Company 'Retails Knowledge' for Lifelong Learners

WASHINGTON — The drive from Nenana down to Cantwell on the Parks Highway in central Alaska is 150 miles, many of them out of reach of radio stations.

So when A.P. McDonald, owner of Parks Highway Service and Towing of Nenana, set out a few days ago to bring in a stalled pickup and camping trailer that was hooked to it, he knew he'd be spending a lot of time by himself in his tow truck.

But he soon found himself reflecting on ways in which Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" in the early 14th century explored subjects of spiritual transformation and the nature of good and evil.

On another day, McDonald, 59, might have considered the mythical heroes of the Vikings or the origin in ancient Mesopotamia of the concept of a transcendent, monotheistic God.

In fact, he has thought about those topics — and others — during long trips, rescuing stranded tourists on Alaska's Highway 3.

In addition to running a wrecker service that promises "damage-free towing, emergency road services, lock-outs, jump-starts," A.P. McDonald is an enthusiastic customer of the Teaching Company.

Headquartered in Chantilly, Va., outside of Washington, D.C., the company produces and markets audio and video courses on hundreds of subjects, from astronomy to calculus to Voltaire to American Religious History.

McDonald has bought 24 of them, each consisting of at least two dozen 30-minute recorded lectures.

Other customers have included Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and musician Bruce Hornsby, said Teaching Company spokeswoman Lucinda Robb.

Although the courses are necessarily a one way relationship, many of the teachers hear from customers, Robb said.

Calculus lectures by University of Texas mathematics professor Michael Starbird regularly produce fan mail, including a recent letter from a brewer who offered to provide beer for future math department functions, she said.

Started in 1990 by a former congressional staff member, the company was sold last fall to a private investment partnership for an undisclosed sum.

People who buy Teaching Co. courses, at prices that range from $100 to $500, don't get a diploma or college credit or anything like that.

"They get the pleasure of learning," said Emory University history professor Patrick Allitt.

Allitt is one of dozens of college professors who have traveled to Chantilly for grueling hours of studio work, producing Teaching Company courses.

He believes the company succeeds because as people get older and college is pushed aside by other priorities, they become interested in subjects they ignored or shunned when they were young, surrounded by learning opportunities.

"I think that's especially true of history," Allitt said. "People often don't care for it when they're in their teens or 20s, but when they're 50 they realize they're part of it."

Like other Teaching Company lecturers, Allitt was paid advances, then commissions on the four courses he has recorded.

Many courses consist of 40 or 50 individual, 30-minute lectures by a single professor. Some are the work of a team.

"Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition" consists of 84 lectures by a dozen professors, including Robert Kane, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins of the University of Texas, Jeremy Adams of Southern Methodist University and Mark Risjord of Emory.

Other lecturers include:

— Edward J. Larson, the Richard Russell professor of history and Herman Talmadge professor of law at the University of Georgia, who received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 book on the Scopes trial over teaching evolution.

— Luke Timothy Johnson, Robert Woodruff professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Emory.

— Susan Sage Heinzelman, associate professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Texas.

Other lecturers come from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt.

Oxford University philosophy professor Daniel Robinson has taped five courses, including "Consciousness and Its Implications" and "Great Ideas of Psychology," in which he explores such questions as: "Is 'mind' itself merely an unobservable illusion, leaving the science of psychology with little more to study than the actual physical realities of body and brain?"

A course on Judaism is taught by Isaiah Gafni of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The company was founded by Tom Rollins, a former staff member of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee, who never forgot the time when he faced almost certain failure of a Harvard law school course on "the federal rules of evidence."

"There's nothing on Earth that is more boring than the federal rules of evidence," Rollins said in an interview. "I hadn't showed up for class and I had a test coming up."

Learning of a taped set of lectures on the rules of evidence in the library, he checked it out, took a deep breath and settled down for what he assumed would be a miserable weekend — but one that might keep him from flunking a necessary course.

"They were fabulous," he recalled of the lectures. "He was an old, accomplished trial lawyer and one hell of a lecturer."

Rollins passed the test and wound up on the Senate staff.

"We were trying to think of ways to fill the void of qualified math and science [high school] teachers in America," he said, "and I remembered those great rules of evidence lectures."

But when he suggested that the federal government commission recorded lectures as a way to supplement public school teaching resources, "I was told that was forbidden by about a dozen federal statutes," he recalled.

Wary of changes that swept public education in the wake of the desegregation decisions of the 1950s and '60s, Southern members of Congress got several laws passed that prohibited federal government involvement in deciding curriculum content of public schools.

But the idea wouldn't leave Rollins alone and when he left the government, he decided to try it as a private enterprise.

He recalled that his primary ally in starting the Teaching Co. was "foolhardiness."

"I have had the good fortune of having a handful of unbelievably good professors in my day, and I knew what a difference they make. You're dying to get to their class," he said, "and I believed it was possible to reproduce at least a part of that experience by recording it."

After a bumpy decade, the company began to grow.

Possibly to avoid encouraging potential competitors, the company is uncommonly secretive. Employees will not disclose what lecturers are paid, what Rollins was paid when he sold the company last October to Brentwood Associates, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, or even how many employees the Teaching Co. has.

It scours colleges and universities for top lecturers and many on the company's list come from Ivy League universities and other prestigious schools.

"We offer a course in astronomy," said Rollins, who continues to refer to the Teaching Co. as if he were part of it, although he is not, "and so who do we get to do those lectures? Alex Filippenko from Berkeley, the most-cited research astronomer in the world.

"Our course in the Shakespearean tragedy is by Peter Saccio," he said. Saccio is former head of the English Department at Dartmouth College. "And," Rollins adds emphatically, "a Shakespearian actor."

Another course, "Business Law, Contracts," by Frank Cross of University of Texas, has not sold especially well, Cross said in an interview.

"I'm familiar with the Teaching Co. more as a consumer than a lecturer," Cross said. "I've bought a dozen or more of (Rollins) courses. When I drive up to Kansas to visit my folks, I get a course and pop it into the CD-player."

On the web: The Teaching Co., www.teach12.com.