Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 19:32:01 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Bob Olsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Higher Ed Commercialized
This is part 1 of 2 parts
"The major change to befall the universities over the last two
decades has been the identification of the campus as a significant
site of capital accumulation, a change in social perception which
has resulted in the systematic conversion of intellectual activity
into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property."
"...the commoditization of the educational function of the
university, transforming courses into courseware, the activity of
instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products
that can be owned and bought and sold in the market."
"... invented ways to socialize the risks and costs of creating
this knowledge while privatizing the benefits."
"Once faculty put their course material online, moreover, the
knowledge and course design skill embodied in that material is
taken out of their possession, transferred to the machinery and
placed in the hands of the administration."
"... once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their
services are in the long run no longer required."
'"The potential to remove the human mediation in some areas and
replace it with automation - smart, computer-based, network-based
systems - is tremendous. It's gotta happen."'
"...campaign to portray faculty as incompetent, hide-bound,
recalcitrant, inefficient, ineffective, and expensive..."
"...the commoditization of instruction involve(s) the transformation
of the university into a market for the commodities being produced."
"...while they are studying their courses, their courses are
studying them."
"...all online activity including communications between students
and professors and among students are monitored, automatically
logged and archived by the system for use by the vendor."
"...all students once enrolled are required to sign forms releasing
ownership and control of their online activities to the vendors."
Forwarded message.........
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 13:11:23 -0800 (PST)
From: MichaelP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Higher ed.- a little like commercial TV
Here is a warning of high tech threats to education
David F. Noble October has authored the provocative internet article,
"DIGITAL DIPLOMA MILLS: THE AUTOMATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION"
(a copy follows this notice)
He is a professor of History at York University, co-founder of the
National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest and the author
of _AMERICA BY DESIGN_, _FORCES OF PRODUCTION_, and most recently _THE
RELIGION OF TECHNOLOGY_.
The talk is sponsored by the History Department, the History of Science
Program, the Center for Labor Studies, and The American Association of
University Professors (AAUP-UW).
Jim Gregory
Department of History
phone: 206-543-7792
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*********************************************************
Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education
Reply-To: H-NET Discussion List for American Political History
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[The following article is reprinted here by permission of the author and
the originating list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] I
am reposting here because of the article's provocative interpretation of
issues that are very pertinent to us in higher education, and because of
its discussion of the background of changes occurring in our profession.
Your comments are invited. PBK]
*********************************************************
Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education
David F. Noble October, 1997
Recent events at two large North American universities signal dramatically
that we have entered a new era in higher education, one which is rapidly
drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation. In mid-summer the
UCLA administration launched its historic "Instructional Enhancement
Initiative" requiring computer web sites for all of its arts and sciences
courses by the start of the Fall term, the first time that a major
university has made mandatory the use of computer telecommunications
technology in the delivery of higher education. In partnership with
several private corporations (including the Times Mirror Company, parent
of the Los Angeles Times), moreover, UCLA has spawned its own for-profit
company, headed by a former UCLA vice chancellor, to peddle online
education (the Home Education Network).
This past spring in Toronto, meanwhile, the full-time faculty of York
University, Canada's third largest, ended an historic two-month strike
having secured for the first time anywhere formal contractual protection
against precisely the kind of administrative action being taken by UCLA.
The unprecedented faculty job action, the longest university strike in
English Canadian history, was taken partly in response to unilateral
administrative initiatives in the implementation of instructional
technology, the most egregious example of which was an official
solicitation to private corporations inviting them to permanently place
their logo on a university online course in return for a $10,000
contribution to courseware development. As at UCLA, the York University
administration has spawned its own subsidiary (Cultech), directed by the
vice president for research and several deans and dedicated, in
collaboration with a consortium of private sector firms, to the commercial
development and exploitation of online education.
Significantly, at both UCLA and York, the presumably cyber-happy students
have given clear indication that they are not exactly enthusiastic about
the prospect of a high-tech academic future, recommending against the
Initiative at UCLA and at York lending their support to striking faculty
and launching their own independent investigation of the commercial,
pedagogical, and ethical implications of online educational technology.
This Fall the student handbook distributed annually to all students by the
York Federation of Students contained a warning about the dangers of
online education.
Thus, at the very outset of this new age of higher education, the lines
have already been drawn in the struggle which will ultimately determine
its shape. On the one side university administrators and their myriad
commercial partners, on the other those who constitute the core relation
of education: students and teachers. (The chief slogan of the York faculty
during the strike was "the classroom vs the boardroom"). It is no
accident, then, that the high-tech transformation of higher education is
being initiated and implemented from the top down, either without any
student and faculty involvement in the decision-making or despite it. At
UCLA the administration launched their Initiative during the summer when
many faculty are away and there was little possibility of faculty
oversight or governance; faculty were thus left out of the loop and kept
in the dark about the new web requirement until the last moment. And UCLA
administrators also went ahead with its Initiative, which is funded by a
new compulsory student fee, despite the formal student recommendation
against it. Similarly the initiatives of the York administration in the
deployment of computer technology in education were taken without faculty
oversight and deliberation much less student involvement.
What is driving this headlong rush to implement new technology with so
little regard for deliberation of the pedagogical and economic costs and
at the risk of student and faculty alienation and opposition? A short
answer might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures
of "progress". But there is more to it. For the universities are not
simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and
camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher
education. For here as elsewhere technology is but a vehicle and a
disarming disguise.
The major change to befall the universities over the last two decades has
been the identification of the campus as a significant site of capital
accumulation, a change in social perception which has resulted in the
systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital
and, hence, intellectual property. There have been two general phases of
this transformation. The first, which began twenty years ago and is still
underway, entailed the commoditization of the research function of the
university, transforming scientific and engineering knowledge into
commercially viable proprietary products that could be owned and bought
and sold in the market. The second, which we are now witnessing, entails
the commoditization of the educational function of the university,
transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself
into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought
and sold in the market. In the first phase the universities became the
site of production and sale of patents and exclusive licenses. In the
second, they are becoming the site of production of - as well as the chief
market for - copyrighted videos, courseware, CD-ROMs, and Web sites.
The first phase began in the mid-1970's when, in the wake of the oil
crisis and intensifying international competition, corporate and political
leaders of the major industrialized countries of the world recognized that
they were losing their monopoly over the world's heavy industries and
that, in the future, their supremacy would depend upon their monopoly over
the knowledge which had become the lifeblood of the new so-called
"knowledge-based" industries (space, electronics, computers, materials,
telecommunications, and bioengineering). This focus upon "intellectual
capital" turned their attention to the universities as its chief source,
implicating the universities as never before in the economic machinery. In
the view of capital, the universities had become too important to be left
to the universities. Within a decade there was a proliferation of
industrial partnerships and new proprietary arrangements, as
industrialists and their campus counterparts invented ways to socialize
the risks and costs of creating this knowledge while privatizing the
benefits. This unprecedented collaboration gave rise to an elaborate web
of interlocking directorates between corporate and academic boardrooms and
the foundation of joint lobbying efforts epitomized by the work of the
Business-Higher Education Forum. The chief accomplishment of the combined
effort, in addition to a relaxation of anti-trust regulations and greater
tax incentives for corporate funding of university research, was the 1980
reform of the patent law which for the first time gave the universities
automatic ownership of patents resulting from federal government grants.
Laboratory knowledge now became patents, that is Intellectual capital and
intellectual property. As patent holding companies, the universities set
about at once to codify their intellectual property policies, develop the
infrastructure for the conduct of commercially-viable research, cultivate
their corporate ties, and create the mechanisms for marketing their new
commodity, exclusive licenses to their patents. The result of this first
phase of university commoditization was a wholesale reallocation of
university resources toward its research function at the expense of its
educational function.
Class sizes swelled, teaching staffs and instructional resources were
reduced, salaries were frozen, and curricular offerings were cut to the
bone. At the same time, tuition soared to subsidize the creation and
maintenance of the commercial infrastructure (and correspondingly bloated
administration) that has never really paid off. In the end students were
paying more for their education and getting less, and the campuses were in
crisis.*
The second phase of the commercialization of academia, the commoditization
of instruction, is touted as the solution to the crisis engendered by the
first. Ignoring the true sources of the financial debacle - an expensive
and low-yielding commercial infrastructure and greatly expanded
administrative costs - the champions of computer-based instruction focus
their attention rather upon increasing the efficiencies of already
overextended teachers. And they ignore as well the fact that their
high-tech remedies are bound only to compound the problem, increasing
further, rather then reducing, the costs of higher education. (Experience
to date demonstrates clearly that computer-based teaching, with its
limitless demands upon instructor time and vastly expanded overhead
requirements - equipment, upgrades, maintenance, and technical and
administrative support staff - costs more not less than traditional
education, whatever the reductions in direct labor, hence the need for
outside funding and student technology fees). Little wonder, then, that
teachers and students are reluctant to embrace this new panacea. Their
hesitation reflects not fear but wisdom.**
But this second transformation of higher education is not the work of
teachers or students, the presumed beneficiaries of improved education,
because it is not really about education at all. That's just the name of
the market. The foremost promoters of this transformation are rather the
vendors of the network hardware, software, and "content" - Apple, IBM,
Bell, the cable companies, Microsoft, and the edutainment and publishing
companies Disney, Simon and Schuster, Prentice-Hall, et al - who view
education as a market for their wares, a market estimated by the Lehman
Brothers investment firm potentially to be worth several hundred billion
dollars. "Investment opportunity in the education industry has never been
better," one of their reports proclaimed, indicating that this will be
"the focus industry" for lucrative investment in the future, replacing the
healthcare industry. (The report also forecasts that the educational
market will eventually become dominated by EMO's - education maintenance
organizations - just like HMO's in the healthcare market). It is important
to emphasize that, for all the democratic rhetoric about extending
educational access to those unable to get to the campus, the campus
remains the real market for these products, where students outnumber their
distance learning counterparts six-to-one.
In addition to the vendors, corporate training advocates view online
education as yet another way of bringing their problem-solving,
information- processing, "just-in-time" educated employees up to profit-
making speed. Beyond their ambitious in-house training programs, which
have incorporated computer-based instructional methods pioneered by the
military, they envision the transformation of the delivery of higher
education as a means of supplying their properly-prepared personnel at
public expense .
The third major promoters of this transformation are the university
administrators, who see it as a way of giving their institutions a
fashionably forward-looking image. More importantly, they view
computer-based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and
plant maintenance costs - fewer teachers and classrooms - while at the
same time undermining the autonomy and independence of faculty. At the
same time, they are hoping to get a piece of the commercial action for
their institutions or themselves, as vendors in their own right of
software and content. University administrators are supported in this
enterprise by a number of private foundations, trade associations, and
academic-corporate consortia which are promoting the use of the new
technologies with increasing intensity. Among these are the Sloan, Mellon,
Pew, and Culpeper Foundations, the American Council on Education, and,
above all, Educom, a consortium representing the management of 600
colleges and universities and a hundred private corporations.
Last but not least, behind this effort are the ubiquitous technozealots
who simply view computers as the panacea for everything, because they like
to play with them. With the avid encouragement of their private sector and
university patrons, they forge ahead, without support for their
pedagogical claims about the alleged enhancement of education, without any
real evidence of productivity improvement, and without any effective
demand from either students or teachers.
In addition to York and UCLA, universities throughout North America are
rapidly being overtaken by this second phase of commercialization. There
are the stand-alone virtual institutions like University of Phoenix, the
wired private institutions like the New School for Social Research, the
campuses of state universities like the University of Maryland and the new
Gulf-Coast campus of the University of Florida (which boasts no tenure).
On the state level, the states of Arizona and California have initiated
their own state-wide virtual university projects, while a consortia of
western "Smart States" have launched their own ambitious effort to wire
all of their campuses into an online educational network. In Canada, a
national effort has been undertaken, spearheaded by the Telelearning
Research Network centered at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, to
bring most of the nation's higher education institutions into a "Virtual
U" network.
The overriding commercial intent and market orientation behind these
initiatives is explicit, as is illustrated by the most ambitious U.S.
effort to date, the Western Governors' Virtual University Project, whose
stated goals are to "expand the marketplace for instructional materials,
courseware, and programs utilizing advanced technology," "expand the
marketplace for demonstrated competence," and "identify and remove
barriers to the free functioning of these markets, particularly barriers
posed by statutes, policies, and administrative rules and regulations."
"In the future," Utah governor Mike Leavitt proclaimed, "an institution of
higher education will become a little like a local television station."
Startup funds for the project come from the private sector, specifically
from Educational Management Group , the educational arm of the world's
largest educational publisher Simon and Schuster and the proprietary
impulse behind their largesse is made clear by Simon and Schuster CEO
Jonathan Newcomb: "The use of interactive technology is causing a
fundamental shift away from the physical classroom toward anytime,
anywhere learning - the model for post secondary education in the twenty-
first century." This transformation is being made possible by "advances in
digital technology, coupled with the protection of copyright in
cyberspace."
Similarly, the national effort to develop the "Virtual U" customized
educational software platform in Canada is directed by an industrial
consortium which includes Kodak, IBM, Microsoft, McGraw-Hill,
Prentice-Hall, Rogers Cablesystems, Unitel, Novasys, Nortel, Bell Canada,
and MPR Teltech, a research subsidiary of GTE. The commercial thrust
behind the project is explicit here too. Predicting a potential fifty
billion dollar Canadian market, the project proposal emphasizes the
adoption of "an intellectual property policy that will encourage
researchers and industry to commercialize their innovations" and
anticipates the development of "a number of commercially marketable
hardware and software products and services," including "courseware and
other learning products." The two directors of the project, Simon Fraser
University professors, have formed their own company to peddle these
products in collaboration with the university. At the same time, the
nearby University of British Columbia has recently spun off the private
WEB-CT company to peddle its own educational website software, WEB-CT, the
software designed by one of its computer science professors and now being
used by UCLA. In recent months, WEB-CT has entered into production and
distribution relationships with Silicon Graphics and Prentice-Hall and is
fast becoming a major player in the American as well as Canadian higher
education market. As of the beginning of the Fall term, WEB CT licensees
now include, in addition to UCLA and California State University, the
Universities of Georgia, Minnesota, Illinois, North Carolina, and Indiana,
as well as such private institutions as Syracuse, Brandeis, and Duquesne.
The implications of the commoditization of university instruction are
two-fold in nature, those relating to the university as a site of the
production of the commodities and those relating to the university as a
market for them. The first raises for the faculty traditional labor issues
about the introduction of new technologies of production. The second
raises for students major questions about costs, coercion, privacy,
equity, and the quality of education.
With the commoditization of instruction, teachers as labor are drawn into
a production process designed for the efficient creation of instructional
commodities, and hence become subject to all the pressures that have
befallen production workers in other industries undergoing rapid
technological transformation from above. In this context faculty have much
more in common with the historic plight of other skilled workers than they
care to acknowledge. Like these others, their activity is being
restructured, via the technology, in order to reduce their autonomy,
independence, and control over their work and to place workplace knowledge
and control as much as possible into the hands of the administration. As
in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management
primarily to discipline, deskill, and displace labor.
Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater
direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever
before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision,
regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically. At
the same time, the use of the technology entails an inevitable extension
of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all
hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond,
via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and
administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously
accessible. The technology also allows for much more careful
administrative monitoring of faculty availability, activities, and
responsiveness.
Once faculty put their course material online, moreover, the knowledge and
course design skill embodied in that material is taken out of their
possession, transferred to the machinery and placed in the hands of the
administration. The administration is now in a position to hire less
skilled, and hence cheaper, workers to deliver the technologically
prepackaged course. It also allows the administration, which claims
ownership of this commodity, to peddle the course elsewhere without the
original designer's involvement or even knowledge, much less financial
interest. The buyers of this packaged commodity, meanwhile, other academic
institutions, are able thereby to contract out, and hence outsource, the
work of their own employees and thus reduce their reliance upon their
in-house teaching staff.
Most important, once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their
services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant,
and when they leave, their work remains behind. In Kurt Vonnegut's classic
novel Player Piano the ace machinist Rudy Hertz is flattered by the
automation engineers who tell him his genius will be immortalized. They
buy him a beer. They capture his skills on tape. Then they fire him. Today
faculty are falling for the same tired line, that their brilliance will be
broadcast online to millions. Perhaps, but without their further
participation. Some skeptical faculty insist that what they do cannot
possibly be automated, and they are right. But it will be automated
anyway, whatever the loss in educational quality. Because education,
again, is not what all this is about; it's about making money. In short,
the new technology of education, like the automation of other industries,
robs faculty of their knowledge and skills, their control over their
working lives, the product of their labor, and, ultimately, their means of
livelihood.
None of this is speculation. This Fall the UCLA faculty, at administration
request, have dutifully or grudgingly (it doesn't really matter which)
placed their course work - ranging from just syllabi and assignments to
the entire body of course lectures and notes - at the disposal of their
administration, to be used online, without asking who will own it much
less how it will eventually be used and with what consequences. At York
university, untenured faculty have been required to put their courses on
video, CD- ROM or the Internet or lose their job. They have then been
hired to teach their own now automated course at a fraction of their
former compensation. The New School in New York now routinely hires
outside contractors from around the country, mostly unemployed PhDs, to
design online courses. The designers are not hired as employees but are
simply paid a modest flat fee and are required to surrender to the
university all rights to their course. The New School then offers the
course without having to employ anyone. And this is just the beginning.
Educom, the academic-corporate consortium, has recently established their
Learning Infrastructure Initiative which includes the detailed study of
what professors do, breaking the faculty job down in classic Tayloristic
fashion into discrete tasks, and determining what parts can be automated
or outsourced. Educom believes that course design, lectures, and even
evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and consigned to outside
commercial vendors. "Today you're looking at a highly personal human-
mediated environment," Educom president Robert Heterich observed. "The
potential to remove the human mediation in some areas and replace it with
automation - smart, computer-based, network-based systems - is tremendous.
It's gotta happen."
Toward this end, university administrators are coercing or enticing
faculty into compliance, placing the greatest pressures on the most
vulnerable - untenured and part-time faculty, and entry-level and
prospective employees. They are using the academic incentive and promotion
structure to reward cooperation and discourage dissent. At the same time
they are mounting an intensifying propaganda campaign to portray faculty
as incompetent, hide-bound, recalcitrant, inefficient, ineffective, and
expensive - in short, in need of improvement or replacement through
instructional technologies. Faculty are portrayed above all as
obstructionist, as standing in the way of progress and forestalling the
panacea of virtual education allegedly demanded by students, their
parents, and the public.
The York University faculty had heard it all. Yet still they fought
vigorously and ultimately successfully to preserve quality education and
protect themselves from administrative assault. During their long strike
they countered such administration propaganda with the truth about what
was happening to higher education and eventually won the support of
students, the media, and the public. Most important, they secured a new
contract containing unique and unprecedented provisions which, if
effectively enforced, give faculty members direct and unambiguous control
over all decisions relating to the automation of instruction, including
veto power. According to the contract, all decisions regarding the use of
technology as a supplement to classroom instruction or as a means of
alternative delivery (including the use of video, CD-ROM's, Internet
websites, computer-mediated conferencing, etc.) "shall be consistent with
the pedagogic and academic judgements and principles of the faculty member
employee as to the appropriateness of the use of technology in the
circumstances." The contract also guarantees that "a faculty member will
not be required to convert a course without his or her agreement." Thus,
the York faculty will be able to ensure that the new technology, if and
when used, will contribute to a genuine enhancement rather than a
degradation of the quality of education, while at the same time preserving
their positions, their autonomy, and their academic freedom. The battle is
far from won, but it is a start.
The second set of implications stemming from the commoditization of
instruction involve the transformation of the university into a market for
the commodities being produced. Administrative propaganda routinely
alludes to an alleged student demand for the new instructional products.
At UCLA officials are betting that their high-tech agenda will be "student
driven", as students insist that faculty make fuller use of the web site
technology in their courses. To date, however, there has been no such
demand on the part of students, no serious study of it, and no evidence
for it. Indeed, the few times students have been given a voice, they have
rejected the initiatives hands down, especially when they were required to
This is part 1 of 2 parts
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