-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sid Shniad Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 11:47 AM Subject: In Memoriam -- David Noble: teacher, author, educational activist
http://aft1493.org/component/content/article/103.html#noble In Memoriam David Noble: teacher, author, educational activist By Greg Davis, CSM, emiritus noble1 <http://aft1493.org/images/stories/articles/noble1.jpg> Dr. David Noble, Professor of History at York University (Toronto), died in December at age 65. He also had taught at MIT, Harvey Mudd College, and Drexel University; was a co-founder, with Ralph Nader, of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest (1983); and had served as curator of modern technology at the Smithsonian Institution. He wrote a number of illuminating books, including America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of American Capitalism (1977), The Religion of Technology (1997), and Digital Diploma Mills (2001). Critic of corporatization of higher education A historian of technology and a professor in North American universities, he was never-the-less a critic of both. His ideas ran contrary to the generally held beliefs that all technology was an unmitigated benefit and that whatever enhanced corporate profits would benefit America. Noble focused on several of the most important educational issues of our time, including computerized instruction in colleges and universities, the commodification of knowledge into commercially marketable products, and the infiltration and co-opting of higher education by private corporations- i.e., what he called a process of corporatization. I met David Noble in 1998, after Dan Kaplan and I attended a lecture he gave at UC Berkeley on corporatization. The Chancellor of UCB had signed without faculty participation an agreement with Novartis, a for-profit biotech firm, according to which the University, in exchange for a $25 million investment in the Department of Natural Resources, gave it control over publication of research, commercial rights to all research, and the right to appoint several of its scientists to the Department's faculty. Noble saw the agreement as a violation of a taxpayer-funded institution's role to serve the public, not a private, interest; of its commitment to open debate and full disclosure of all research results; and of the traditional role of the faculty, not the administration, to make decisions within academic disciplines. Needless-to-say, UCB's more recent $500 million agreement in 2007 with British Petroleum (of Deepwater Horizon oil spill notoriety, no less!) to create the Energy Biosciences Institute was even more controversial. It is an indication of how much further the process of corporatization has advanced at UCB since Noble's 1998 cautionary talk. In 1997, the evolving issue of computerized instruction had came to a head after the administration at UCLA, in partnership with a for-profit company, the Home Education Network, ordered all faculty to put their courses online without compensation and despite student opposition and a lack of faculty involvement in the decision. The same year, at York University (where Noble taught and organized the opposition), after a two-month, student-supported faculty strike, the administration was forced to abandon similar plans. And at California's State University system, an unprecedented partnership (California Educational Technology Initiative) between CSU and a consortium of private corporations, GTE, Hughes, Fujitsu, and Microsoft, ultimately was abandoned due to faculty and student opposition, as well as that of corporate competitors Apple, Sun, and Netscape. In 1999, SMCCD's AFT organized a statewide conference on community college faculty issues relating to computerized instruction, at which David Noble, who had already put on the Web some of the critique which eventually appeared in Digital Diploma Mills, was the featured speaker. "Digital Diploma Mills" foresaw institutions like University of Phoenix As outlined and explained in this analytical classic of the political economy of computerized instruction, Noble clearly saw it as part and parcel of the corporatization of higher education in North America. Back in 2001, when Mills was published, Noble had identified as vendors of online network hardware and software Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Bell, and edutainment publishing companies like Disney, Simon and Schuster, and Prentice-Hall. He also mentioned the explicit commercial intent of the Western Governors' Virtual University Project and the existence of Educause, an academic-corporate consortium formed to standardize, computerize, and outsource to commercial vendors course design, lectures, and evaluation. Thanks to Noble's conscious-raising writings and activities and the inherent student distaste for a depersonalized and standardized learning format, computerized instruction in higher education has largely remained, except in profit-oriented educational institutions like Phoenix University, distance learning for a limited student clientele, including the elderly, disabled, full-schedule workers unable to attend college classes, and those with business and technology careers interested in upgrading their knowledge. The push for online classes to cut costs continues Today, however, the proponents in California of expanding community college online offerings to a more general student population as a cost-cutting measure, including the Legislative Analyst's Office and UCB's Center for Studies in Higher Education, are betting that budgetary desperation and concerns over training the jobless, plus a new generation of students conditioned by an information technology- saturated adolescence, will combine to provide a favorable reception to their proposals. The corporate effort to expand the community college market for information technology has likewise intensified, with non-profit organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in the forefront. The Foundation's "Completion by Design" and "New Generation Learning Challenges" grant programs are designed to establish a firm foothold for an information technology and business management reform agenda, initially aimed at disadvantaged student populations in community colleges. David Noble's presence on the North American education landscape will be sorely missed at this crucial time. He could have helped once again to inform the debate, clarify the issues, explain the factors of political economy which underlie the surface of the debate, and lead by example the fight to protect teachers' rights as professionals and academic values. Since he is gone, however, we have no choice but to honor his legacy and continue the struggle on our own. !DSPAM:2676,4d65642e308681109415160!
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