Dr. Michael Thaddeus has been at Columbia University for over twenty years. During that time, he served as everything from a tenured professor to the Dean of the Department of Mathematics. The trials and tribulations of Columbia’s goings-on are nothing if not familiar to Thaddeus, with one exception: the recent development of online programs with third-party companies, a trend that’s infiltrated even the ivy league– Columbia, Yale, and Harvard all have partnerships with 2U. The rise of these online programs, in Thaddeus’s opinion, is a serious cause for concern. In a March 2023 email to Columbia faculty titled “Online Education at Columbia,” he detailed the problems he and other faculty took with the college’s new online-only programs, the creation of which stems almost entirely from 2U as opposed to existing faculty.

“Students often feel, however, that they have been defrauded when they pay top dollar for an elite university education, only to find that instruction is provided by 2U,” he wrote in the body of a follow-up email, linking to coverage of master’s students in USC’s online social work program, also the product of a partnership with the company.

In an interview, Thaddeus detailed issues like a lack of faculty oversight or the unchecked ambition of these programs as something he’s repeatedly brought up with the administration, to no avail.

“People are going to have to realize that this is going to damage the reputation of the school,” Thaddeus said. “It’s going to take a long, long time to damage the reputation of these elite, ivy schools, so they can offer mediocre online education during this time interval and make a lot of profit by exploiting this reputation in an unscrupulous manner.”

Columbia’s School of Professional Studies, formally a commuter school, now offers over 30 programs. Several of these programs are offered by 2U but seldom reference the company, instead standing as official Columbia University courses, despite the fact that 2U distributes what appears to be more or less the same course at several other universities.

For example, the Coding Bootcamp, Cybersecurity Coding Bootcamp, Data Analytic Bootcamp, and Digital Marketing Bootcamp courses are offered under the same names and with identical course descriptions at Rice University, University of California Berkeley, University of Oregon, and Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University, to name a few.

However, the similarities don’t stop there. Click on a top college to see which offered classes fall under 2U’s domain, or “partnership.”

“It’s become this kind of turbo-charged commuter school,” Thaddeus said. “The faculty of arts and sciences has never been consulted about these programs, at all. The SPS has set up its own governance structure of some kind, and we haven’t even been told what that is. We just know obliquely that it exists.”

Trying to email or get a private audience with then-Provost Mary C. Boyce was a dead end, according to the former dean. The faculty can only voice their concerns through the college’s only official channel for doing so: the University Senate. Boasting the express purpose of creating an open forum for the college community in its entirety, whether it be faculty, students, or anyone else desiring a say in how their education or place of employment should be, the Senate is a longstanding institution designed to keep some degree of power vested outside of administration. Formally created in 1968 after mass student protests, the point of the body was to make sure that something like 2U’s online courses would have to go through the college it’s attached to first, before it rolls out program after program and siphons funding toward that end. For example, all new degree programs must be put to a vote before they can be established—unless, of course, it’s an unaccredited third-party program, which makes up the brunt of what SPS offers.

“It’s really become a powerless body,” Thaddeus said. “Tons of programs have been set up that aren’t accredited and don’t carry course credit or don’t count towards a degree and so they don’t have to even be approved by the Senate, which is kind of the minimal governance structure that faculty have.”

The only way for faculty to find out information about these programs is through these asymmetrical public forums, according to Thaddeus, such as what’s publicly available on the website or recorded in the minutes of faculty meetings. Boyce did not attend any of these meetings, despite emails indicating that she intended to do so.

Regardless, the power of Columbia still rests in the university’s trustees—an enigmatic council with near total control over the college’s inner workings, excepting the small amount of power conceded to faculty for things like hiring new faculty.

“The trustees are as isolated from faculty as the moons of Jupiter,” Thaddeus said. “There’s zero communication between faculty and the trustees.”

In a presentation on online education given to Columbia faculty in 2019, 2U CEO and co-founder Chip Paucek proudly stated that “we built a business on believing that the university is central, first and foremost, so we believe in the power of the institution. People want to join this community, I mean, I can’t overstate it.” Playing second fiddle in Paucek’s lecture was Columbia Senior Vice Provost Soulaymane Kachani, who’s career previously saw him as head of the Columbia Engineering’s online programs department, during which the department was caught lying about the true class sizes of their online courses to U.S. News so as to conflate their rankings.

“What Paucek really means is that it’s valuable to 2U and these corporate partners to work with these long-established universities,” Thaddeus said. “They’ve spent centuries building up their reputation, and he sees the reputation as capital, an asset that can be used to sell this online product which is a shoddy product of inferior quality.”

Although a whole host courses at Columbia are offered by 2U, several don’t seem to make it to 2U’s public partnership pages, according to internal faculty emails, such as “Business of Luxury” or “Understanding Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.” Students interested in taking these courses may have no way of knowing whether or not the course they’re taking is a Columbia or a 2U course, an issue that has seen repeated exposure in the senate.

“It is a crass way of saying it, but it is very much a ‘brand’ thing,” Thaddeus remarked.