“Teamsters in tweed?” I wish.

Beating up on Clay Shirky is something of a sport amongst the people I follow on Twitter, and that sport was particularly popular last week when this article came out.  The line that got the most derision had nothing to do with MP3s or Napster or even MOOCs.  Instead it was this:

“But when someone threatens to lower the price [of education] then we start behaving like Teamsters in tweed.”

Now that sentence is freighted with an enormous number of assumptions (all of which are insulting to Teamsters), but Shirky’s real purpose here is to shame his fellow faculty members.  He seems to think that the proper response to MOOC-ification is for all of us to sit back and let “progress” run its course.  That’s easy for an Internet expert with a job at NYU to imply, but what’s a community college professor who’s about to become a glorified teaching assistant supposed to do when MOOCs threaten his or her ability to pay their bills?

I say they should behave more like Teamsters.

Perhaps Shirky picked the phrase “Teamsters in tweed” for alliterative purposes, but I think he deliberately wanted to invoke the violent reputation of that union as a means of creating enough guilt to stop faculty everywhere from sticking up for themselves.  Or maybe he’s arguing that resistance is simply futile.  Even if it is, that resistance is absolutely crucial if displaced faculty ever want to get anything in exchange for their displacement.  The only intelligent thing to do when someone wants to make your job obsolete is to organize.

Does this kind of talk make me sound like a Teamster?  Good.  If there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifteen-odd years of being a professor it’s that most administrators think that the class divide ends at the edge of campus.  It doesn’t.  [Go talk to an adjunct sometime if you don't believe me.]  Yet the powers that be generally want to act as if every professor is part of a big, happy family even when they’re not.

Running a university during the age of permanent austerity means convincing faculty to put in the greatest amount of effort at the lowest possible cost.  Yelling “Think of the children!” every time people in power want to cut somebody’s salary (using technology to do so or not) is simply a business strategy.  What just kills me is how well this con works on most of my colleagues across academia.

As I’ve written over and over at this blog, the wonderful thing about the online education/MOOC debate is that by sticking up for ourselves we professors ARE thinking of the children since a lousy higher education for almost everyone is of no use to anyone, especially the students who pay for it.  That doesn’t mean my job is special.  It simply means that the quality of the service I provide is just as important as the price when determining its longterm value.

While this rant may seem a tad radical to some readers, all I’m really saying here is that labor and management need to sit down together and work out issues of mutual interest from a position of mutual respect and relative equality.  The Teamsters call this process “collective bargaining.”  In academia, unless we’re lucky enough to work in a union shop, we call it “shared governance.”

Shared governance?  Hasn’t the Internet made that obsolete?  Well, it will if we aren’t willing to fight for it.

“Show me the money!”

Apart from the complete works of Monty Python and Annie Hall, “Jerry Maguire” may be my favorite movie of all time. It’s a sports story; it’s a love story; but it’s also a story of employment. To me, the scene where Jerry leaves his agency for the last time might just be the most amazing scene in the history of Hollywood. You don’t know whether to laugh, cry or cheer. If I remember right, the above scene comes from just before he exits. The catchphrase with which I titled this post has worn thin by now, but if you do click play you’ll see that Jerry screams it out of desperation to keep Rod Tidwell as a client because he needs some money himself.

Are major universities that desperate for money too? Aaron Barlow, comparing the coming obsolescence of journalists to the potential obsolescence of professors, doesn’t think it matters:

Beyond that, education has one thing journalism does not have:…Certification. The success of American journalism is based on lack of a certification process. This allowed the profession to grow on its own as the country grew, and to develop its own methodologies without interference. The ‘self learning’ movements grew (and shrank, and grew again) in much the same way. But, along the way, people started realizing something else was also needed. It wasn’t enough just to study, one had to prove one had learned something. All sorts of processes for certification grew—the bar exam for lawyers, college degrees, licensing exams, apprenticeships. Only journalism could not impose its own–or even allow one to be imposed on it.

I sure hope he’s right. However, what if the academic certification process gets so corrupted by the need to show someone (venture capitalists, taxpayers, Rod Tidwell, etc.) the money that universities become willing to give just about anyone credit for just about anything? After all, plenty of for-profit universities claim to be certified and that hasn’t stopped them from offering a terrible education at an outrageous cost.

Now read this and tell me it’s not a bad omen:

The new generation of online courses features interactive technology, open admissions, high-caliber curriculum and the ability to teach tens of thousands of students at once. The universities say the online courses are as rigorous as their campus counterparts.

Some schools, including the University of Washington and University of Helsinki, say they will offer college credit for Coursera courses.

[emphasis added]

Rigorous? Really? The Coursera history course from Princeton that I’m about to take has no required reading. I suspect that’s because reading is unpopular, and since the customer is always right then the reading had to go.

Perhaps the best thing about Jerry Maguire is to see him grow a conscience as he gets increasingly humiliated so that he eventually does the right thing by everybody. Do universities have consciences? [I won't even bother to ask if venture capitalists do.] Faculty need to play the Renée Zellweger role in this movie and shame Jerry into doing the right thing.

Our students can be the little kid who keeps asking, “Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?”

Are college professors working class?

Audrey Watters is my new hero. Considering the general subject of this blog of late, she should probably be my old hero. Nonetheless, considering her position as an ed tech journalist it took some guts to come out and write this about the controversy over those Mystery Science Theatre 3000-style Khan Academy parodies circulating out there on the Internet:

[T]his isn’t just a matter of highlighting pedagogical problems in the Khan Academy videos or with their usage in the classroom. This is about power: “arrogance” connotes superiority and power; “disparagement” seeks to displace or depreciate power. Who has the authority to speak about or dismiss pedagogy? Who gets to speak about math and science? These aren’t simply matters of education or expertise but rather of political power as it’s wielded within our current education reform narrative. And that is a narrative that’s painted Khan as a revolutionary hero, while painting teachers as reactionary villains.

[Emphasis in original]

What do most of the edtech startups of the world, the people who fund them and the university administrations that contract their services want to do with that power? Push teachers of all kinds off the shop floor so that they have to accept any terms of employment that they are offered if they want to teach again in the new tech-centered world of education that they are all trying to create. It reminds me of what happened to iron workers in America during the 1870s when the Bessemer steel process finally took off.

But college professors, you say, aren’t exactly blue collar. They don’t have to accept the same crap that “ordinary” workers do, as described brilliantly (with tons of links in the original post at Crooked Timber) by Chris Bertram, Corey Robin and Alex Gourevitch:

On pain of being fired, workers in most parts of the United States can be commanded to pee or forbidden to pee. They can be watched on camera by their boss while they pee. They can be forbidden to wear what they want, say what they want (and at what decibel), and associate with whom they want. They can be punished for doing or not doing any of these things—punished legally or illegally (as many as 1 in 17 workers who try to join a union is illegally fired or suspended). But what’s remarkable is just how many of these punishments are legal, and even when they’re illegal, how toothless the law can be. Outside the usual protections (against race and gender discrimination, for example), employees can be fired for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. They can be fired for donating a kidney to their boss (fired by the same boss, that is), refusing to have their person and effects searched, calling the boss a “cheapskate” in a personal letter, and more. They have few rights on the job—certainly none of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendment liberties that constitute the bare minimum of a free society; thus, no free speech or assembly, no due process, no right to a fair hearing before a panel of their peers—and what rights they do have employers will fight tooth and nail to make sure aren’t made known to them or will simply require them to waive as a condition of employment. Outside the prison or the military—which actually provide, at least on paper, some guarantee of due process—it’s difficult to conceive of a less free institution for adults than the average workplace.

Do you really think higher education is any different? Do I have to remind you that three quarters of college professors in the United States are part-time or under limited term contracts? For them, often in need of reappointment semester after semester, the situation might actually be worse in some ways. Adjuncts have little choice but to endure a constant assault on their rights and prerogatives if they want to keep their job, just like other working class people do. The restructuring of power relationships in employment and in the classroom brought on by online education is just one aspect of this ongoing struggle.

What separates tenured and tenure-track professors from other working people is, of course, tenure itself. Even though anyone with tenure will be the first one to tell you that the idea that they can’t be fired is a joke, tenure is a lot more job protection than most workers get. That’s precisely why tenure has been under attack for years.

But the war on professors has a lot more fronts than just the battle over tenure. Like the math teachers who are told to show Khan Academy videos rather than actually teach math themselves, the very existence of teachers of any kind is being called into question by people who claim to serve the cause of education. As my intended audience for this blog is other college professors, I tend to stress the importance of self preservation in light of these kinds of attacks. However, teachers, students and the public at large that depends on both those groups should be concerned about the ways in which the very definition of learning itself is being changed.

If I watch videos about engineering, am I qualified to build a bridge in your town? If I watch videos about brain surgery am I qualified to probe around inside your skull? If I watch the History Channel a lot, does that make me an historian?

Like so many other occupations, college professors at all ranks are being de-professionalized because the forces of austerity have targeted labor costs of all kinds, whether the workers drawing the salary they want to cut provide essential value or not. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that learning from a real live teacher is worth the expense (and I’d say that even if I weren’t a teacher myself). If our now constant struggle against those forces of austerity doesn’t make people like me working class, then I don’t know what would.

There’s a class war going on out there, my dear colleagues, and you’re all in the thick of it. Whether academics are willing to recognize that fact, however, is another matter entirely. For the sake of education everywhere, I sincerely hope they are.

“I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain.”

I’m sure you’re wondering what it’s like teaching in Korea. It’s great! Thanks for asking.

I’ve structured my first Western Civilization course ever entirely around Milestone Documents. I have a big list of documents over on their course page and we go through each document in class in order. I say a few words at the beginning. I help them with the really tough English words. Then we talk about each document.

Everyone seems to like it because most Korean professors, they tell me, talk at their students rather than with them. Come to think of it, most American professors tend to do the same thing. Here’s a special post at Mother Jones from a professor who knows Kevin Drum:

Ivy League students sometimes complain that most of the discussion-leading and careful paper-grading — they call it “real teaching” and they’re right to do so — is done by grad student teaching assistants, since seminars with professors are scarce. But at the University of California these days — and I’m told it’s been like this at Michigan for decades — graduate and undergraduate funding cuts mean that most upper-level courses have no discussion sections and no teaching assistants. In other words, the real teaching doesn’t take place at all. Papers, if they’re assigned at all — and increasingly they’re not — are graded by “readers” paid so poorly that they can only spend a few minutes on each paper, are not available for writing assistance, and can’t even be required, given their meager pay for long hours, to attend the lectures in the classes they’re grading for. There’s no way readers can grade papers carefully in such circumstances: they put check marks in the margin when something of substance is mentioned, and pass pretty much everyone through. As for professor-led seminars, never that plentiful, they’ve all but vanished: they simply cost too much.

This is not a good thing for anyone involved. When one of my Korean students asked me whether most American professors teach the same way I do, I said I doubt it. However, I also said I couldn’t imagine teaching any other way.

I don’t want to stand in front of 400 people who have to listen to me talk. Likewise I don’t want to be a mere tender of machines. A discussion or even a lecture during which a discussion might still break out guarantees that nothing about my job will ever be boring or routine except paperwork and meetings.

Mark Bauerlein argues that adjuncts put up with poor pay and all the other crap that goes with their status at the bottom of the academic hierarchy because they expect to move up the ladder someday. I don’t presume to be an expert on the adjunct mindset, but I’d guess most people in that position do it more out of love than any dream of future improvement in status.* Real teaching at any level really is interesting and rewarding (at least in the emotional sense). All of us accept varying degrees of crap thrown our direction because we like what we do and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Real teaching creates bonds that can last a lifetime (whether we recognize it or not).

Well, I’ve got news for everybody. Our glorious online future is going to break the chain between us and our students that makes modern academic life bearable for all of us.

So what are we going to do about that?

* Of course, the fact that you love what you do is no excuse for your employer to exploit you, but that’s a subject for a different post.

“Are you experienced?”

I’m delighted that while I’m not back to doing this blog thing quite yet, the ever-popular Britney Titus has sent another excellent post. Like any pushy editor, the title of the post is mine (as she is far too young to come up with the Jimi Hendrix reference).

For my student teaching, I was placed at a junior high where they assisted with online classes. During that process, I learned, once again, what it means to be a student.

One of the first things that caught my attention was the number of students who were in fact taking a portion or all of their classes online. As many of schools are now focused on standardized multiple-choice testing as formative assessments, I became even more surprised when I learned that nine times out of ten, the online students outperformed students that were in the classroom. However, before all of the online education charlatans out there rejoice, the face-to-face students completely outshined them when they were in the classroom itself. I think that’s because the missing piece of the puzzle for online students is socialization.

I began to think what exactly these online classes are preparing them for and I unfortunately could not think of anything. They will not need intense fill-in-the-bubble skills once they graduate. Furthermore, how will they survive a seminar-style classroom if they are not receiving the necessary socialization skills? They can know all of the content in the world and be able to take a multiple-choice test every single day, but if they do not understand how to use that information to reach a higher level of critical understanding then these students will not survive in a higher education environment. I may be coming off as an intense critic, but I just fail to see how an online environment transforms a child into a complete and well-rounded student.

Something else that the online students are missing inside the classroom is the idea of teaching life lessons through history. One of the lessons that I taught involved reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to understand the conditions of slavery. Interestingly enough, many of my students came back with their response papers that specifically said, “If I have to read this again I will not come back to class.” After my fit of frustration, I looked at this as a teaching opportunity and simply asked the class the next day how they were ever going to understand the good if they fail to understand the bad? How could they ever fathom what the Emancipation Proclamation or Civil War meant for this country if they did not understand the ruthlessness and barbarity of slavery?

Even more so, there are things in life that they have to learn about or go through in order to remain humble and respectful. I explained to the class that if they do not go through bad things, then they would never be able to appreciate the good. We had about an hour-long discussion about this topic and related it to the rise of abolitionists and the reform movement prior to the Civil War. After the class finished, I just found myself thinking how do online students ever get this kind of instruction? Sure, you may be able to Skype or instant message, but does that really provide the type of atmosphere where students feed off one another and debate topics back and forth?

I was lucky enough (or so I thought) to be placed in a school with two Social Studies teachers retiring at the end of the school year. I interviewed and after about two weeks I got a phone call saying I did not get the job. Surprisingly, I was not bitter, but more critical of the bigger ideas in play. I have a crisp resume full of honors and community service, an impressive transcript especially in the Social Studies fields, and I had multiple student work examples that showed my various skills as a teacher, such as having the eighth-grade students reading and understanding college-level texts as well as writing complete six-paragraph essays in a forty minute timed period. I always said I am not perfect, but I thought I embodied a well-rounded teacher who would in fact teach the students to think at a higher level.

So why didn’t I get the job? I came to find out that at least one of the teachers who secured the job had more years of experience than I did as she had been an elementary school teacher in the years before. This makes me question what is more valuable: rigorous forms of education and study or an extended amount of experience? In my case, the latter came to be true, which brings me to my overall point. Why are we drilling over and over again the necessity of going to college if experience is going to be more valuable at the end of the day? I once got into an argument with some of the fellow teachers in the graduate program about students feeling entitled in this day and age to a job when they get out of school. They believed that nobody should feel entitled and should have to work at it like everyone else. Yet, I fail to see what motivation exists for working hard if it is not going to pay off in the end?

The hardest thing about student teaching was the student who just did not care. If he/she got an F, they got an F and it did not matter. I was so frustrated with these types of students, but can I blame them? If they just get pushed into high school even if they fail, why try? I feel like this is a problem that certainly needs to be addressed in the educational system given that thousands of students procure debt every year (including myself) to go to universities or graduate schools and that it starts so early now. I do not think students should be pushed to go to college or graduate school if it is not going to do what it is supposed and set them up for a career.

I am 22, graduated with two undergraduate degrees in history and Spanish (in three years) and am halfway through a Master’s Program, yet I fail to secure a job at a junior high school? What does this say about the value of education and the future of students altogether? I think I finally figured out why my master’s thesis is taking so long to even get off the ground and it is because a small part of me is very scared that in the long run all my work and dedication is not going to matter any more than it does now. That, for a dedicated master’s student who wants nothing more than to write well, is one scary thought.

I probably am being a little skeptical as this is my first job hunt experience, but I also see this happening to my friends outside of the educational field. One of my best friends just graduated from nursing school, yet received the same response when interviewing for a job: you need more experience. The fact that this is happening to graduates from multiple fields of study is what worries me the most and makes me think this is bigger than just myself in the educational field – that this is happening to students in fields of all kinds.

Thus, even though this post probably comes off as a critical temper tantrum, life experiences are not biased. Unfortunately, mine forecast a grim and dark future for education as a whole.

Why professors are like low-wage workers (even if their wages aren’t particularly low).

When I was in Santa Barbara at that op-ed workshop last month, my contribution about adjunct faculty began by comparing them to workers at Apple’s Foxconn plant in China. Both groups produce a beloved product. Both are treated badly. Understand these conditions, and moral observers should be outraged. Yes, I know that adjuncting isn’t really life-threatening (at least in the short-term) like at Foxconn, but I still thought this analogy was a pretty good hook for the essay.

Harold Meyerson disagreed. Well, disagreed might be a little strong, but he thought this comparison was too provocative for a newspaper essay in which I wanted to bring people over to my side. Even though the rest of the room split about 50-50, I changed the analogy anyway. That does not, however, mean that I won’t make it again in the (mostly) friendly confines of this blog.

This is from a columnist in the new issue of Fortune magazine*:

The infotech revolution is great for high-wage workers because it turbocharges them; an executive with three screens on her desk and an iPhone in her pocket is enormously more productive. Infotech doesn’t much hurt low-wage workers, many of whom do place-based work (cooking in restaurants, pouring concrete) that can’t be done elsewhere. But infotech makes middle class jobs disappear; software takes over routine back-office tasks, and infotech coordinates supply chains, so manufacturing jobs can be done by lower-paid workers abroad.

Could my job be done by a low-wage worker abroad? I’m an American historian, so I doubt that the pool of people like me in China or India is all that big. Perhaps if I were a math professor I’d be slightly more worried. [Of course, I'd also be paid better.]

Irrespective of discipline, however, I would argue that good teaching is place-based by definition. Teach over the Internet from across the country or across the world and you lose something. At the very least, you lose the distinctly personal relationship that good teachers have with their students. I communicate electronically with people I wouldn’t know otherwise if not for Twitter or this blog, but as much I like so many of you out there we don’t really know one another. The teacher/student relationship, on the other hand, should be a much more personal relationship. How else are you going to understand precisely what expectations you have for one another?

As Sherry Turkle repeatedly suggests, the Internet is so seductive because it allows you to separate yourself from real people who carry the baggage of real world problems. If you don’t like how things are going with your Internet-based relationship, you can always turn off the computer or just de-friend the offender. Your relationship with your favorite teachers, on the other hand, should be one of the more important ones you’ll ever have because it helps determine how you think about the world. Forging that relationship while learning online is like trying to make friends during a rock concert. It’s not impossible, but is much harder to do than in normal circumstances with all that loud noise in the background.

Factories are also full of background noise. One of the first rules of any good factory is that the workers shouldn’t talk to one another on the job as it saps productivity. Perhaps that also applies to workers talking to the product, for as Mario Savio once said, the students are the raw materials in the factory that is modern higher education and the faculty are a bunch of employees. While the labor force to which I belong might be treated marginally better than the workers at Foxconn in China, we’re all in the same dire need of help from our consumers if conditions at our respective factories are ever going to get better.

* No link, because it’s not up yet. And yes, I do actually subscribe. I got it with unused frequent flier miles. Even if I don’t agree with most of what’s in there, the magazine is still serious and informative (just like CNBC used to be until the Jim Kramer mentality took over the whole channel).

You’re going to miss grading when it’s gone.

You think it’s hard to find an academic job now? Just wait until machines start grading student essays and students start grading each other. Combine these developments with our glorious all-online higher ed future and they won’t need you anymore at all.

I can hear you now: “Surely you jest, Jonathan. You’ve been reading stuff in the Onion and forgetting it’s satire, right?” Alas, not this time. Here’s part of the executive summary of a Pearson white paper (.pdf) on their automatic essay grading technology:

In the 1990s, the people of Pearson’s Knowledge Technologies group (KT) invented many of the key techniques that enable automatic scoring of constructed language in assessment tasks. In the succeeding 15 years, Pearson has assembled these researchers into an advanced development group with an intellectual property base that is unparalleled in the assessment field. Now, working as a unique stand-alone group inside Pearson, KT has automatically scored many millions of written and spoken responses. KT has measured core language and literacy skills as evidenced in students’ constructed responses. Similar tasks also elicit responses that are assessed for content knowledge. In 2010 KT scored over 20 million spoken and written responses from all over the globe.

You don’t do this sort of thing because it offers a better critique of written work than a living, breathing person does. You do it because it’s cheaper. Much cheaper. More importantly, the labor cost savings can go to football, climbing walls in the gym or just higher administrative salaries. And Pearson doesn’t make out too badly either.

If all of this reminds you of late-nineteenth century industrialization, then you’re not alone. Unfortunately, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of technology in education seem to think that the economic displacement of the industrial era is worth duplicating. This guest post from ProfHacker recounts a recent highered navel-gazing conference at Rice:

Cathy Davidson and John Seely Brown (JSB) articulated learning frameworks for the fluid, dynamic Digital Age rather than the Industrial Age. Davidson explained that many of the practices we associate with education, including multiple choice tests and attention to task, were designed to serve the needs of the Industrial Age for standardization and a regulated labor force. In contrast, the Digital Age calls for mash-ups, customization, multi-tasking, data mining, and collaboration by difference. Davidson suggested that we should ensure that kids know how to code (and thus understand how technical systems work), enable students to take control of their own learning (such as by helping to design the syllabus and to lead the class), and devise more nuanced, flexible, peer-driven assessments.

[Emphasis added]

So let me get this straight: We should turnover the reins in our own classes to machines and social algorithms because the workplace is full of machines and social algorithms? Vocational education for everyone! Better yet, let students create their own vocational education!!! Maybe they can design their own jobs too. I just hope they don’t want to become professors.

As I explained the last time I mentioned Cathy Davidson, I find her total obliviousness to the collateral damage these kinds of changes will cause extremely disturbing. However, I find the fact that so many faculty members are willing to actively participate in the destruction of their own profession even more disturbing.

If I remember my old labor history right, in his A Theory of the Labor Movement the economist Selig Perlman described American workers as job conscious as opposed to class conscious. That means that they were more concerned with putting bread and butter on the table than they were with banding together to overthrow the capitalist system. To Perlman, that was a good thing. If only academics thought that way! Too many professors writing about the future of higher ed don’t seem to care about their own long-term material well-being, which makes me think again about how much we faculty could all learn from the folks who work at Walmart.

I guarantee you that most administrators would never make this same mistake. Their own long-term material well-being is probably why they became administrators in the first place.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T.*

Before I forget, I want to blog about what I was doing last weekend. I went to an op-ed writing workshop at the University of California – Santa Barbara organized by the historian Nelson Lichtenstein and sponsored by the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Our teacher was Harold Meyerson of the American Prospect and the Washington Post.

The format was that everybody writes a 750 word op-ed, then Meyerson and the whole group suggest ways to improve it. Let’s just say that while everyone was treated with respect, it was still a justifiably humbling experience for many of us sitting around the table.

I think the most common mistake was doing what they call in the journalism “burying the lede,” dropping the argument down to the third or fourth paragraph. When I realized that I had done this too, I explained to the group how ironic this was. I spend hours telling students to put their argument in the first sentence of the first paragraph of everything. They protest that their English professors tell them to begin with a hook and bury the argument. I (and I presume many others there) simply figured that since this wasn’t an academic paper, the English professors were right this time.

When I asked Meyerson how to resolve this hook/thesis dilemma, he responded, “Ideally, the hook and the thesis will be the exact same thing.”

There’s your teaching moment for the week.

The other folks around the table with me beisdes labor historians were Walmart workers from an organization called Our Walmart. While sponsored in part by the UFCW, what these folks are really doing is organizing and making demands of their notoriously authoritarian employer outside the confines of a union. [Of course, they had a hand in the video above too because public relations is an important way to make those demands heard.]

In terms of writing about labor issues, the Walmart workers had all us professors beat on the authenticity issue hands down. But more importantly, I think they can actually teach us academics something about how to gain respect in any workplace. While I kept babbling on to them about how brave they were, what I heard back is that they don’t feel scared when they speak up about Walmart because they know that literally thousands of other Walmart workers are standing behind them.

In other words, you don’t need a union to change life on the job. You just need to organize.

Why haven’t most of us in academia figured that out already?

* I know you were expecting Aretha. If you feel cheated, click here.

What if disrupting education isn’t such a hot idea after all?

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the Clayton Christensen interview I linked to last Monday, was the explicit comparison between techno-skeptical teachers and Luddites. I’m not sure that I’ve ever read anything edtech-related that was quite this smug:

In the early 19th century, British textile artisans protested the Industrial Revolution with the anti-technology “Luddite movement.” They believed mechanized looms would replace them and make their jobs obsolete. They were right.

Automation in the 19th century was the disruptive equivalent of high-speed digital technology today, which is replacing jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors at astonishing speeds. Self-checkout counters at the grocery store, complete with laser scanners to read bar codes, are starting to replace human cashiers. On the road, the advent of EZPass and other computerized toll machines are replacing human tollbooth collectors. The rise of online education could effectively render terrible teachers redundant, while bolstering the careers of talented educators. There’s a word for this; it’s progress.

But what if it isn’t?

What if education suffers when the technology of pedagogy changes? We can all agree that that’s within the realm of possibility, right? This issue seems especially relevant for online education in its current underdeveloped, often poorly-administered form. Why can’t we wait for online education 2.0 rather than embrace the current extremely rudimentary product that most colleges offer? Besides, who says teachers who don’t embrace every disruptive technology that comes down the pike are necessarily Luddites? Why not accept the ones we like and reject the ones we don’t? After all, it seems as if for every wonderful innovation like Zotero, there’s a Courseload out there too.

Writing at Tenured Radical, Judith C. Brown offers what I think is a pretty good rule for telling the difference between a good edtech innovation and a bad one:

The key to the success of incorporating digital approaches is to know when and how to use them for pedagogical purposes rather than simply to lower costs.

Teachers and professors are undoubtedly in the best position to tell one from the other. Unfortunately, since online education in America is primarily about lowering costs, they don’t exactly get consulted very often. It’s gotten so bad that even Anya Kamenetz, who I have had absolutely nothing nice to say about previously, can write:

Personally, I’d like to see more university presidents making faculty their partners, not adversaries, in the transformation process.

Does that make her a Luddite too? If some administrators actually listened to this advice, educational technology disruption might be a little less…ummmmm…disruptive. Unfortunately this whole line of argument is really just titling at windmills, because the educational disrupters aren’t interested in education. They’re interested in money.

But what about administrators who facilitate this kind senseless disturbance? They already have money. What they’re interested in is power. As Thomas Pynchon explained in reference to the relevance of the Luddites to the modern world in 1984:

The word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.

That’s why campus police have pepper spray. The only disruptions allowed on campus are in the classroom, as long as the faculty and the students aren’t the ones doing the disrupting.

Will college professors go the way of the milkman?

I have been a Natalie Merchant fan since I first saw 10,000 Maniacs in college. In the old days, when I still went to concerts, I saw them more often than I did any other band (even after their shows were overran by teenage girls in peasant dresses). I pre-ordered the first Natalie Merchant album in seven years before it came out last year (rather than download the tracks) so that I could read the liner notes, and have had it in my car ever since. It’s two discs of the work of mostly obscure poets put to music, so there is actually a lot of interesting stuff to learn there.

This is my favorite track on the album:

The poet is Eleanor Farjeon, well-known in English places, but not in America. As Merchant notes, poetry aside, perhaps the most endearing thing she ever did was to turn down the title Dame of the British Empire with the line, “I do not wish to become different from the milkman.” Words to live by if I’ve ever encountered them.

They seem particularly useful to us academics, as we (myself included, of course) tend to greatly overrate our own usefulness. So many of us assume that whatever we’re interested in will be interesting to others, even if it isn’t. [See here for an important variation on this phenomenon.] I’ve also seen far too many examples of academics who assume that they’re somehow different than other working people just because they have a Ph.D.

We had time, and somehow we found the resources to study something for seven-odd years. This does not make us immune to the same rules of employment that blue collar workers face, like technological unemployment or the inevitable class struggle between employer and employee. This post by Tenured Radical about her computer troubles from over the weekend reminded me of Henry George’s complaint that industrial workers had been reduced to “mere feeders of machines.”

At the same time, there’s one way that I really do hope to be different from the milkman. Unlike milkmen, I hope my chosen profession continues to be practiced beyond a boutique existence long after my career has ended. If anyone has studied the demise of milkmen in America, I’d be interested in reading their work. If I had to guess though, I’d say that milkmen were probably victims of better refrigerated transport. It became cheaper to make milk on vast dairy farms and keep it cold for hundreds of miles than to squeeze it fresh and send it down the street. Yes, I know milk delivery is still a boutique operation in some places, but most people aren’t willing to pay that much more for a better product.

Will the college students of the future be willing to pay more for a better education? Will they even be able to pay more for a better education? Earlier this summer I wrote:

Seriously, the primary reason that I don’t go totally Luddite on this entire profession is that if given the opportunity, I don’t think the average bean counter is going to remake the university very well at all.

I still believe that, but now I’m afraid that the vast majority of both administrators and college students couldn’t care less. If I’m right, that should be enough to make you empathize with working people of all kinds. Especially milkmen.

Perhaps we can all double as psychiatrists, just like this milkman did.