A theory of the (academic) leisure class.

“The leisure class is in great measure sheltered from the stress of those economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organised industrial community. The exigencies of the struggle for the means of life are less exacting for this class than for any other; and as a consequence of this privileged position we should expect to find it one of the least responsive of the classes of society to the demands which the situation makes for a further growth of institutions and a readjustment to an altered industrial situation.”

– Thorstein Veblen, from The Theory of the Leisure Class,1899, p. 198.

The other day, Mills Kelly titled a post with two excellent questions, “To MOOC or not to MOOC? What’s In It for Me?”. He came up with two answers: altruism and book sales. In the ensuing Twitter discussion, I noted that some superprofessors do actually get paid by their home campuses for their labor. However, I then got reminded that that sum is generally chicken feed compared to the amount of labor that goes into creating a MOOC.

Pity the poor superprofessor! Spending all those countless hours setting up their Massive Open Online Courses:

There are also significant labor costs that come with offering MOOCs. A recent Chronicle survey found that professors typically spent 100 hours, sometimes much more, to develop their massive online courses, and then eight to 10 hours each week while the courses were in session. This commitment amounted to a major drain on their normal campus responsibilities.

What the Chronicle fails to mention is that those hours come only at start-up – filming, planning, meetings, etc. The entire point of a MOOC, the root of its appeal from a management standpoint, is that once you get it the way you like it, you literally never have to change anything again. I’m not saying that the machine runs by itself, but it certainly will never take 100 hours again. The MOOC would never be profitable to anyone if it did.

The superprofessor, in other words, leads the team building the machinery, then steps back and does minimal work until the money starts flowing. This literally seems to be the lesson that two Berkeley Superprofessors report over on the edX blog:

You will always find ways to improve your material, but remember, you can always revise your lecture recordings later—this Fall we will revise our lectures for the third time. Balance your desire to perfect the material with the need to juggle all the other commitments most faculty must manage.

We’re conscientious, but you don’t have to be. More advice from these guys – “Consider delegating:”

[Y]ou may find it too time-consuming to keep up with the forums. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that most MOOCs don’t have formal office hours or other means for students to get direct help, so the forums are even more critical to the student experience.

They mention the pioneered-by-Coursera tactic of recruiting “community TAs” from the student population to do the hands-on work of teaching for you, but the deserves-to-be-infamous New Yorker article on MOOCs out this week also notes that graduate students are intimately involved in the edX MOOC-making process. Because, after all, in the future every professor will have their own MOOC for fifteen minutes.

That same New Yorker article also begins to answer Mills’ question about what’s in it for the superprofessors:

Michael D. Smith, the dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, told me that Harvard plans to start paying mooc teachers when revenue begins flowing.

Are they going to shaft the superprofessors who started MOOCs before the investment pays off? Of course not. The MOOC you create now will presumably run for the forseeable future, so the MOOC providers will have to give their creators something. The Penn MOOC article that I linked to over the weekend offers a better analogy: patent policy. A professor creates something that has a market value and then you and your employer split the proceeds. Since humanities professors don’t usually have the potential to get marketable patents, MOOCs become a way for the few well-paid professors in impoverished fields like History or English to become rentiers. MOOCs can make you part of the academic leisure class.

While I realize that my theory bears a startling resemblance to the philosophy of Tim Ferriss, I’m not saying that most superprofessors crave the four-hour work week. It’s more like rich professor, poor professor. Their MOOCs are a direct assault on the rest of our livelihoods. The president of Stanford made this abundantly clear in a piece quoted in that New Yorker article:

“As a country we are simply trying to support too many universities that are trying to be research institutions,” Stanford’s John Hennessy has argued. “Nationally we may not be able to afford as many research institutions going forward.”

If that’s not a declaration of war, I don’t know what is. Superprofessors, despite their often-stated desire to bring industrial higher education to the lesser-industrialized world, are the weapons of mass destruction in this war. They may be aiming to educate people in Africa, but the rest of us faculty will become the collateral damage of their life of comparative leisure.

MOOCs, in short, are nothing but the logical extension of corporate higher education. Karen Michalson explains the ideological background behind the MOOC offensive better than I ever could here:

Corporate culture has now taken over academic culture and destroyed it. The Chinese did something similar with Tibet. European colonists accomplished this in North America. Overwhelm an area with a population that adheres to a different culture and language than the original inhabitants and watch the original culture die, or at least become so weak and marginal you have to squint to see it.

In America, everything is an enterprise, so why should our universities escape that fate? Everything is thought of in terms of a business, and anything that resists that thought category is carved and distorted until it does – albeit freakishly – pass for one. The model is all. The only way to measure value is money. If it doesn’t make money it doesn’t have the right to exist.

But some things have no business being businesses. Just because the capitalist model of competition and free markets sometimes results in better consumer products doesn’t mean it results in better higher education.

We can argue until we’re blue in the face that a living, breathing professor is better than anybody’s taped lectures. They won’t care. The big dogs want to stay “sheltered from the stress of…economic exigencies” even if it kills the rest of us in the process.