Virtual U.

At first glance, it seems to be one of those odd little news items that exist to generate bemusement: Western Governors University, a highly touted, totally on-line institution of higher education expected 1,000 students in this, its first, year of operation. It has 10. Another 75 applications remain unprocessed because of, you guessed it, computer problems.

The slapstick humor of seeing a grandious plan slip on a banana peel. The irony of technological glitches taking down something that is about nothing but technology. And, with startup costs of $9.5 million for a student body that can be counted on two hands, how about those per-pupil costs? Makes four years at one of the better Ivies look like slumming.

But this is serious, and not because 17 states invested a lot of time, energy and money to create the first university that exists nowhere but on the Internet. What’s troubling is that traditional colleges and universities across the country increasingly are turning from the lecture hall to the workstation (including the University of Maine Sytem, which has 24 Internet courses this year) and in doing so are embracing a future they may not understand and may not want.

Certainly, distance learning via the Internet can be of great value, especially to nontraditional students — such as the working adult needing to keep up with changes in his or her field or to acquire new skills for advancement or to retrain for a new job when the old one got downsized. And for persons with disabilities, it can make all the difference.

But those are not Virtual University’s target audience. It’s the traditional college students, the young men or women fresh out of high school, who are being told they can get a degree without ever having to stand in a registration line or eat dorm food. Why not stay at home, enjoy Mom’s cooking, hang out with the old friends and go to class whenever you feel like it?

Anyone who’s ever been inspired by a scholar or argued in an all-night dorm bull session or made new friends because they share interests, not because they happened to be born in the same town, knows why not. True hands-on, face-to-face education enlarges the soul and broadens the mind, things these 21st century correspondence schools can never do.

Compared with other schools that are turning to Internet scholarship as fast as possible, UMaine is taking a relatively cautious approach and there is evidence from other states that it should continue to do so.

Arizona is finding that as Internet courses expand, its legislature sees less need to fund the real university — the lecture halls, libraries and labs that make a campus a campus, the scholarship and aid packages that allow low-income students to attend. In California, the drop-out rate among digital students is markedly higher compared with traditional students, and their reading and writing skills (all too often not very good to start with) do not improve nearly as much. And there is a very real concern everywhere that this trend is leading to a two-tiered system of higher education — the more expensive, genuine article for the affluent leaders of tomorrow, and this low-budget, pale imitation for the drones.

The 900-plus students who were expected to enroll at Western Governors U. and did not are, because of their age, almost certainly far more familiar with the Internet than are the educators and technocrats who put this school together. These students, who voted with their tuition checks to go elsewhere, know that the Internet is a great source of information, but it’s no place to get an education.