by Christopher Hanlon
My
sister, who works in advertising, likes to rib me every once in
a while by referring to my line of work as a business. Shell
point out that just like any number of commercial enterprises, colleges and
universities charge fees for services rendered, depend upon the desirability
of their product in order to secure a steady flow of revenues,
and therefore plan and act in obeisance to economic forces not so different
from those that preoccupy corporate planners at Microsoft, GM, Tristar Pictures,
or God help us, Enron. Weve had this conversation enough for my sister
to know that the next stage of our ritual has me reply that higher education
is not actually a business, that though colleges and universities
operate within the same larger market culture as do private corporations,
they are not structured around the goal of generating financial profitand
that I do not view my students as customers. Though I know she will remain
skeptical, I try to convince her that the sort of profit public
higher education generates is at once less tangible and more important than
money. I make certain statements about the ideal of public higher education
in American democracy, pointing out that though Thomas Jefferson wanted his
gravestone to memorialize his founding of the University of Virginia, he didnt
seem to care whether it should note his presidency. I speak in Emersonian
intonations about the American scholar as one of the ideals of American citizenshipnot
what Emerson calls the mere bookworm, but rather Man [or,
one would hope, Woman] Thinking, the whole being or mind
at work to whom Emerson pinned his antebellum hopes for the future of
American public life. Rounding off my polemic, I remind my dear but somewhat
jaded sibling that colleges and universities are committed to a notion of
value that soars beyond the kind of value Adam Smith posited as
the engine of American capitalism, pursuing not only knowledge that leverages
the forces of the market, but also knowledge for the sake of knowledge. At
this point, we usually call our debate a draw so as to move on to some less
contentious topic.
But its getting a lot harder for me to speak in such tones, because
the ideals I call upon in this well-rehearsed exchangea rough approximation
of the same ideals that once convinced me and most of my colleagues to become
university professors in the first placeare becoming increasingly irrelevant
to the decisions that many universities and colleges across America are making
about what higher education ought to look and feel like during the next century.
Public campuses are among the last spaces in American society that have yet
to become commandeered by the aims of private enterprise; they are among the
last symbols of our cultures grudging accommodation of the idea that
some resources should remain out of the for-profit domain. But those who are
as committed to this arrangement as I am should know that its perpetuity is
far from guaranteed. As David Nobles has aptly put it, 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.[1]
A shift in the attitudes that guide higher education is under way, and for
those of us who live and work in the public sector of the field, this shift
has potentially dire ramifications.
T
The largest of these educational collaboratives is called Educause, on which
I focus here not only because its stated philosophies seem to me the most
inimical to those that have guided public higher education in this countrys
past, but more simply because so many of the administrators at my university
are now registered members of this organization. If you teach at a public
college or university in the state of Illinois, chances are you teach at an
Educause institution, since eleven out of the twelve public university campuses
in Illinois, as well as 20 out of the 48 publicly-run community college campuses
in the state, have already enrolled as member organizations of Educause. Indeed,
over 1,800 colleges and universities, across six continents, are members of
Educause, and alongside these colleges and universities are hundreds of corporate
members whose dues provide the ballast of Educauses operating budget
(which this year alone stands at $10.7 million). A glance at Educauses
corporate membership is instructive to anyone who wants to know whose interests
the organization is designed to serve: the 196 corporate sponsors of Educause
include Adobe Systems, Apple Computers, Cisco Systems, Cognos, Dell, eCollege.com,
Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lotus Development, Microsoft, Nortell, Novell,
Palm, Questia, Sigma, SMART Technologies, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, Verizon,
WebCT, and Xerox, to name just a few of the best-known information technologies
and communications companies Educause lists as its corporate members.
Under the sponsorship of these corporations, Educause operates as a thinktank
that promulgates its vision for the future of higher education through roundtables,
conferences, and an array of position papers. The most widely-familiar of
these is a piece entitled The Virtual University, which urges
colleges and universities to undertake what the papers authors accurately
describe as a redefinition of quality in higher education. While
traditional ways of measuring quality in higher ed. may have worked well for
the analog age (such traditional measures include the size of libraries,
student-faculty ratios, the number and the size of the grants and contracts
won by the faculty) such barometers of quality are now irrelevant, we
are told. According to the authors of The Virtual University,
this is because students have gotten smarter. More specifically, Higher
educations consumers [those are the people we once called students]
are becoming much more sophisticated than their counterparts from years
ago. The sophistication of todays student-consumers is evident in the
fact that they know what they want in exchange for their tuition: an education
as hassle-free as downloading a song from Napster or sending off for a DVD
from Amazon.com. In short, since Consumers will exert their inexorable
influence on higher education, the authors of The Virtual University
have tough news to break: The era of a campus-centric model is ending.
[2]
The primary support Educause spokespeople tend to append to such predictions
is their contention that classroom-based teaching makes bad fiscal sense for
the information age. Instead of servicing a mere score or two of student-consumers,
as is usually the limit for courses scheduled to meet in physical spaces,
virtual courses can deliver the same course content to hundreds of these paying
customers. But it is not only the limitations of geography and expense of
university space that cause Educause and its corporate sponsors to scoff at
the traditionally-run college coursethey are also appalled at the figure
of the tenured professor, whose very existence runs counter to their most
basic assumptions about what is desirable in a workforce. What corporate planners
of every industry value most in a workforce is flexibilitythat
is, the ability to hire and fire quickly in response to the ups and downs
of a volatile economy. Clearly, the institution of tenure does not make for
a flexible workforce. Moreover, tenured faculty (1)
cost more than the sort of faculty required to administer a uniform
syllabus made up of uniform readings tested by uniform quizzes calling for
uniform answers, and (2) they usually tend to resist that sort of educational
model in the first place. And so for the corporate trustees-in-waiting of
Virtual U., the answer to the problem is obvious: persuade administrators
to stop hiring tenured faculty so that they may redirect revenues toward investing
in information technology and hiring cheaper, non-tenured faculty to operate
it. As William Massy and Robert Zemsky point out in one Educause position
paper, technology provides more flexibility than traditional teaching
methods, since The career
of a workstation may well be less than five years, whereas that of a professor
often exceeds 30 years. Workstations don't get tenure, and delegations are
less likely to wait on the provost when particular equipment items
are laid off. By using
budgets to purchase more computers rather than to hire more people (what Massy
and Zemsky call shifting away from the handicraft methods that
have dominated higher ed. until now), universities and academic departments
will gain a larger zone of flexibility as
the capital-labor ratio grows. [3]
Does
all of this mean that if granted their wishes, Educause and its corporate
sponsors would send seminar rooms and professors the way of the Edsel? Not
completely, Educause president Robert Heterick assures us. In order to assuage
the sense of unease many may still feel about the wholesale transfer of American
higher education to the private sector, Heterick points to a comforting example:
namely, the success of the Wal-Mart department store chain. Attendant to the
rise of mega-chains such as Wal-Mart, we have seen the rise of specialty
stores for consumers seeking something more than the fixed inventory of the
mega-chain store, the emergence of a niche market for consumers who
are willing to pay more for products that are more unique, less mass-produced,
or of higher quality than those the local Wal-Mart offers. In a similar way,
Heterick assures us, the Wal-Martification of public higher education will
undoubtedly produce a subset of students who seek something more,
a niche market of students who still crave close contact with real professors
on physical campusescustomers who are willing to pay
a premium for what will become the educational equivalent of organic
produce or Sumatra coffee.[4] And so emerges the blueprint of higher education
in the United States as these social engineers chart it: there will of course
always be a small number of ivory towers left in which the affluent few may
indulge an archaic taste for seminar rooms and lecture halls, for one-on-one
conferencing and for carefully written and read term papers. These institutions
will be for the same sort of people who prefer to shop on Rodeo
Drive or Madison Avenue. The rest of us will be left in the able hands of
the same market that has brought us Wal-Mart.
As
of this writing, Easterns administration has indicated some hesitancy
to endorse such language. Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Blair Lord has suggested that the Task Forces findings are too sweeping,
including patentable inventions and thus depriving the university of its traditional
right to benefit from the work it sponsors through its funding of research
and equipment. The policy that DLIPR came up with, Lord states
in a recent UPI interview, applies to everythingpatentable materials
as well as coursewareand the conversations are going to have to be re-engaged
around that. Since the current language of the draft, Lord suggests,
applies not just to web materials but to grass seed and Gatorade,
there is a fair chance that the University administration at Eastern will
find it unacceptable as stands.[8]
1) David Nobles, "Digital
Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education" (First Monday.
October 1997) <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_1/noble/index.html>
2) Carol A. Twigg and Diana G. Oblinger, The Virtual
University: A Report From a Joint Educom/IBM Roundtable, Washington, D.C.
(EDUCAUSE, November 1996) <http://www.educause.edu/nlii/VU.html>
3)
William F. Massy and Robert Zemsky, Using Information
Technology to Enhance Academic Productivity (EDUCAUSE, June
1995) <http://www.educause.edu/nlii/keydocs/massy.html>
4)
Robert Heterick, Time is Natures Way of
making Sure Everything Doesnt Happen at Once, The Center for
Academic Transformation (The Learning Marketplace, March 2000) <http://www.center.rpi.edu/LForum/LM/Mar00.html>
5)
See Eastern Illinois Universitys Board Of Trustees
Regulations, Article 16, Section 3, Subsection 3. <
http://www.eiu.edu/~auditing/botregs/regulat02.htm#A.16>
6) Carol Twigg, Who Owns Online Courses and Course
Materials? Intellectual Property Policies For A New Learning Environment
(The Pew Learning and Technology Program: 2000) 22. May be downloaded in
PDF at < http://www.center.rpi.edu/PewSym/mono2.html>
7) DLIPR Taskforce Draft Language on Intellectual Property, 4-June-01 Section 3, paragraph a. <http://www.eiu.edu/~EiuUpi/DLIP/dliprdraft2.html>
8) See A Conversation with Blair Lord Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. (UPI News, Jan. 7, 2002) <http://www.eiu.edu/~EiuUpi/Newsletters/lordinterview.html>
9) Twigg, Who Owns Online Courses and Course Materials?
Intellectual Property Policies For A New Learning Environment. p.
24.