have a personal relationship.

There is an electricity in the sheer human presence that draws us in, as every theatergoer or churchgoer knows, in ways that can be only remotely approximated by televised or online content. That electricity is generated not merely by one's teacher but also by the presence of one's fellow students, whose company makes the classroom into a community of sorts. That experience of connection with others in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge is one of life's great pleasures, and it is a considerable part of what students are searching for when they return. I only wish that they found it more often than they do.

All honor, then, to the Teaching Company for doing what it does, providing Americans with things that they do not get elsewhere. Let traditional educational institutions take respectful note of their new competitor's success, and learn the right lessons from it: Rather than sneer, they should instead respond intelligently to the challenge, acknowledging that higher education has served its clientele poorly. Rather than imitate the Teaching Company by seeking to digitize and standardize and commodify ever more of their own offerings, colleges and universities should instead build on their comparative advantages, and focus on the humanizing effects that they uniquely can impart -- and work to impart them better.