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Billionaire, 35, plans giant Web site for free education

Thursday, March 16, 2000

By JACQUES STEINBERG
THE NEW YORK TIMES

A 35-year-old software billionaire said yesterday that he would spend $100 million to realize his vision of 21st century higher education: a giant free Web site that would provide access to what he calls the "10,000 greatest minds of our time," in lectures and interviews recorded especially for the venture.

Michael Saylor, the chief executive of Microstrategy, a technology company in northern Virginia, said in an interview that his goal was "free education for everyone on earth, forever." And he envisions his institution eventually granting degrees in countless disciplines, based on final exams that would be administered once a month in convention halls around the world, with grading done by computer whenever possible.

Saylor is an unabashed self-promoter who rented the Washington Redskins' stadium in January for a Super Bowl party for his employees and friends. However, he is worth enough money on paper -- $11.7 billion at the close of stock trading yesterday -- to make it difficult to immediately dismiss his idea, however grandiose.

Saylor's donation, which he intends to make in the form of cash and stock to his foundation, comes at a time when almost every American university is developing online offerings of its courses -- each one chipping away at the notion that a university must have bricks and mortar and a physically present student body to be effective.

But with students at Saylor U. -- he actually hasn't come up with a formal name, but says it will have "dot-com" in it -- requiring nothing more than a computer to enroll, his effort would take online education a step further, undermining a university's very franchise in charging admission for access to knowledge and expertise.

Saylor's spending plans would rank near the top of other online efforts. A group of investors, including Michael Milken, the dethroned junk-bond financier, says it will spend as much as $100 million to start an online, for-profit university called Unext, which would feature course content from professors at the University of Chicago and elsewhere.

At his online university, Saylor imagines Bill Clinton teaching politics, Warren Buffet lecturing on investing and Steven Spielberg demonstrating filmmaking -- all in 30-hour video packages, with questions anticipated, and answered, in advance. So far, he hasn't recruited a single instructor, but he doesn't intend to pay them a dime. He says they will be drawn to his television studio by the opportunity to make their thoughts available to the world for eternity.

"It's a work in progress," a spokesman said yesterday. "It's impossible to say in certitude what the details are."

Saylor, whose plan was first described in an article in yesterday's Washington Post, intends to announce his effort formally at a business conference today in Washington, D.C. But his scheme was already reverberating through the halls of higher education yesterday.

Stanley Ikenberry, the former president of the University of Illinois, said he applauded Saylor's idealism but was concerned that the lectures at Saylor's university would be, in effect, canned.

"If you believe that higher education is simply content mastery, then you can put that in a can," said Ikenberry, the president of the American Council on Education, a non-profit organization representing 1,800 colleges and universities. "But higher education is so much more than that. It involves judgment, analysis, synthesis, communication, creativity and innovation, which are the things that human beings do best."

Saylor embarked on his road to wealth while working at Dupont soon after his graduation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1980s. It was then that he and several fraternity brothers started Microstrategy, a company that, before long, had created software that McDonald's, Victoria's Secret and K-Mart, among others, were using to tabulate detailed analyses of sales and inventory.

The company's sales last year were $200 million.

Saylor imagines that his company's future lies in a world where the Jetsons would feel at home: personally tailored information -- such as a disembodied voice reporting that a doctor's appointment or flight has been canceled -- that would be broadcast directly to people through their car radios and cellular phones, which would then offer them an instant opportunity to respond.

Wall Street, at least, thinks it's hardly science fiction: Microstrategy's stock has rocketed from $7 a share to nearly $300 in the span of less than a year.

Asked if his announcement was intended to draw as much attention to himself as to his intentions, Saylor said he didn't think the question was relevant, suggesting that Michelangelo's greatness was not compromised because he signed his paintings.

© 2000 The New York Times.
All rights reserved.

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