A Traditional Education, Online?

By Alexander Talcott | Monday, October 22, 2001

In an April 2000 application to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, Richard Bishirjian stated, 'The vision of Yorktownuniversity.com is to establish a presence on the Internet for scholarship on free enterprise, market economics and the history and philosophy of education, religion, and culture.' The application having been accepted, Bishirjian, who holds a doctorate degree in government and international studies from Notre Dame, became the founder and president of Yorktownuniversity.com, a distance learning college on the Internet.
On August 20, Yorktown enrolled its first class of twenty-five students, most of whom already hold degrees from other schools and are taking classes outside of a degree program. Offering more than fifty courses, at a cost of $299 per credit, Yorktown will award BA degrees in Government and Managerial Economics, while operating under a system of five ten-week terms.Yorktown uses a course management system called Blackboard, already used by 1,700 other schools, including Dartmouth, to maintain electronic classrooms.In addition to examinations and assignments, student progress will be evaluated via Blackboard's monitoring of class attendance and participation, achieved by recording the amount of time students spend on their courses' websites.

Bishirjian recognizes that more and more Americans can attend college, but worries that 'government-funded schools have an incentive to produce government-loving citizens.'Yorktown's marketing plan aims to attract a student body of, primarily, conservatives, evangelical Christians, prepared home school students, members of the military, free-market thinkers, and others.Bishirjian notes, 'We want to engender a group of people who are well-educated and well-grounded in American principles.'

Dr. Gary Wolfram, a Professor of Political Economy at Hillsdale College and one of Yorktown's founding faculty members, believes that while an online education will never replace what educators offer in the classroom, such an 'e-school' has advantages over learning by correspondence.Costs are minimized without a true facility component, and there is the exciting ability to unite students across the globe who share comparable ideologies.Wolfram acknowledges, 'I can convey more information in my classroom than I can over the Internet,' but adds, 'If you're in Guatemala, you can't come to my classroom.'

Another Yorktown professor, Richard Zeller, previously resigned from Bowling Green State University in Ohio because the school did not permit him to teach a course in political correctness.Zeller is teaching one at Yorktown now called 'Political Correctness—Totalitarianism American Style,' and explains, 'I wanted to be part of a university that educates, not brainwashes' students.Despite this altruistic pursuit, a lecture sample from Zeller's course—available online—is sated with critical terms for the Left, among them 'PC thought police.'Zeller says television advertisers of morally sound programming, for example Dr. Laura Schlessinger's talk show, are threatened by 'feminist thrash and burn' to pull their spots.A Yorktown education may be a brainwashing from elsewhere on the political spectrum.

However, most of Yorktown's fifty-five professors, including Wolfram, remain affiliated with other more traditional universities.Many have studied under noted classical liberal thinkers, such as Milton Friedman and other Nobel laureates.Their approach to subject matter varies, ranging in degree of spite for the Left.Unfortunately, if the nine online sample lectures, from children's literature to the entrepreneurial history of the United States, are any indication, the professors uniformly fail to require close readings or execute careful analyses of texts.

Yorktown is run out of Hampton, Virginia, near Yorktown, the site of the final battle of the American War of Independence.The school's motto, a tad facetious, is 'Putting tradition back into education.'

By the end of its first academic year, Yorktown hopes to enroll 200 students and
offer an M.A. in Government.

Yorktown students will be part of a market of distance-learning students that may reach 2.2 million by 2002, according to projections by Merill Lynch analysts.
When asked about the value of a Yorktown degree, Wolfram offered, appropriately, 'The market will determine how people accept this.'

A Traditional Education, Online?

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