Moving Beyond Textbook Sales, Harcourt Plans to Open a For-Profit University By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK
The company that owns Harcourt Brace and Bergdorf Goodman will soon be marketing a new product -- college degrees. It is creating an independent university that plans to offer all of its courses via distance-education technologies.
A number of academic publishers now offer not just textbooks but also interactive software, World-Wide Web sites, and other curricular products. But Harcourt General, Harcourt Brace's corporate parent, is the first to try leveraging those resources into an actual institution.
Leaders of the new institution, which will operate as a for-profit subsidiary of Harcourt General, have already hired a provost and several administrators. In May, they began advertising four deans' positions -- for the schools of business, health-care systems and administration, information technology, and general studies.
They say the hiring of part-time faculty members could begin this month.
The company plans to apply for a license to grant degrees from the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education in September, and after that for accreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The company hopes to begin offering courses by the fall of 2000.
"The idea is to offer full degrees" up to the master's level, and to aim the program at non-traditional students, says Robert V. Antonucci, the director of Harcourt's university project and president of the company's new division, which will be called Harcourt Learning Direct. "There's a market out there."
The university will have its headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. -- a locale chosen, says Mr. Antonucci, because Massachusetts is the home base for Harcourt and "a mecca of where education is."
Mr. Antonucci was Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts from 1992 to 1998, when he left to join Harcourt. Harcourt General, whose imprints include Holt, Rinehart and Winston and Steck-Vaughn, is based in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Its non-educational holdings include a controlling interest in the retailers Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus.
Harcourt's move into the teaching side of higher education is part of a larger corporate push into learning businesses that includes the company's 1997 purchase of ICS Learning Systems, a century-old correspondence school that offers high-school, vocational, and associate-level-college programs. Along with the new university project, Harcourt is planning to upgrade programs at ICS and create the Harcourt High School, for which it is already seeking accreditation.
Mr. Antonucci says that gaining accreditation for the planned university is important to Harcourt because it would give the virtual venture added credibility.
He says Harcourt is working to insure that its new institution will be able to provide adequate library support and academic counseling to students.
Such actions could help it avoid the kinds of criticism that arose recently when another regional accrediting body, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, granted accreditation to the all-virtual Jones International University.
The American Association of University Professors, in particular, assailed the North Central decision, saying in a letter that the accreditors had abandoned their own standards in approving Jones.
James Perley, the chairman of the A.A.U.P.'s Committee on Accrediting of Colleges and Universities, says his organization "will be paying increased attention" to such issues in the future.
He says he hopes the New England accreditor takes into account such factors as how much contact Harcourt professors will have with students, the role of faculty members in developing the curriculum, and how the institution plans to guarantee academic freedom.
Charles M. Cook, the director of the New England Association, says accreditors will be concerned with the way the curricula are designed, delivered, and evaluated.
"We want to know that there are individuals who are qualified" to oversee the academic programs, says Mr. Cook.
But he adds: "It need not be a faculty, in the traditional sense."
Stanley Z. Koplik, the chancellor of higher education in Massachusetts, says he doesn't see any inherent obstacles that would prevent a virtual institution from gaining a license -- assuming that Harcourt can demonstrate, among other things, that it has qualified faculty members, adequate financial backing, and a means of providing library resources.
Earlier in May, another major publisher, the Thomson Corporation, announced that it was reorganizing its publishing division and renaming it Thomson Learning to reflect its increasing focus on providing courseware for "lifelong learning."
In addition to its traditional academic markets, Thomson Learning plans to sell courseware and other materials for adult education, corporate training, test preparation, and professional certification.
But Thomson officials say they have no plans -- at least for now -- to go the route that Harcourt has taken and create their own institution.
Thomson would rather provide content to "those people who are really experts at supplying degrees," says Robert S. Christie, Thomson Learning's chief executive officer.