CourtJester, over on this post of mine, responds:

Here we have the argument presented that education is something that must always be paid for, received face to face, and never acquired second-hand or indirectly, lest that should dilute the earning power of the highly educated.

So what do we do now? Close down Wikipedia, The Open University, correspondence schools and all the rest?

Of course not. I never suggested that anything be closed for the benefit of a single class of workers. My suggestion was merely that professors who want to put their work online should remember that the people who employ them may not share their benevolent interests in educating as many people as possible. It was a call for faculty to show a little enlightened self-interest. Nothing more.

Yet CourtJester’s comment does suggest a point that I do believe: Who says that being able to take intermediate algebra online is necessarily progress? After all, even in the Khan Academy model there are teachers available to answer questions during schooltime after students view videos as homework. Is Apple going to equip iTunes U with operators trained in all the courses it puts up on the web? Do you want getting help from your instructor to be like calling your health insurance company?

I feel the same way about e-readers. Other than the ability to carry lots of books for long trips abroad, I don’t see how any e-reader is an improvement over the older paper and ink information delivery system. Presumably, the content is exactly the same. All you do by making reading electronic is increase the possibility that something can go wrong with the machinery. Yes, you can insert hyperlinks into an electronic text, but what purpose does that serve other than distraction? Here’s Nicholas Carr from The Shallows on precisely this subject (p. 103):

As soon as you inject a book with links and connect it to the Web–as soon as you “extend” and “enhance” it and make it “dynamic”–you change what it is and you change, as well, the experience of reading it. An e-book is no more a book than an online newspaper is a newspaper.

Seriously, how arrogant do you have to be to think you can improve upon narrative as a way to convey information? All these rocket scientists think they’re Elvis or something.

I am going to start on the first day of class. Many professors know the keen attention that students pay to their syllabus: will this be on the test? Imagine how much more attentive students will be when the syllabus is only available for a small additional charge. It will help get them used to paying for legroom later, when they are out in the real world. No doubt there may be some confusion. Perhaps someone wants to drop the class. Of course I’ll sign the form. But since you are changing your itinerary, you have to pay a reasonable handling fee for the paperwork…

Of course, we know this is never going to happen. For one thing, faculty wouldn’t be the ones who get to keep the money therefore nobody would ever collect the fees. But it’s still funny because we know that the average higher education administrator is totally capable of doing something this craven.

Consider what they already do with respect to academic labor. Universities will pay the absolute lowest rate possible to the adjunct faculty member standing up in front of the classroom solely because they can. Who cares if those people are so stressed out trying to make a living that they can’t devote their full attention to the class? Despite the abuse he’s taking in the comments, I think this guy is right. Hiring contingent faculty is like Moneyball, except he fails to point out that thinking about the livelihood of other human beings in this manner is morally repulsive whether it’s a teacher or a baseball palyer. [Where is the adjunct Curt Flood when we need them?]

Yet they soldier on. Seriously, I am absolutely in awe of any human being who devotes their life to teaching despite the fact that they could make much more money doing any number of jobs that require a lot less training. Describing teaching as a higher calling is an excuse to exploit people, but ours is a noble profession. To do it while being continually exploited demands our respect because contingent faculty do what they do for their students.

Unfortunately, administrators know this too. Therefore, we all accept situations that we would otherwise find untenable like appalling contingent faculty contracts or online courses because lower costs are supposed to benefit our students whether they actually do so or not. We’ll give up our demands because they’re holding our students hostage. Yet somehow Joe Biden thinks faculty salaries are the reason that tuition is so high?

Maybe that fee-for-service model in higher ed isn’t so crazy after all.

That has changed. For the last 10+ years I’ve been going out of my way to read European and World History in my spare time out of a combination of embarrassment and enjoyment since so much of it has been completely new to me. I’ve also been working on a global history of the ice and refrigeration industries which has taken my narrative all over the world by using American reports on foreign inventions and companies.

While the deal isn’t finalized yet, it looks as if I’ll be teaching in South Korea for about a month this summer. They want me to do Western Civilization. All of it. In less than a month. If it weren’t for my years of reading I would never even consider it, but I’m going to need a textbook.

I can teach American history without a textbook because I am an expert in American history. I need a textbook to cover Western Civilization because textbooks are a crutch. I don’t mean that anyone who uses them is necessarily ignorant, but if you aren’t sure about what you are teaching they make it far easier to sound as if you do. I won’t be so much teaching out of the textbook as using it as a starting point for deeper discussion, but if I really had no idea what I was doing this would be an easy way to get by.

In the video I posted yesterday, Dan Czitrom of Mount Holyoke tells a story of visiting East Tennessee State shortly after his textbook first came out in order to talk that large department into adopting it. He was rightfully concerned about this mission because 1) Making people teach out of the same textbook has academic freedom implications and 2) Everyone in that department had to teach a section of US History whether they specialized in US history or not. Without textbooks, neither of these problems could ever have existed.

Czitrom also states that he was shocked, shocked to see gambling at that establishment at how bad the working conditions were at East Tennessee State. He then suggests that the wonderful accoutrements that his and other publishers provide are a lifesaver for people who face large classes with no help. I hate to disagree with a fellow Badger, particularly since I’m sure his heart is in the right place, but I would argue that the exact opposite is true.

When publishers create tools that make less-than-ideal situations tenable, they make it easier and more acceptable for administrations to make those circumstances even less tenable in the future. After all, what’s another hundred students if you’re grading multiple choice tests with a computer program? More importantly, if your textbook (or the web in general for that matter) is providing the content and the computer is doing your grading for you, why do they need you at all? And how are you ever going to get out from under those difficult working conditions if your “friends” in the publishing industry keep making it easier for colleges to teach more students with less-qualified instructors? There’s probably a shortage of Western historians of any kind in Korea, so my flawed expertise is better than nothing at all. What’s East Tennessee State’s excuse?

Teaching out of your textbook isn’t just bad for your students. In an environment when textbook publishers want to become online education providers, it’s bad for you too. That’s especially true for adjunct faculty who can be replaced by a machine in the blink of an eye any time their employer decides it would rather spend more on online learning rather than face-to-face education.

I don’t think I have to tell you how much your “friends” in the publishing industry will do for you the moment that happens.

Thanks to AHA Today, I actually watched the entire video of the Wither the Future of the History Textbook? session from the AHA in Chicago yesterday and was shocked by how relevant it was to many of the concerns I address on this blog.

While not the center of the conversation, my main takeaway was the aspiration of textbook publishers to move into the online learning business. I know this shouldn’t have surprised me since as at least one publishing giant actually owns an online education arm, but I had forgotten that until I heard one of the publishing folks on the panel say something to the effect of, “What we make in the future may not even resemble what we make now.” Then the other panelist from the publishing industry pretty much explicitly stated that she expects the future of the history textbook to be some kind of online learning platform.

Wanna head ‘em off at the pass? Stop assigning a survey textbook right now. It’s not against the law. Both publishing reps actually bring up the fact that some history professors have killed their textbooks already, but then they dismiss us as a disgruntled minority. True, but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong. Watch the session closely, and you can actually hear the fear in their voices as they worry whether enough of us will wake up before it’s too late.

In the last speech, Jan Reiff of UCLA (who doesn’t assign textbooks and never had a class where the professor assigned a textbook) asks a very important question, “What if we create our own textbook?” She was talking specifically about a class on the history of Los Angeles, but there really is no reason that historians as a profession can’t do the same thing to giant textbook publishers that our administrators would love to do to us: Cut them out of the picture entirely. Create our own textbooks (that won’t resemble what’s being produced now at all) on the basis of what we actually teach, and charge little or no money for them. The key here is that all the decision-making power would fall to the people responsible for doing the actual educating, namely us.

No more books without price tags so that the bookstore can mark them up to $85 a pop. No more revisions for the sake of revisions every three years. I got a great idea for a slogan too: Don’t be evil. Yes, I realize that’s been taken, but I don’t think Google is really using it anymore.

PS Coming tomorrow (or whenever I find the time to write it up): textbooks as instruments of oppression.

If you want an indication that Davidson’s blogging pedagogy methods are more common than the NYT bothered to indicate, examine the advice at the end of this long article on the subject which I saved a while back to help my own teaching (and be sure to read the original for more detailed advice if you really do want to teach with blogs):

1. Have a clear pedagogical purpose for incorporating blogs into the instruction, and clearly state the purpose and requirements of student blogging on the class syllabus….

2. Blog contributions and comments should be a graded element of the course….

3. Don’t assume that students are familiar with the practical aspects of blogging….

All of these suggestions require a significant amount of class time to explain and implement. The link between them is that you have to put the blogs, posts and comments that students write front and center in your classroom so that everybody will take it seriously and so that nobody will get lost. If students don’t learn how to post in the first place, they’ll never be able to learn how to write well because they’ll be too busy pulling out their hair trying to get the tech skills down. Thank goodness they can ask their teacher when they see you in class.

But what if they never see you in class? Imagine what it would be like having to explain the tools needed to make new educational technology work and the actual educational concepts themselves, and you have to do all of this through the technology that you’re trying to teach. This situation exists almost by definition with distance education. It’s kind of ironic when you think about it closely: Teaching writing on and for the Internet requires more face-to-face time to do it well than just teaching writing.

One of the lessons I’ve learned by paying attention to distance education and the digital humanities in recent months is that many smart people are investing a lot of time doing creative and wonderful things for education’s sake. Despite my philosophical opposition to online courses, I’ll even agree with Tim Burke that they might actually constitute a new art form when they’re done well:

[I]f you created a really rich body of materials that looked somewhat like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was crafting a completely novel form of publication. Imagine a work of historical scholarship that included video of the author giving an explanatory lecture at the beginning of a section of the reading; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pictures, audio recordings, maps, and other supporting materials; that extensively linked to relevant (or competing) analyses available in digital collections like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take questions from students reading the book in a class.

But what happens when the rubber meets the road? When art collides with MBA thinking? When Bambi meets Godzilla? I’ll tell you what happens: Bambi gets stomped.

Administrators and higher ed reformers see online classes as a means to cut costs by saving on both overhead and wages. As a result, most of the artists among us will be beaten down by the pressure of having their class sizes continually scaled up and their salaries continually scaled down in response to increased access to unemployed Ph.D.s all over the world who are too busy to care about art.

The really heartbreaking thing though is that Bambi in this scenario is likely going to act as if everything is just peachy even after the hunters shoot his mother. Professors (as opposed to teachers, who are heavily unionized) may just be the only workers in America who’ll reject organization for their self-protection in the face of appeals that their job is a higher calling even as their employers make doing that job next to impossible.

Consider this story from Friday’s Inside Higher Education:

Each of Professor Pam Watkins’s 70 podcasts took almost two hours to produce. Then she spent another 100 hours uploading and editing her handouts. The result is an intermediate algebra course that is one of the first classes in Apple’s new iTunes U library.

The Harrisburg Area Community College math professor wasn’t paid to design the course, but volunteered to do so in hopes of helping math students in central Pennsylvania and beyond.

Pam Watkins is obviously an extremely dedicated teacher. Yet how many math professors won’t be hired in the future because of the unpaid work she did? Teaching may be a calling, but it’s also a profession and that profession not only requires fair compensation so that teachers can afford to keep doing it, it requires a certain amount of class solidarity in the face of employers who are more than willing to sell the product of our free labor and then use the proceeds from that sale for their own less-than-benevolent ends.

I’ve argued repeatedly in this space that online education is not a good thing for students, but think of the professors too! Is machine-tending really what you signed up for when you took your current job? Are you willing to make the transition to our glorious online future even if the people in charge won’t let you turn your course into a work of art?

I’m not saying that you have to be Godzilla when it comes to this particular transition, but there’s no reason that you have to be Bambi either. If you won’t fight for your own sake, maybe you can fight for the sake of art and creativity.

Did Apple make the exact same mistake that I worried about yesterday morning? It’s hard for me to tell as I didn’t get enough time online yesterday to figure out precisely what it was that they announced. Was it really any more than an electronic online book store? Doesn’t Amazon already have one of those?

By now I’ve read lots of commentary from people who probably understand what Apple is doing no better than I do, but then there’s Audrey Watters, who was actually there at the big announcement. She seems kind of underwhelmed, but I think her analysis of textbooks as a form is much more interesting than anything she wrote about Apple:

Once you’ve recognized that textbooks are just an assemblage of resources and that, in a digital world, there’s no reason to bind it together and publish these en masse, then I think you can see a path to liberation from that industry model. You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format.

Here! Here! This is precisely why I killed my textbook and now assign Milestone Documents instead. Moreover, Audrey’s phrasing suggests an opening for me to elaborate on what I think is probably the most important reason that teaching without a textbook makes me so happy: The almost precise alignment between what I teach in survey and what I make students read.

Even if your 800-page textbook is the best written 800-page textbook that the world has ever seen, there is an enormous amount of material in that book which you will never get to in lecture and you will never test them on come exam time. Students have a hard enough time learning just what I lecture on and discuss with them well. Why do I need to burden them with a lot of extra material, particularly if it’s likely that they won’t read it in the first place?

Honestly, when is the last time you read your entire survey textbook from cover to cover? Would you rather cover everything and have them remember next to nothing or would you rather cover less material and have them learn it better because the readings reinforce what you actually teach? So go ahead, Apple: Kill the bloody textbook. I won’t mourn its passing because I’ve been teaching textbook free for over a year now.

The mass market paperback, on the other hand, is a whole ‘nother story. Not only do I want page numbers so that students can follow along with discussions in class and footnotes so that they can do research with those books as a starting point, I want space in which to write my questions about the entire text, since I always assign the entire text.

I’m a hi-lighter, a page corner turner, a creator of marginalia and I tend to write all my discussion questions on the title page of every book I assign. This saves me the terrible burden of having to re-read every repeat book every time a new semester rolls around.* Nobody is going to be coming out with a new version of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test anytime soon just to make more money, and that’s precisely the way I like it.

Historians’ offices are full of books for a reason. Maybe you could talk me into reading novels on a Kindle or an iPad (if I weren’t convinced that Apple and Amazon were plotting to ruin my favorite pastime) because I know I’ll never go back to the vast majority of them again.** However, I won’t even give up the paper copies of my history books when Hell freezes over because I’d rather read than skate.

* To be fair to myself, I still re-read every book I assign (even the classics) at least every three or four times I teach it just to make sure I still remember the good stuff.

** Notice which books Historiann, my original inspiration for this whole no-textbook thing, is keeping in this post. It’s the same rationale.

Yet some radicals want to go stir up our subjects for their own ends. As USA Today explains:

With their promise of ubiquity, convenience and perhaps affordability, e-textbooks have arrived in fits and starts throughout college campuses. And publishers and book resellers are spending millions wooing students to their online stores and e-reader platforms as mobile technology improves the readability of the material on devices such as tablet computers.

[Emphasis added].

Hey edtech people! You realize that it’s professors, not students, who pick what textbooks get assigned, don’t you? What exactly are you doing to woo us? Indeed, convincing students to demand e-books might actually piss us all off, making the adoption of electronic texts less rather than more likely. You’d think a little market research would have been enough to make that discovery.

Seriously, I see that college students want to use Facebook in their courses. Do you really think most of us are ever going to let that happen? Saying no to our students is part of our job description.

I sure hope Apple doesn’t make this same mistake. If they do though, I am more than prepared to work for them anytime as a consultant as my kingdom’s revenues are nothing like those of the business professors a few kingdoms over from me and I’m too much of a pacifist to ever declare war.

Why do business professors generally make more money than history professors? The answer, trying to be fair about it, is that business professors have non-academic alternatives. That means that universities have to compete with marketers in order to hire a marketing professor, accounting firms to hire an accounting professor, etc. History professors…well I guess we have Plan B, which hasn’t really been worked out yet.

Yet this whole line of argument assumes that the academic labor market is, in fact, free: that there are a number of options out there for people seeking better employment, that they are well-informed of all those options and that they won’t be afraid to risk moving. But what if the academic labor market isn’t free after all? There’s an article in the new Harper’s (so new that it’s not even on the web site as I write this) about monopoly employers, who (if I remember my economics right) are actually monopsonists – One buyer of labor and many sellers. It mostly covers workers in the computer industry and the chicken industry, but a description of a free (labor) market there, provided as contrast, doesn’t apply much to academia either.

I’ll take each trait one at a time:

“Most important is an equality between the seller and the buyer, achieved by ensuring that that there are many buyers as well as sellers.

The deliberate restructuring of demand has eliminated that possibility.

Second is transparency. Everyone sees the quantity and the quality of the product on offer, and the price at which each deal is done.

Those of us in state schools can usually find out everyone else’s salary without too much trouble. But do you know their courseload? Do you know their perks? Are you rude enough to ask?

A third characteristic is a tendency to deliver egalitarian outcomes.

I probably make about $35,000/year less than the average business professor at my university and I have a higher courseload. But then again, tell that to our adjuncts.

Adjunct faculty in the humanities make less than well-supported graduate students at most universities, yet they carry most of the teaching load in many places. And don’t tell me that’s because they don’t do research, because today’s adjunct faculty are just as capable of putting out books as anyone who’s lucky enough to have the time to write when not teaching just two or three classes each semester.

A free labor market would create something akin to equal pay for equal work. Since academia is nothing like it, there must be some reason why the academic labor market isn’t free. The New Faculty Majority blog posts this part of an article on art that suggests a parallel to academia:

Classical economic models assume that suppliers don’t have any particular emotional attachment to what they’re supplying; all they really want to do is to make money. As a result, if they’re not making money, they’ll exit the industry, leaving more to go around for everyone else. As we see from Kirk Lynn’s contribution to the discussion, however, many artists (especially artist-entrepreneurs) have far too much passion for their work to consider exiting solely for financial reasons. The result of this lack of exit is a surfeit of fantastic art that few aside from its creators have time to take in.

Perhaps then they exploit us (to differing degrees) because we care. Since you’ll take less to do the work which you find meaning in and enjoy, then we’ll pay you less. I know we’re always free to quit, but what do you do if you actually believe in what you’re doing and want to try to make academia better? I guess we could all try to become Blue Meanies administrators, but what if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror each morning?

You could always start a blog! Or maybe not. This is from Reason #76 over at a blog that you really should be reading already:

Why? Why are academics—of all people—afraid of writing (and speaking) honestly about their profession? Why do so many of those who do express themselves feel compelled to do so anonymously? The answer lies in the staggering power imbalance between academics and the people who employ them. That imbalance is so great because of the crippling realities of the academic job market. The consequences of offending your colleagues and superiors in any way can be dire, because until you have tenure (see Reason 71) your employment is insecure; you are easily replaced.

But if we just worked all together now…

The public relations problem for private equity capitalists at firms like Bain, KKR and Blackstone is that they’re the agents of the creative destruction part of capitalism. They aim to take over underperforming firms and operate them more efficiently. [Steven] Davidoff, who worked on merger and acquisition deals as a lawyer before becoming a professor at Ohio State, says there’s no doubt that in that process people can get hurt.

“Sometimes operating them efficiently means that employees lose their jobs, plants are closed down and companies are restructured,” he says.

This is the philosophy that the people who control education are putting into practice right now. Our local school district announced the closing of three schools in Pueblo last Friday, including the elementary school two blocks from my house. Similarly, I find this prospect from Fortune magazine’s The Future Issue absolutely terrifying:

[C]orporations, frustrated by the skills gap of high school grads, may open schools of their own. Wal-Mart High, anyone?

Vocational education for all, anyone? I guarantee you that in this future there will be no classroom time devoted to the great historical questions of modern times, such as why we let Wal-Mart destroy this nation’s social and economic fabric in the first place.

And if you don’t think higher ed is already facing these same kind of efficiency considerations then you’re living on Mars. Why is there no History Department at the University of Phoenix? Because it’s not profitable. Colleges, especially for-profit colleges, live by efficiency. History departments die by efficiency because sitting around contemplating the answers to ageless questions doesn’t really do all that much for the gross national product. Therefore, I think we in history and many closely-related fields will disappear in the coming wave of technology-induced efficiency unless we offer a different set of values through which to justify our existence.

I happen to be rather fond of joy. Sitting around contemplating the answers to ageless questions may not be efficient, but it is lots of fun.

I went to the University of Pennsylvania as an undergrad during the mid-1980s. At that time, the Wharton School of Business really determined the mindset of the entire place. I hung out with the engineers and the comp lit majors, but I did know a lot of Wharton students.* While most of them can undoubtedly buy and sell me several times over by now, I know for a fact that as a history and political science major I enjoyed my classes a lot more than they did.

I, for one, am sick and tired of trying to defend the humanities by arguing that it teaches a particular skill set that will help you get employed (although it does). That’s a losing argument. Students who are worried about that will major in business or computer science anyways…and they’ll often be miserable as a result. I think people should major in history because history is fun, just like they should go to college because learning is fun too.

At least it should be. While I have never taken a class at the University of Phoenix, I’d bet good money that an online, mostly-vocational education is no fun at all. [It certainly doesn't sound fun in this article from Harper's.] The University of Phoenix model is, however, very efficient. Which one of those considerations is more important to you? Which one of those considerations do you think is more important to Mitt Romney? Via the Edge of the American West, I see that Romney is quite enamored with Full Sail University, a Florida for-profit school that charges $80,000 for a 21-month program in video game art. That program has a graduation rate of 14 percent. If this is the future of higher education then we are all doomed.

At least with the Democrats, the humanities as they’re supposed to be might drag on for a little while longer.

* Including my freshman roommate, Bernie Madoff’s surviving son, Andrew.