The Back Page A Digital Gift to the Nation by Lawrence K. Grossman and Newton N. Minow

Carnegie Corporation of New York recently hosted the third in a series of Carnegie Forums, which are aimed at bringing important issues to the nation’s attention. The Digital Promise Forum focused on a proposal put forth by Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of NBC News and PBS and Newton N. Minow, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), PBS, the RAND Corporation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. Their proposal calls for the establishment of a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust aimed at stimulating innovative and experimental ideas and techniques to enhance learning; broaden knowledge; encourage an informed citizenry and self government; make available to all Americans the best of the nation’s arts, humanities and culture; and teach the skills and disciplines needed in an information-based economy. The Trust would be financed with revenue from auctions of licenses to the publicly owned electromagnetic spectrum (the frequencies that transmit radio and television signals, as well as a new array of digital information) and would be governed by a board of distinguished and diverse citizens from many fields. Also speaking at the forum was Susan Ness, former FCC commissioner and Robert Pepper, Chief, Office of Plans and Policy, FCC. Grossman and Minow’s comments are excerpted below.

The United States has made three great public investments in the educational life of the nation: First, in 1787, the Northwest Ordinance set aside public land to support public schools in every state. Second, the Morrill Act, passed in 1862, led to the establishment of 105 land-grant colleges, which became the backbone of American higher education. Third, in 1944, the U.S. enacted the G.I. Bill, which provided educational opportunities for the more than 20 million American men and women who served in World War II. What we’re proposing now is a fourth great public initiative that would contribute to the continued health and expansion of the nation’s economy, as the other initiatives have done, and open the door to a knowledge-based future for Americans as well as the rest of the world.

But why is this necessary? Why do we need to create what would, in essence, be a venture capital fund for public institutions such as schools, museums, universities, libraries and nonprofit organization to transform themselves into true participants in the digital age as well as develop educational and cultural content geared for our new wired world? Why not, as we have been asked time and time again, leave all this to the private sector or to market forces? After all, many people think that this new world, this new digital Internet world, owes its existence to the marketplace. That’s partially true, but it’s not the whole story. The development of the Internet was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), founded in 1958 as part of the U.S. Department of Defense, to support scientific research in the United States. As a matter of fact, the first real name for what became the Internet was ARPANET, and the first four sites connected through ARPANET—this was in 1969—were universities. From that beginning came the Internet and its more recent commercial arm, the World Wide Web. We feel that what we’re suggesting would set up a similar dynamic: using public money to serve an educational purpose would also stimulate the private sector to contribute and to get involved.

Some of the people we’ve talked to in government bring up this same argument. Why do you need a public trust fund when the marketplace is already so focused on the digital world and the Internet? Our answer is, well, why do you need public libraries in this country when we already have bookstores? And why do we need public parks if we’ve got country clubs? Why do we need public hospitals if we’ve got private medical institutions? We’re talking about the same thing: the need for a public response to a public need, particularly in this time of great technological change and development. That’s the debate we have to have, as a nation: do we leave the chance creation of “public good” solely in the hands of the private sector or do we, proactively, identify what needs to be done and put a system in place to see that those needs are met—not only in a timely fashion but with creativity, with innovation, and with sufficient resources to ensure that every citizen is given access to the enrichment that new technologies can bring to life and learning? It’s our hope that when you talk to legislators on this level—confront them with the history of the Northwest Ordinance and the Morrill Act and the G.I. Bill—they’ll say to themselves, You know, that’s right. None of the benefits that were a direct result of those initiatives would have come about if there wasn’t a commitment on the part of the government to the public sphere. The Digital Investment Opportunity Trust is designed to do for education, in its broadest sense, what the National Science Foundation does for science, the National Institutes of Health do for medical research, and what ARPA (now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) does for defense.

We’ve just spent more than a year talking to the presidents and to the boards and the patrons of the nation’s libraries, museums, performing arts centers, universities, colleges and school systems, and all of them—up to and including the vast New York Public Library, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution—are concerned with being able to digitize their collections, their courses and all their other materials, such as audio and video recordings of live performances. They want to be able to break out beyond the walls of their institutions and take advantage of the new technologies to reach into homes and into workplaces and into all kinds of educational settings in order to enrich and promote lifelong learning. But they can’t do that on their own: they need a commitment from government and from society to support their efforts and endorse their goals.

As an example of how that can work, let’s focus on what happened in the realm of television. When television was first becoming available, there was very little debate in the country about how this great new resource should be handled. There wasn’t even a change in the Communications Act to replace the world “radio” with the word “television”: we simply adopted the system of regulating radio, transferred it to television with no debate, and left out the public spirit entirely. But then along came Freida Hennock, the first woman appointed to the FCC, who was also the first FCC member to be concerned about the noncommercial use of television: it was through her intervention, in 1952, that the first two hundred and forty-two television channels were set aside solely for educational use. Her pioneering efforts were given a dramatic boost in 1967, with the release of a landmark report by the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television entitled, Public Television: A Program for Action, that called for a federally funded system of public broadcasting (and, incidentally, changed the terminology from “educational television” to “public television”). It also became the blueprint for the Public Broadcasting Act, which broke new ground because, for the first time, Congress voted to fund television programming. In other words, it accepted that part of government’s responsibility was to provide support for television’s content. It was also a shift over to the idea that the free market could not supply all the nation’s cultural needs, and that government had a civic responsibility to act.

Still, public television has ended up passing the hat. In 1981, Walter Annenberg personally gave $150 million to support public broadcasting; through the years, other philanthropists and foundations have also provided support—and, as viewers of public television know—pledge drives are a constant necessity. What we want to do, with the Digital Trust, is ensure that funding is available for the development of digital educational content and model projects. The reason we’ve singled out the spectrum as a source of funding is that it’s going to be auctioned off one way or another, and the money is going to go into the government’s coffers—we’re just suggesting that at least a portion of the proceeds be earmarked for the purposes we’ve outlined. We’re suggesting that money generated by a public resource be put back into the public sector to serve an essential purpose: helping this nation’s public institutions fully participate in the digital age.

Let’s go back to our own American history for inspiration. During the darkest days of the Civil War, when you would think that all the priorities of the government would be devoted to organizing an army and supplying that army and recruiting more men and paying for the war, Congress passed the Morrill Act to make higher education available to the public. When Abraham Lincoln signed it, he was recognizing that education was a national priority, no matter what. If, as a nation, we were able to understand that fact in the midst of some of the greatest turmoil the country has ever known, we certainly ought to be able to do the same thing now when we’re living in a time of greater resources and opportunities. If we don’t, we’ll have nobody to blame but ourselves.

And since we’ve come to Carnegie Corporation of New York to discuss this initiative, let’s invoke the name of the Corporation’s founder, Andrew Carnegie, who started life as a poor boy and felt he owed his later success to the public resources that were available to him here in America. We both believe that if Carnegie were alive today, he’d be cheering us on, because this is exactly the kind of thing he’d do: he would invest in the new age, the new technologies, in order to make it possible for everyone to get the best possible education available. And isn’t that what we all want—for our children, and their children, and all the children who follow? Making a digital gift to the nation through the creation of a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust will ensure that legacy and it will ensure that the public institutions we value so much and that have such a vital impact on all our lives will not only survive into the 21st century but will also flourish and grow. It’s as simple as that.

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