Ground rules for the MOOC Monster.

So a giant, hairy, orange monster has shown up at the door to your classroom. Maybe you invited it, but more likely your dean or provost invited it into your department for you. What are you going to do? Are you going to let it inside and risk being eaten alive or are you going to try to bar the door?

Recognizing that plenty of people are not in a position to bar the door, I thought I would suggest a few ground rules for living with the MOOC Monster. After all, monsters are such interesting people. Maybe you and it can learn to get along. And rather than making these rules facetious (like “Don’t let him eat anybody,”) these are (mostly) serious:

1) The Monster is not allowed to get between the professor and the students.  In other words, every student must maintain access to the professor.

Public education does not mean education only for the self-motivated or the quick to pick up on things. Public education means education for everybody. That means every student must be able to ask questions of somebody who knows the answer. TAs are helpful in this area, but even students caught in a 500-person face-to-face lecture hall still require access to the professor. In theory, they have it. MOOC students, on the other hand, certainly don’t. Instead they’re barred in the syllabus from e-mailing the superprofessor or the superprofessor holds a lottery so that students have the privilege of participating in a Google chat with them. This is not good customer service.

Neither is pawning the inquisitive off on other students and calling that a “learning community.” Yes, there are plenty of things that students can learn by working together. There are also plenty of things that they can’t. Anybody who thinks that the entire college experience can be transformed into an interactive group activity is either an edtech entrepreneur or rolling too many of their own jelly babies.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, the Achilles Heel of endeavors like these is peer-grading. That’s where the lack of access to the professor hurts the learning process most because correcting essays is where most writing-based instruction occurs. Rather than quote myself, I’ll offer up an extended excerpt from this post at Degrees of Freedom:

But when paid graders have to go through thousands of submissions for AP History (for example), they are not simply e-mailed a rubric and a bunch of essays and told to get on with it. Rather, they are all flown into the same location and put through hours or days of training to ensure they are all grading consistently.

This usually includes sharing examples (called exemplars) of essays representing each score on a rubric (giving graders models to work from). It will also include mechanisms for sharing and confirming scores between graders and bringing in additional evaluators to break ties or settle disputes.

The point of all this activity is to squeeze as much inconsistency out of the process as possible so that the major source of subjectivity in a rubric-graded scoring exercise (idiosyncrasies between those doing the grading) is minimized.

Needless to say, no such training or collaboration is available when I’m scoring 3-4 essays from my home in Boston (and applying my own extra rules – such as the non-native English one mentioned above) while someone else is scoring their 3-4 from their villa on the Turkish coast (and applying his or her own idiosyncratic rules as they work).

This is not good customer service either. Indeed, if you actually care about learning, this kind of crapshoot would probably drive you to drink. Perhaps, just perhaps, the MOOC Monster could be a model party guest while visiting a math classroom, but if the course has anything to do with writing I don’t see why we shouldn’t kick the creature out before it comes in and trashes the place straight away.

2) The Monster must be kept on a leash. The professor must hold that leash at all times.

Technology, the cliché goes, is neither good nor bad. That depends upon how it’s used. How it’s used depends upon how much you know about where you plan to use it. Over the weekend, Michael Feldstein, fresh off a conference full of edtech startups and VCs wrote:

The prevailing attitude in the Valley seems to be, “Hey, we built the internet. How hard could education be?”

That’s right. Education is your career, but the capitalists of Silicon Valley are convinced that they can do your job better than you can. I wouldn’t trust my history classroom to a psychology professor (nor they to me, I hope), yet the guy who used to run Snapfish.com and his venture capitalist buddies are convinced that they can recreate the Ivy League online. It would be hilarious if so many people weren’t assuming that this sort of thing was even remotely plausible.

If you need brain surgery, call a brain surgeon. If you want an education, then there better be some educators involved or you’re probably flushing your money down the toilet. I’m not talking about the venture capitalists here. If gullible administrators willingly give them guaranteed contracts then their profit is in the bag. I’m talking about the students. Professors serve as quality control for higher education endeavors. If your professor is about as accessible as the pope or Thomas Pynchon, then you can’t perform that function no matter how well-meaning you happen to be.

I am not a Luddite (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I try to learn technologies that I think will be useful to me in my life or in the classroom. I eschew technologies that won’t help, or which I know I can’t control. Also over the weekend, Derek Bruff asked, “Why isn’t the digital humanities community building great MOOCs?” I think the answer to that question is pretty obvious. Its members want nothing to do with a technology that they can’t control.

Come to think of it, the fact that MOOCs don’t do anything to improve the quality of education may have something to do with it too.

3) The professor is the one who gets to decide if the Monster has overstayed its welcome.

In real terms, I’m talking about assessment here. I hate assessment. I think it’s nothing but a fishing expedition for an excuse to punish higher education by defunding it, thereby making it even less effective than it already may be. Yet, for some reason, MOOCs seem to immune from all this assessment talk that dogs face-to-face classes. “Don’t mind the 90% dropout rate,” the MOOC enthusiasts tell us. “It’s a new technology. We’ll figure it all out down the road.” Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. I still want to know why MOOCs deserve a pass while face-to-face classes don’t.

I think this is where that whole “Be a maker not a hater” business comes in. I have no problem with making things. However, if a professor can change their assessment rubric to value outcomes rather than individual student learning, they are cooking the books. Of course 95,000 students are going to do something, but doing isn’t necessarily the same thing as having every student learn what they need to know.

The digital humanities allows us to stretch the nature of our disciplines and of what students need to learn in college. I’m certainly fine with trying some of what this new subdiscipline has to offer in some of my classes. In fact, I just got a small grant from my university to try a class along these lines next spring. However, too many edtech startups and superprofessors are running down what most of us do every day in an effort to justify whatever disruption makes them rich, famous or both. Perhaps whatever tech that happens to be hip that week is a good thing. Perhaps it isn’t.

I say let the people who do the teaching be the judge.

***

But what if we can’t? What if the powers that be won’t let us kick the MOOC Monster out of our classrooms? Congratulations, if you understand that this is the likely outcome of laying ground rules for the MOOC Monster, then you understand that professors are employees, not entrepreneurs. Everything we do takes place within an industrial relations system in which most of us have very little power.

Nonetheless, I think there’s value in forcing the MOOC pushers to go on the record with their anti-education views. These simple ground rules aren’t unreasonable. They are reflections of the should-be-uncontroversial principle that educators know what’s best for education, not VCs or tech geeks. To argue against these rules would clearly reveal that the actual agenda of the MOOC “Revolution” does not involve improving the quality of education for anyone. Maybe then we professors might start paying more attention to the threat that the MOOC Monster embodies.

Monsters may be interesting people, but you can’t engage them in meaningful conversation if they’ve just swallowed you whole.

“They mean to win Wimbledon!”

Since this blog is getting kind of popular, I think it’s time for me to scare off as many readers as possible with an extended Monty Python analogy. And rather than go for a scene from a movie that almost everybody’s seen like “Life of Brian” or “Holy Grail,” I’m going to discuss a skit from the Flying Circus that only diehard fans like me can remember (since it comes from the season after John Cleese left the show), let alone quote without watching the whole thing again.

Here’s the video:

And part II:

And part III:

If you want the short version: Giant blancmanges from the planet Skyron in the Galaxy of Andromeda are turning Englishmen into Scotsmen. Why? Because Scotsmen are the worst tennis players in the entire world. When the blancmanges are discovered practicing on tennis courts throughout the country, the Graham Chapman scientist character logically concludes in a very alarmed voice, “They mean to win Wimbledon!”

This is a long way of saying that I thought of that line on Friday morning when I read a similarly absurd but obvious conclusion in the IHE article about Amherst College rejecting MOOCs:

“They came in and they said, ‘Here’s a machine grader that can grade just as perceptively as you, but by the way, even though it can replace your labor, it’s not going to take your job,’” [Adam] Sitze [Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought] said. “I found that funny and I think other people may have realized at that point that there was not a good fit.”

Gee, ya think? The Amherst faculty are like that plucky Scotsman, Angus Podgorny, fighting off the scourge of the alien blancmanges at Wimbledon before they get a chance to eat us all.

But I also have a more serious point to make here that’s a little less obvious. The blancmanges could only win Wimbledon once all the real competition had disappeared (either by being eaten or being turned into Scotsmen). Similarly, I think Amherst’s liberal arts college model is a threat to the MOOCification taking hold nearly everywhere else in academia.

In order to take over, MOOCs have to worm there way into places where they might not obviously belong. That requires something that has come to be called wrap-around. [Kind of reminds me of a boa constrictor, now that I think of it.] As Michael Feldstein recently wrote:

I was able to ask edX’s Howard Lurie about whether the course design for the blended classes in the SJSU project will be the same as the fully online one. He acknowledged that there would have to be a variant. We’re going to see more of that. To the degree that MOOCs are going to used in this way, they need to (1) have the curricular wrap-around that scaffolds the classroom use, and (2) be designed to be modular so that faculty using them in their own classrooms can customize them to the local needs of their students. In other words, we need to be able to draw different and more flexible lines between where the course-as-artifact ends and human-directed course experience begins.

In one way, this would be a pretty good future. MOOCs as textbooks would restrict MOOCs to the role of tools and professors couldn’t possibly replaced by tools, but what if we don’t need MOOCs at all? Why should we blow up the entire concept of courses [Feldstein calls the concept of the course an "artifact."] just to facilitate a technology that plenty of professors don’t want and won’t use? Indeed, if we’re going to go ahead and question everything, then the need for professors at all would inevitably find its way onto the table.

This seems to be what bothered the faculty at Amherst most. From that IHE article again:

Some Amherst faculty concerns about edX were specific to Amherst. For instance, faculty asked, are MOOCs, which enroll tens of thousands of students, compatible with Amherst’s mission to provide education in a “purposefully small residential community” and “through close colloquy?”

Yes, there’s a reason tuition at Amherst is so expensive. An Amherst education is labor-intensive because faculty there are primarily concerned with educational quality rather than price. Yet partnering with edX has the potential to make Amherst even more expensive! That makes as much sense as blancmanges playing tennis.

For people without access to higher education, the ability to enroll in MOOCs is certainly better than no higher education at all. If you’re already in college, then the question becomes whether the cost saving that MOOCs might offer can offset the inevitable decline in quality. [Claiming there's no decline in quality is just a way to justify the unjustifiable.] Amherst students who have the qualifications and the means to attend that school have little to gain from MOOCs.

MOOC providers are in a different position entirely. If they want to convince the public that their education is not just sufficient, but somehow superior to face-to-face instruction, liberal arts colleges become a nagging reminder to everyone who cares about such things of the road not taken. In other words, they can never win Wimbledon as long as this kind of competitive counterexample remains MOOC-free.

World History MOOC Report 10: In which I look on the bright side (sort of).

If you haven’t checked out the comments to this post in which I discuss MOOC pedagogy with Jeremy Adelman, you really should. If nothing else, he’s given me an enormous amount of material for a week with no lectures. Like this:

I think you are giving a partial representation of a more complex story that would involve the multiple tiers of students, some auditing, some doing the full-bore (as it were). The submission levels are low compared to what? Compared to all enrolled? Or compared to other MOOC’s? What we know about MOOCs is that they all have very high attrition rates and uneven participation rates. My main concern is that people understand the principle of reciprocity so that peer support and assessment doesn’t run into free-riding; which is not the same as more passive forms of using the course, like watching the lectures no more.

This came in response to my second mention of the poor response rate from my fellow students on the first writing assignment. Jeremy (and some new commentators on this blog) have been suggesting that there are multiple levels of engagement in a MOOC and that we should celebrate that for increasing engagement with the humanities, and world history in particular. That works for me. Despite my carping, I’ve come to enjoy my MOOC experience more the closer it gets to my period of expertise. I particularly enjoyed Adelman’s discussion of building national identities around the world during the Nineteenth Century and his brief history of the American West in global perspective.

The problem with this kind of cheeriness, however, is that even as some parts of American higher education reach for a broader audience, those parts are nonetheless doing their best to eat the lunches of those of us left in the vast MOOC-less wasteland. Mills Kelly described this process quite succinctly a few days ago:

Why are we in trouble? The answer is both simple and very complicated. The simple answer is that institutions with much better brands than ours have thrown themselves head first into the MOOC swamp and already we are seeing signs that in the coming year or two many, if not most (or even all) of these institutions will find ways to offer academic credit for what are now free courses. Once that happens, our students are going to vote with their feet (or fingers on keyboards) and will start taking increasing numbers of courses from these institutions–both because these courses are convenient, and because they are from institutions with better brands.

When that happens, we can expect that more and more of our students will be presenting us with transcripts from Stanford, Penn, Michigan, the University of Virginia, and other similarly better known competitors, and demanding that we accept these courses toward our degrees.

Actual enrollment in an actual MOOC has made me more optimistic than that for two reasons. 1) If actual professors review the course structures of these MOOCs for which they are supposed to award credit, they’ll see that they differ greatly from the brand images of the institutions that hosted them. ["So you took a history course from Princeton, but there was no required reading?"] and 2) I don’t think most college students will pick this kind of education if given a real choice because it is impersonal, superficial (since drilling down in history requires reading and real time responses), but still incredibly time consuming.

Professor Adelman is doing the best he can to create a worthwhile experience, but the format in which he’s operating has made it very difficult for me to see any of the pedagogy which he tells us he’s considered. As Alan Levine put it in a post I read yesterday:

…I have the question of how video lectures of people reading content is really going to play in parts of the the world where connectivity is not what it is in Palo Alto.

And is this really the best learning we can give the world? Lectures, machine grading, and multiple guess? Really? Check the century on your digital watch, Socrates.

In short, it’s not the MOOCs that I’m afraid of – it’s the people who insist on making their declarations that MOOCs are the future a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some of them actually have the power to make that happen.

“When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.”

Why yes, I do take requests. I’m particularly glad to when they remind me of scenes from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” that I haven’t used on this blog yet. Whose brave deeds do I wish to sing about here? Glenn A. Hartz of Ohio State, who used to be opposed to online classes, but thanks to the inevitable forward progress of technology has now changed his mind. He writes in the Chronicle:

So, do I like online courses? My answer is that it doesn’t matter. The students like them, and we have to adjust to their demands.

I hear that students all like getting “A”s, so I assume we must adjust that way too. While we’re at it, we can give up on homework since that might offend their delicate sensibilities. Hey! Why don’t we just give up getting paid entirely and become volunteers? After all, the idea of professors fighting for their own interests (which might actually coincide with the interests of their students) is simply unseemly.

I’m not going to fisk the whole essay because I’ve covered Hartz’s points a million times before on this blog. What I will do, however, is note how ludicrous it is to think that there are only two possible positions on the subject of learning online: for or against. Anybody who really understands this subject knows that the right tools can be used in the wrong ways (or vice versa for that matter). If fewer administrators used online learning as a club to bash the concept of shared governance, perhaps I’d be a lot more positive about it.

Let me cite a better essay from the Huffington Post to illustrate my position better:

Distance learning technologies should be seen as one more tool at an educator’s disposal. Some educators have an almost ideological reaction to distance learning. They hate it and think its evil, or they love it and think it is the solution to all of our educational problems. The specific tool used should be the one best matched to the educational objective. Just because you have a tool and you know how it works, doesn’t mean you have to use it. Form should follow function.

As I’ve explained before, I’m not anti-edtech. I’m pro-professor. In a professor-centered edtech world, faculty could pick and choose the tools we want, making sure that education not profits remains the primary goal of universities everywhere.

This is not some utopian dream. My friend Jonathan Poritz’s essay about open source technology (now available in Academe) can serve as a road map for creating that kind of world. On the other hand, ceding edtech decisions entirely to administrators and profit-seeking private companies almost guarantees that the future will be a nightmare.

For this vision to become a reality, we professors need to stick to our principles. We can’t just mindlessly accept the free market ideology that our critics are so desperate to impose upon higher education everywhere. We need to be willing to have our eyes gouged out and our elbows broken.

Seriously, isn’t control of the future worth fighting for? Isn’t control of YOUR future worth fighting for?

Don’t feed the beast.

If you don’t read the Academe blog because I contribute over there sometimes, then you should read it because of the high quality of material provided by the other contributors. This piece by Martin Kich, for example, is incredibly persuasive even though I don’t agree with it:

The issue of whether faculty ought to resist this “automation” of higher education is already moot. Tenure-track faculty now constitute just 35% of the faculty employed nationwide, and full-time non-tenure-eligible faculty account for just another 18%. And at many institutions, the percentage of full-time faculty is much lower—at some technical and community colleges, even as low as the single digits. Faculty, in the traditional senses of the classification, are already on the verge of becoming anachronisms. Resisting or, worse, denying one of the major factors in our radically changed circumstances will serve only to hasten our demise.

OK, but the problem with that assessment is that it would require me to teach online. Life is too short to teach online. I didn’t get into this business to stare at a computer screen all day. Of course, you can do remarkable things by staring at a computer screen all day, but the administrators who Martin wants you to engage with don’t care about how remarkable your course is. They’d replace you with an adjunct in the blink of an eye. All they care about is revenue. Therefore, my position is don’t feed the beast.

So what happens if the beast eats you? I think he’ll eat you faster if you enter the cage than if you stay outside. The more faculty who engage in online pedagogy, the more legitimate this form of instruction will become. Now that would be awesome if online education deserved that legitimacy, but if you judge the online education industry on its own terms it hasn’t earned anyone’s respect yet:

Education researchers have actually conducted a number of studies about this. As of a few years ago, the findings were pretty bleak for the industry. A literature review in 2009 found that ”all scholarly research to date has concluded that the ‘gatekeepers’ [human resources managers, executives, etc.] have an overall negative perception about online degrees.” But online teaching has gotten a lot better in the past three years, and the results are starting to show up on surveys of employers. One study found that half of executives viewed MBAs earned online as no different from ones earned in person. That’s still substantial stigma, though. If half of employers don’t think your degree is worth as much as those of other people applying for the same position, that’s not a great position to be in.

What happens to the online education industry if things stay this way? What happens to the professors who’ve made the jump online if it all turns out to be just another bubble? What happens to the students who jumped with you?

I refuse to have the answers to those questions on my conscience.

…what are the problems with online universities?

Did you know that online universities are blossoming in Asia? I know because AFP told me so. Read the whole article if you want to see the hype for yourself, but I find their obligatory nod to critics much more interesting:

The growth of online degree programmes is also constrained by poor Internet accessibility in parts of Asia and beyond.

More than 80 percent of South Koreans and 60 percent of Malaysians have online access, but in China the rate slips to about 40 percent and it slumps to around 10 percent in India.

Other criticisms include inadequate regulation, allegations of poor-quality teaching, student cheating, and the fact that online degrees are still not as widely recognised as traditional ones in the marketplace, say industry experts.

Reading that list reminds me of this scene from “Life of Brian”:

Apart from the limited Internet access, inadequate regulation, poor-quality teaching, cheating and the facts that employers won’t give their graduates jobs, what are the problems with online universities?

Well, I guess the argument’s over then, isn’t it?

“[Y]ou must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest with…a herring.”

Laura Gibbs deserves some kind of prize for public service. I’ve been tweeting her series of posts about peer grading in Coursera for a while now, but since Audrey Watters has written them up I figured I might as well consider them here too. What you need to know going in is that Laura teaches online for the University of Oklahoma so she’s clearly rooting for Coursera as she takes their course on Science Fiction and Fantasy. I think this makes her indictments of the process all the more damning.

For example, there’s this:

So, what kind of data is Coursera collecting about the efficacy of this process? None. What kind of feedback are people getting on their feedback? None. What kind of guidelines and tips did we get on offering feedback? (Almost) none. Given that this is a skill, and a skill that many people have not had to use in the past, I think we would need a LOT of tips and guidelines to help with that, along with feedback so that people who are just now developing this skill can estimate how well they are doing.

And this:

By far the biggest problem, though, is vague and/or inaccurate feedback… and that’s a much harder problem to solve. It’s much like the problem with the poor quality of the essays overall; yes, there are inappropriate essays (blank essays, essays only a few words long, plagiarized essays, even spam essays) that need to be flagged – but the larger problem is the bewildering number of essays that are of such poor quality that it gets very discouraging to spend time on them. Without some kind of additional instructional component to the class, I am just not convinced that this often unreliable and/or unhelpful anonymous peer feedback can really help people to improve their writing.

Remember, this is just about the peer feedback system. I haven’t even mentioned the plagiarism problem or the lack of writing instruction in general.

“Can peer feedback really work in a setting where there is so little community and where this is little sense of reciprocity?,” asks Audrey. Well, that depends upon how you define the term “work.”

If you watched that Daphne Koller TED video, you probably remember the joke about how she tried to convince those terrible humanities professors that multiple choice was a perfectly acceptable way to test for higher order critical thinking and they did’t buy it. Ha ha ha. Unable to do that, they went with Plan B: peer grading. The impression this story left on me was that Coursera was only interested in doing the absolute minimum in order to make their humanities classes acceptable. Certainly, everything Laura has written suggests that they didn’t exactly put much forethought into some pretty basic problems.

But I want to take this point one step further. I would argue that creating an effective peer review process for grading writing is impossible – like chopping down the mightiest tree in the forest with a herring. Since writing is a skill that you never really stop learning, peer grading is therefore almost always the blind leading the blind.

For example, I am about to go into deep seclusion to polish my book manuscript for the last time before it hits the copy editor. It needs polishing because I have a bad habit of using the passive voice the first time I write anything at all complicated. Usually I turn those sentences around when I catch them during proofing, but I don’t always catch them. If your peers don’t know what passive voice is, or (as seems very likely in a lot of these Coursera classes) your peers don’t even speak English as their first language, learning how to write well solely from them is going to be impossible.

Since I teach history, I am prone to think of learning history as an excellent end in itself. However, if you desire employment when college is over, learning how to write well is the best skill that academic history classes can offer you. No wonder employers don’t take job applicants with online college degrees seriously then.

It appears that Coursera is giving them little reason to think otherwise.

As if the Monty Python reference wasn’t proof enough.

That is in fact me writing about whether the Internet will make professors obsolete at Inside Higher Ed. If you’re arriving here from that link, I invite you to take a look about a year’s worth of posts making related points. If you’ve been around already, I hope you’ll help me monitor the comments over there so that I can do a follow up post (assuming one is necessary).

“Suicide Squad…attack.”

I hate to pick on Kate as she’s so nice. Besides, this post is smart and reasonable in its own way. It’s also so much better than the technological utopian day-dreaming that I often find myself reading. Still, her analogy is really useful for helping me make my point here:

A couple of miles away from the place where I grew up is this beautiful Iron Age hill fort…Within the inner circle are the remaining stone foundations of an original castle, and—critically—the well that stored water for the whole settlement. Soldiers controlled the resources in the middle, and the villagers and clergy lived in the outer circle, in wooden buildings of which nothing remains. In the early 12th century, exasperated by disputes with the castle guard over access to the well, the clergy took off with the community and restablished the city in a new location, where it still is today.

It’s a metaphorical stretch, but for me this decisive, strategic and disruptive move is a caution to those who are guarding the well of traditional higher education. For a long time, we’ve held the inner circle, letting prescribed numbers in across narrow bridges that we also control. We’ve enjoyed the security of higher ground, protected by an impressive moat. But here’s the tricky part: we only get to do this as long as the whole village accepts the way in which we manage their resources.

In other words, we’re not kept in business by market demand for the service we supply, but by taxpayer-voter consensus that a public higher education system is national infrastructure worth funding, even though the majority of the population don’t get to use it.

Perhaps I should have found a Holy Grail clip to respond to this one. Nevertheless, this kind of argument always reminds me of the suicide squad from Life of Brian because no army worth its salt would give up their fort or their village voluntarily. Maybe they’ll fight to the death. Maybe they’ll negotiate a surrender that will guarantee them their lives. Maybe the soldiers will open access to the well, but get some nice land to tend somewhere outside the castle walls in return. Only academics and the Judean People’s Front will up and kill themselves before the battle or even the process of negotiations ever starts.

The American financier Jay Gould once said famously that he could hire half the working class to kill the other half. Something similar might be said of professors. The super-professors work for Gould, but they aren’t going to constitute anywhere near half the professoriate that we have now. In this case though, I at least understand their motives. The rest of us are bringing a knife to a gun fight – or worse yet, no weapon at all.

For so many academics, all you have to do is say “Think of the children!” and rational self interest flies out the window. The founders of Udemy aren’t thinking about the children. The founders of Coursera aren’t thinking of the children. [And if I'm wrong, and students are somewhere down there on their list of concerns, they certainly aren't thinking about what happens to the professors they want to displace.] I, however, am thinking of students, thank you very much, even if I’m also thinking about the fate of myself and others like me too.

American higher education doesn’t have an access problem because the face-to-face relationship between teachers and students has somehow failed. It has an access problem because the number of administrators has exploded, the pay of university presidents has become obscene, football programs at all levels are engaged in an eternal arms race with each other and directors of admissions insist that universities need to have not one but two climbing walls in the gym in order to attract the best students. Most importantly, American higher education has an access problem because state and federal revenues have dried up since the one percent don’t want to help anybody but themselves.

Fully funding public higher education not only benefits the mostly underpaid professors (adjunct and otherwise) who work in the current system. It creates better-educated students than you’d get if you just sit them in front of a computer screen and make them watch tapes of super-professors all day. Direct interaction isn’t just key to the educational process. It’s key to the social dynamics that make real learning possible.

Professors welcoming the advent of MOOCs are therefore, to my mind at least, worse than suicidal. They’re a distraction from fighting the battle that really matters, namely the fight for a quality education for everyone who can directly benefit from it. Offing yourself before that battle is even over isn’t going to help anyone.

“Now we see the violence inherent in the system!”

As your king, I’m sure you’re wondering where I stand on the Grafton-Lemisch history job market controversy which Tenured Radical explained so eloquently for us yesterday. I think they’re both right! I believe that everyone who gets a Ph.D. should get a job that puts the skills acquired during that long, difficult journey to best use. Whether that job is at an academic institution or some other place that’s interested in history really shouldn’t matter as long as it pays a living wage. I also agree, as Lemisch suggests, that “an acceptance of things as they are” would be a terrible, terrible thing.

My problem with this whole discussion though is that the AHA is probably not the best place to be having it. That’s because the crisis in question isn’t discipline specific, it’s…wait for it…systematic.

I hate to sound like a broken record here, but there isn’t a shortage of tenure track jobs in the humanities or elsewhere. The problem is a longstanding, systematic restructuring of academic work that devalues the contributions of individual instructors, both on the tenure track and off. When those on the tenure track catch cold, adjuncts get pneumonia. Recently, some of this problem has become technological, but it’s mostly a logical outgrowth of the systematic starvation of academics in favor of spending on things like sports and unnecessary new buildings at public and private universities alike.

My fear is that the more time we spend arguing with one another about the best way to approach this decades-old problem that we can’t solve by ourselves, we’ll forget about the common enemy. No, not the Judean People’s Front! I’m talking about the Romans!!! I realize I’m mixing my Python movie analogies, but you know who the Romans are here, right?

There I go bringing class into it again. I really would make a lousy king. My heart is with the bloody peasants even though I’m only moderately repressed.