the online imperative

Music: Alejandro Escovedo: Big Station (2012)

As the result of a smart use of the FOIA request, journalists at the University of Virginia's student newspaper secured a series of email exchanges between the Rector and Vice Rector of the university's Board of Visitors. As I blogged recently ("the for-profit hustle"), these two and a number of others orchestrated the firing of a widely respected university president, Terry Sullivan, on the basis of "philosophical differences." These emails reveal the primary difference between the seasoned educator and administrator and the wealthy businesspeople of the board was "online teaching," what used to be called "distance learning." The first relevant email between Dragas and Kington is a message sent about an opinion piece, most likely David Brooks' defense of online teaching titled "The Campus Tsunami." While acknowledging the emotional complexity of "learning," Brooks nevertheless expresses faith in online education---destructive storm and all.

There are other reasons for Sullivan's dismissal of course, as the respective statements released by the ousted president and sitting rector make plain: Dragas wants dramatic and swift change to UVa, something mystical called "strategic dynamism," while Sullivan argued for a more prudent, "incremental" approach. Still, the larger point I have made about this controversy is the same: the university is corporatizing, the politicized boards that govern public universities are business people, and business are trained to think as business people and will govern accordingly. The present climate of "accountability" (which is another way of saying outcome-based assessment on a commodity model) and the demand for cheaper degrees is a market-driven imperative. And as Brooks' defense of online teaching begins, the mold is, alas, the University of Phoenix.

(Need to know why the University of Phoenix is bad? Watch this Frotline documentary, "College, Inc.")

This imperative to online teaching as a way to reduce the cost of education (which is perhaps better read as "increase enrollment") entails plenty of consequences, and most of them are not pleasant. In a thoughtful if not altogether depressing essay by William G. Tierney, "The Price of College Affordability," the professor outlines a number of predicted consequences for heeding this imperative:

• Poor students will disappear from campuses; only the rich will be able to afford residential college.
• Four-year degrees will disappear in favor of shorter and more cheaply "earned" degrees.
• The professoriate will be eclipsed by production values and part-timers and adjuncts.
• The university will shift to the community college model, significantly curtailing research.
• Public intellectualism and expertise will cease, as academic freedom is curtailed in favor of a rhetoric of PR.

My friend Catherine Liu embellishes Tierney's essay this way: "A sobering view of the rationalization of higher ed. I wrote about this in American Idyll. We are going to have liberal arts for the rich, a tiny but powerful minority and job training for the poor. And then politicians are going to crow that American students can't speak foreign languages or think critically." Of course, it was reported that one of the things the Board of Visitors wanted Sullivan to "cut" was the teaching of foreign languages.

So with the corporatization (or as Catherine nicely puts it, "rationalization") of the university comes the irony of educational ironies: the basis upon which such radical changes are called for is the land-grant mission, to educate the "industrial classes" affordably. And yet, the only experience the working classes will be able to afford amounts to professionalization with online classes---a cheaply delivered commodity, not an "experience" (certainly not what I would call "learning"). Only the incredibly wealthy will have access to the life of the mind. The working-class structure of the land grant, public university becomes, in the end, the province of elites "on the ground." If you're working class, you can only afford the "brand" online.

To these rather sour predictions I'll add one more: the network model. In the early days of radio, pioneering companies like AT&T realized it was a helluva lot cheaper to standardize programming and deliver it to stations they owned around the country. Local, community-based programming was expensive. The network was born so that programming to be done once, and then replicated. On this infrastructure television was born, and then later, of course, cable. I predict the online imperative will graft the textbook industry on an analogous course model, such that basic courses are standardized and beamed across the InterTubes to various public universities. College freshpersons at "participating" institutions will now be able to take "Introduction to Argumentation" with, say, Richard Cherwitz at the University of Texas in California and Missouri.