By SCOTT CARLSON

A woman who made the NFL hot online turns her attention to higher education

Ann G. Kirschner seems to have a knack for clairvoyance. She had the good sense to join the sprouting cable-television industry after leaving academe in 1980, when job prospects for scholars of Victorian

literature were dismal. Six years later, she and three colleagues opened a successful satellite-television company, charging the start-up costs to their credit cards. And she made the right call when she led the National Football League online in 1994, establishing a World Wide Web presence that is the envy of other sports leagues.

Now Ms. Kirschner senses that the world is changing again, becoming a place where universities have to get online or get out of the way.

"The history of the university suggests that every once in a while, the pecking order changes. That change is led by external forces as well as internal forces. One could argue that we're at a turning point now. Those universities that figure out what this age means and how to adapt to it have a very strong future ahead of them."

In her new position as head of Fathom, a for-profit venture established by Columbia University, Ms. Kirschner plans to create just such a future. Fathom is intended to bring Columbia and five other institutions online with a Web site that will market distance-education courses and academic texts (http://www.fathom.com).

Fathom will also provide, free of charge, an extensive collection of scholarly articles and lectures from leading academics, along with other intellectual resources, such as digitized images from the New York Public Library. Columbia's partners in the project include the library, the London School of Economics and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, the British Library, and the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History.

Ms. Kirschner says Fathom will be an information source for anyone interested in knowledge -- students, professionals, lifelong learners. The articles, she says, will be more analytical and more up-to-date than anything in an online encyclopedia. "What you're going to get from the encyclopedia is static information. What you'll get from the news is a thin layer of information. But what you'll get from Fathom is cutting-edge information, the latest of what's out there."

That's the theory, at least. The site was formally announced just last month, and not a single article has yet been posted.

Ms. Kirschner began forming the idea for what has become Fathom two years ago. "The thought was, How do you look at the university as a great source of programming, not just learning? It was the idea that you could extend a university online and provide points of access all over the world."

"But I didn't think that I could incubate it from within a university," she says, explaining that she didn't realize how entrepreneurial academe had become since she'd left it, how global in its outreach.

Last year, she met Michael M. Crow, Columbia's executive vice provost, who was eager to establish an online venture at the university. He says Columbia was "concerned that no one from our sector was trying to capture space" on the Internet to deliver scholarly content. "If you watch the forces at work, we'll soon have purely commercial enterprises in the business of authenticating information and delivering knowledge. Universities will be forced to deal with these people."

The solution, he says, was to adopt the shape and tactics of a commercial venture and attract investment capital -- which is why Columbia needed someone like Ms. Kirschner.

Fathom, which has not made its revenue projections public, is expected to generate income primarily through two outlets. It will provide links to distance-education courses, and it will take a portion of the tuition of people who sign up for classes through its site. It will also sell scholarly books, no matter the publisher, that are related to articles on the site. Information about book sales will be announced in the next few months, Ms. Kirschner says. She adds that Fathom will consider running advertisements on the site, but "we won't ever be carrying blinking banner ads for pet food."

"This will be a more complicated for-profit company than most," says Mr. Crow. The company will "try its best" to provide a reasonable return on investments, he says, but will also remain loyal to the university's mission. "We don't know whether investors will be interested in this idea."

Fathom has no plans for a public offering of stock, says Ryan Craig, vice president for business development, but "we're looking at all the funding options." Seed money has come from Columbia -- its $20-million infusion accounts for most of the sum -- and the London School of Economics.

There are some at Columbia who wonder if the new venture is a boondoggle. "There's no business model there. They aren't going to make a profit selling books or tchotchkes," says Eben Moglen, a professor of law who specializes in Internet issues. The university started Fathom when Internet stocks were inflated, he points out, adding that "we're going to see a shakeout in the dot-com companies. We're talking about organizations that had brands a lot more reputable than Fathom -- or which at least were being promoted on Good Morning America with a sock puppet -- that are going to go deep six now."

"I think that it looked like a pretty good, although entirely vulgar, proposition that the university was going to make money by promoting dot-com stock for jerks to purchase," he says. "But that was then. That doesn't look so smart now, and it ain't gonna look smarter six months from now."

Ms. Kirschner acknowledges that getting Fathom up and running means straddling two worlds. She has to run the company with a fast-paced, entrepreneurial spirit, but not trample the core values of the university -- its commitment to free inquiry and knowledge. She was hired for her dual background in academe and business, Mr. Crow says.

"The average business person is the take-no-prisoners type, with no soft touch," Mr. Crow says. But "she has the right touch, the right skill to work within the academic context. She has the right commitment to intellectual rigor." When she courts institutions that Columbia sees as potential partners, he says, "she shows that she understands academic culture. She knows that she's not sitting across the table from U.S. Steel."

But she can also play the businesswoman when called upon. "She's a diminutive person, but it's interesting to watch her put on her N.F.L. face," Mr. Crow says. "She sort of gets all puffed up and becomes an N.F.L. executive. It's kind of funny to see such a small person all of a sudden seem like a linebacker."

Ms. Kirschner and other managers at Fathom will get a cut of any profits, Mr. Crow says. But she's not in it for the money, she declares. "Believe me, if I wanted to make a quick buck, there are a lot easier businesses than Fathom to do it in." She had become bored at the football league, she says, and jumped at the chance to return to a university atmosphere last year. Coming back to academe "is like being on a park after living in midtown."

"We talked a lot in the N.F.L. about intellectual property," she says, "and the phrase always rang hollow in my ears, because there was nothing intellectual about the intellectual property."

Even so, her idea for the new venture grew out of her thinking as she developed the N.F.L.'s Web site: "What the Internet does best is strip away unnecessary mediation and put together those who want to hear with those who want to speak," she explains. "I'm very reluctant to draw parallels between the N.F.L. and Fathom, lest I trivialize my current endeavors. But one of the great ambitions of Fathom is to present the creators of new ideas with people who are interested in those ideas."

For example, as one of Fathom's in-house demos, producers put together an article on string theory that features Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics at Columbia and author of The Elegant Universe (W.W. Norton, 1999). It includes a digitized video of a public lecture that he gave, along with text and an animation inspired by images in his book; he reviewed the piece for accuracy. On the side of the screen, a reader can click a link to buy his book or browse various distance-education courses related to the topic.

At first, Fathom will market courses only from its partner institutions. Once it has established a process to review the academic rigor of other courses, it will offer them as well.

"I think Fathom is off in the right direction," Mr. Greene says. "Rather than having things that are really text-driven, which would be a book that happens to be on a computer, they're wisely trying to integrate text with visuals."

What the 30 or so Fathom staff members are excited about now is a new feature that represents connections among articles visually, like stations on a New York subway map. Below an article on nuclear reactors, for example, would appear a line linking it to related articles -- on fission, say, or Chernobyl -- any of which could be called up with a click of the mouse. Some of the articles on the line would represent transfer points to other lines -- other series of related articles. So the Chernobyl article might also be linked to a line of articles about environmentalism. Some articles on the original line might link to lines about physics or foreign policy. And just as a subway rider can get from Coney Island to Morningside Heights on more than one route, Fathom users could move freely from topic to topic.

The venture's expansive aspirations more than fill its cramped, closetlike space on the top floor of Low Memorial Library, where Fathom employees and visitors navigate around cardboard boxes, chairs, and file cabinets. Fathom's creators are accustomed to holding meetings in borrowed rooms or on wooden benches in the library's dimly lit halls.

Ms. Kirschner has a "window office" -- little more than a table under a window too high for a decent view -- at the end of a small room that she shares with as many as four other people.

Fathom's squad of programmers, producers, marketers, and designers crowd into the rest of the space. Amid cans of Diet Coke and strewn papers, they sit at long tables and work on laptops -- not full-size P.C.'s, because space here is at a premium.

Says Ms. Kirschner of her young staff: "My philosophy is to hire people who are smarter than me and listen to what they say."

She grew up in the 1950's in Queens, N.Y., in an Orthodox Jewish family. Her father is a retired clothing retailer; her mother, a Holocaust survivor, stayed home to raise Ann and her two brothers. She earned her B.A. in English and piano at the State University of New York at Buffalo and her M.A. in English at the University of Virginia. She loved teaching, and when she arrived at Princeton University in the late 1970's to get her doctorate, with a dissertation on orphans in Victorian fiction, she had every intention of going into academe.

Maria DiBattista, an English professor at Princeton who advised Ms. Kirschner on her dissertation, calls her whip-smart -- "a dream student." But, she adds, "I got the sense that she was keeping her options open, and that the academic world might not be for her."

"In the end, I felt that I wasn't good enough," Ms. Kirschner says. "The reality was that as a really committed teacher but a mediocre scholar, I wasn't headed for a successful career." Academic jobs were scarce at the time -- "humanities Ph.D.'s were driving cabs," she says -- and Ms. Kirschner suspected that staying in academe might mean having to live far from her husband, who was in medical school in New York.

She worked for the Modern Language Association for a year. She thought it would be a good "halfway house" for a displaced academic. A turning point came when she organized a conference about Ph.D.'s who went into business instead of academe. She had never thought about business, but the stories of people who were using their education in high-profile careers in film, television, and the financial markets appealed to her.

"It was suddenly seeing the enemy, and realizing, Gee, that's an interesting way to spend your day," she says. "At the same time, I had friends who were making all of the compromises I hesitated to make -- they were in faraway places, teaching subjects they hadn't planned to teach -- and some of them were a bit weary."

Ms. Kirschner answered an ad that sought bright, hard-working people who wanted to work with cable television, which was just starting to reshape the telecommunications industry.

Fast-forward to 1994, when another communications technology was on the verge of starting a revolution. Ms. Kirschner -- who had created, expanded, and sold a successful company that marketed satellite-television equipment and subscriptions -- was working as a consultant for television-oriented businesses, including DirecTV and the National Football League. She had just helped launch N.F.L. Sunday Ticket, the league's own satellite venture.

Late one morning, visiting a friend at an advertising agency, she was pulled aside by someone in the office, who offered to show her "this online thing."

"They had pictures. They were laid out the way a magazine would be," she says now. "It was absolutely electrifying. I remember thinking that this was what we'd been waiting for -- the 'we' there being people who thought that new ways of distributing information were on the horizon."

She returned to her office, forged a pitch for a commercial Internet site, and went straight to the football people. "I sat down with the president of the N.F.L. and said, 'The world is changing. I've seen this thing, and it's called the Internet, and watch out because it's going to be big.'" Then she laid out a plan to put the league on the Internet.

"I positioned it totally in terms of helping the N.F.L. reach a younger, hipper audience," she says. The league listened -- and offered her a job as vice-president for programming and media development. Her responsibility was to put together an N.F.L. Web site, without spending a ton of money.

Ms. Kirschner was heading into uncharted territory. "We really didn't know what made a great Web site," she says. She wanted to give the fans something that they couldn't get from the television networks or the newspaper. She settled on the concept that now informs the Fathom project: NFL.com would be the unmediated voice of the league, offering interviews and chats with players, fans, and coaches, along with up-to-the-minute statistics.

Today, the N.F.L.'s Web site is the most popular of any professional league's; among all sports sites, only ESPN.com and CBS SportsLine get more hits.

Now her challenge with Fathom looms large. There are academic partners yet be to courted, investors yet to be found, profits yet to be made, and tens of thousands of articles yet to be produced -- the spectrum of human thought to be captured and downloaded onto a Web site.

"This project is enormous, and if I were really smart, I'd give up right now," she says with a chuckle. "We're taking a first step on what's going to be a very long trail."

But it's a challenge that she seems to like.

"The idea that I could have a little footnote in the evolution of what higher education means gets me excited," Ms. Kirschner says. "We are so much at the beginning of what online education is. We are not even in the equivalent of the 1950's in television. Milton Berle hasn't arrived yet. But with these things you're either too early or too late, and I've found that it's better to be too early."

March 22, 1951, in New York.

EDUCATION: B.A. in English and piano, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1972; M.A. in English, University of Virginia, 1973; Ph.D. in English literature, Princeton University, 1978.

BUSINESS CAREER: President and C.E.O. of Morningside Ventures, 1999-present; vice president of programming and media development for the National Football League, 1994-99; president of Comma Communications, 1992-94; cofounder of Satellite Broadcast Networks and PrimeTime 24, 1986-92; director of new business development for Westinghouse/Group W Cable, 1981-86.

FAVORITE WEB SITES: Amazon.com, Moviefone.com, NFL.com, NYTimes.com, Zagat.com, nyrrc.org (New York Road Runners Club)

PERSONAL: Married to Harold J. Weinberg, an associate professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine. They have three children. She counts as one of her great achievements her participation in the 1997 New York City Marathon. In her spare time, she likes cooking and traveling. In 1993, she went with her family to Eastern Europe to do research on her mother's experiences in a concentration camp; she is writing a book on the subject. Her favorite book is George Eliot's Middlemarch. She's a film enthusiast; one of her favorites is The Matrix, which she's seen about a dozen times. "I love the part when Trinity doesn't know how to fly the helicopter until they zip the pilot's manual into her brain," she says of the sci-fi flick. "Someday I'm going to give a speech on distance learning, and I'm going to show that clip."

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