This situation is getting mighty worrisome. The thoughts below are fresh, fluid, and perhaps an over-reaction. Or perhaps not. I’m not the only one who’s worried.

Apple has announced a free service called “iTunes U” that allows schools to restrict content generated at the institution to authenticated members of that institution by setting up a school-specific iTunes store. (Chronicle story here.) The authentication system can be tied to the institution’s own identity management systems. Now we can all have what Stanford and the University of Michigan’s Dental School already have: the ability to strengthen the walls of our gardens by locking down content, and the ability to limit our students to one platform with which to access that content (the only mobile devices iTunes works with are iPods). The emphasis now is on audio content, but iPod now supports video, and Apple’s plans are clearly about more than just recorded lectures–which is not to say that recorded lectures are any small thing.

An interesting excerpt from Apple’s announcement:

It’s the most powerful way to manage a broad range of audio or video content and make it available quickly and easily to students, faculty, and staff. And it is the only application that supports the overwhelmingly popular iPod. iTunes U also offers you the simplicity and mobility you expect from Apple because it is based on the same easy-to-use technology of iTunes Music Store.

Yes, it is. In fact, iTunes U is the iTunes Music Store. It’s just the part you can use for free while you’re in the store, so long as you’ve paid your tuition and you own an iPod. To be fair, you can also listen to content within iTunes at your desktop, but the real augmentation comes with the mobile device, and that’s got to be an iPod. (Note that the Music Store menu item is selected in the Stanford iTunes U screenshot above.)

And if you go to the iTunes U web page, take a close look at the sidebars on the right. There are enough branding, revenue-generating, and courseware-integrating hooks here to land Leviathan without a splash. I look at them and part of me thinks, “I get an outsourced content management/courseware system for free? I don’t have to worry about tech support, server maintenance, interoperability, or any of those back-end troubles? And I can make money and earn cool points with music- and video-hungry students while leaving the driving to Apple? Where do I sign?”

The other part of me looks at those come-ons, and the mention of Blackboard and WebCT (and even Sakai, alas, through no fault of its own), and recoils. I think of the serpent and the fruit it offers. I look at the bite that’s an integral part of the Apple logo. I remember that he who sups with the devil must have a long spoon. Are our spoons long enough for dinner with iTunes U?

Obviously it is not enough for Apple to win market share based on mere excellence. Their larger strategy, perversely admirable in its cleverness, is to leverage popular culture from within the institution (all those iPods we have–and “we” means me, too, for it is truly an excellent product) to lure institutions into a) helping them generate a monopoly and b) giving in to their own worst impulses with regard to locking away the knowledge and expertise they generate. As one observer noted (I’ve lost the reference), Steve Jobs understands that the key to changing the world is popular culture, not computers. Trouble is, this iTunes U strategy isn’t changing the world at all. This strategy simply shifts advantage within the status quo.

We will see more of this, I’m sure. Some campuses will become Yahoo-centric, others Google-centric. We’ll find AOL getting into the campus portal business, and they’ll protect us from spam and malware for free. The idea will be to generate brand loyalty, to lock content (our work, our students’ work) into proprietary systems so we can’t shop around or assemble a best-of-breed solution, to turn higher education into a machine to foster life-long consumption of this or that product. Nothing new there, of course. I suppose I had just hoped for more from Apple. Their marketing certainly encourages us to hope for more. Perhaps hope is the most addictive drug of all, especially if you can push it while people are in your store.

In this light, Disney’s purchase of Pixar, which lands Jobs a seat on the board as majority stockholder, brings an uneasy image into my mind: the ravens on the playground equipment in Hitchcock’s The Birds. I laugh at my own melodrama. But there’s a catch in my throat as the chuckle dies away.

I distrust instapundits and I don’t want to be one. But I wonder: Think different? When I wish upon a star, my dreams come true?