This article addresses an impasse in debates about online education in university education. One side presents a story of the progressive development of technology as it is applied to the organisation of higher education, leading to pedagogical advances and to the new forms of administration required for the realisation of the technology's full potentials, both pedagogical and economic. The other side views online education as a lever of neoliberal reform that extends to the university a capitalism that is now digital, global, and knowledge-based. Both sides of the debate share the same underlying philosophy of technology, according to which technology is a "fait accompli" with which the university must comply or which it must reject out of hand in defense of traditional academic values and priorities. The authors argue that critical theory of technology offers a way to redress this impasse by providing a philosophical orientation capable of widening the debate over online education and university restructuring through its emphasis on the dynamics of technological design and development as social and political processes. They examine the case of an early experiment in educational computer conferencing, drawing significant conclusions from it about methodology and policy in the online education debate. (Contains 1 figure and 17 notes.)