Looks like San Jose State’s outsourced MOOC adventure is off to a bright start. In fact, things are going so well that the school is going to do what American University already has, and just chill for a bit.
Translation from provost-speak to English: “Umm, we decided to do this, and facts aren’t going to change that now. Move along. As soon as you people stop paying attention to what we’re doing, we can go back to doing it.”
Being a young teacher who is lucky enough to have full-time work but not fortunate enough to be on the tenure track, I occasionally romanticize the material existences of the actual institutionally certified professors I know. Not the adjuncts; not even the lucky lecturers; no, the real professors who have tenure or who can maybe get tenure someday. Those folks. They must have houses to themselves and own their Priuses outright. Right?
Right?
Oh dammit. No, reports Katherine Harris, at least not if you teach at a public university. Her poignant, pragmatic essay is worth reading. Still, as Doc Sportello would say, Bummer.
As Ryan has pointed out, it’s hard for us to not comment a lot about the state of higher education because we both have a vested interest in seeing it not completely destroy itself. It’s a topic that makes for strange bedfellows and challenges the political categories we all too easily apply to ourselves and others. For instance, Bob Samuels is the president of UC-AFT (the union that represents non-tenured faculty in the University of California system), while Alan Jacobs teaches at Baylor University and writes for The American Conservative. By conventional metrics, one is a progressive and one is a traditionalist Christian conservative, but both have written a lot about how the push toward eliminating small classes in favor of MOOCs is a terrible idea for students. Both Samuels and Jacobs are educational conservationists. These aren’t people opposed to making meaningful changes to the way universities are run (everyone but administrators admit that administrative bloat must be reversed), but rather people who want to conserve what higher education does best: introducing students to new ideas and people through lectures, personal instruction, debates, and meaningful face-to-face social interaction. Having to share space with someone and their ideas is a really powerful thing. As anyone who reads internet comment boards knows, the web specializes in letting us (and training us to) talk past one another because the other person isn’t actually there to respond. This is one of the reasons why segregation, whether written into the law, de facto, by choice, or via technology is so awful: it prevents us from doing the messy work of having to argue with others, defend our own positions, and think on the fly. There is no lag-time in real life, and no substitute for having to look someone in the eye and treat him as a real, valid human being, even as he says things that challenge your sense of how the world works. That’s an education, and the kind that will benefit one in almost any career.
Similarly, the folks running down traditional educational models and/or pimping MOOCmania are also an eclectic bunch. From Ivy League-educated “libertarians,” to the virtuous conservative Bill Bennett, to the mostly Democratic mandarins of Silicon Valley, the crew trying to tell us how traditional models of education are outdated is hard to pin down politically. So, to borrow a term from one of our favorites here at TRG, Evgeny Morozov, these folks can best be understood as “solutionists.” They see a problem (and as Ryan and I have made clear, there are tons of problems in higher ed that have nothing to do with MOOCs), and their first instinct is to blow things up. They also love blaming professors, as if professors run universities (or even university systems) anymore. There are reformers who aren’t “solutionists,” like Vance Fried, and while I don’t agree with some of his ideas (consolidating all of the humanities into one major is dumb, and he seemingly thinks teaching 5 writing-intensive classes is the same as teaching 5 sections of algebra), I at least get the sense that he understands that education is about much more than the transmission of information. People of good faith can disagree about how to fix things, but they must sincerely be interested in fixing things in order for the conversations to be productive.
The latest smart take from the “hey, maybe we should be a bit more critical of MOOCs and the people who are pushing them” camp comes from Scott L. Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College. His basic thesis is so simple and obvious that I am amazed that it hadn’t occurred to me:
The corporate world recognizes the virtues of proximity in its own human resource management. Witness, for example, Yahoo’s recent decision to eliminate telecommuting and require employees to be present in the office. CEO Marissa Mayer’s memo reads as a mini-manifesto for close learning:
“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Why do boards of directors still go through the effort of convening in person? Why, in spite of all the fantasies about “working from anywhere,” are “creative classes” still concentrating in proximity to one another: the entertainment industry in LA, information technology in the Bay Area, financial capital in New York City? The powerful and the wealthy are well aware that computers can accelerate the exchange of information, and facilitate low-level “training.” But not the development of knowledge, much less wisdom.
Newstok’s entire piece is worth reading, as is Alan Jacobs’ response, wherein he reminds us to spend less time listening to the solutionists, and more time observing them:
If physical presence is as important in education as the technologists’s actions say it is, then perhaps their energies are misapplied. Instead of looking for ways to eliminate or bypass brick-and-mortar schools — and, not incidentally, making a hefty profit for themselves in doing so — maybe they should bend their considerable intellectual powers to the more challenging, less destructive, and far more meaningful challenge of making college education more affordable for everyone who can truly benefit from it.
And lest you think that conservationists are simply trying to prop up traditional learning models in order to line their own pockets, and are therefore no different from the Silicon Valley folks trying to tear these models down, keep this in mind: 75% of people teaching at American universities aren’t tenure-track, will never make salaries comparable to what people in the tech sector make at mid-career, and could actually probably make a lot more money by jumping on the MOOC train now.
Are you serious, UC?
When a culture endlessly suggests to its children that the humanities are frivolous and effeminate, and when that culture looks the other way while institutions conceived in the Enlightenment ruthlessly downsize the support given to people who safeguard and pass along humanity’s intellectual traditions, you end up with an economy-strangling clusterfuck distinguished by “not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don’t know how to write well or express themselves clearly.”
Given how much TGR has covered the decay of American higher education (hey, it’s the sector we know best), this sounds like something Dan or I would say. But since it isn’t, the quote is probably from some idealistic niche publication, like n+1 or the New Yorker. Maybe even Slate. Yeah? The kind of outlet that gets links on Arts & Letters Daily.
But no. It’s Business Insider. Turns out that some corporate managers are terrified by the applications they’re getting from the current labor pool. Turns out they’re desperate for art-history romantics and inveterate readers.
If you are a liberal pro-marketeer like me, as opposed to someone in favor of anti-market corporate oligarchy, you’ve shivered while surveying the road map adopted by American university regents over the past few decades:
1. Cut funding for undergraduate education. In other words, spend less on giving your students (who pay more in tuition every year) access to classes that have been lovingly curated by experts who are intensely dedicated to the education of those students.
2. Build a gym or a stadium or something.
3. Cut funding for undergraduate education.
4. Stock up on administrators.
5. Cut more funding.
6. Keep cutting. Exploit or invent a crisis if you have to.
7. Realize that enough members of the public are slowly getting wise to the fact that this shitshow doesn’t actually teach kids to be rational, creative adults who can participate in a mature democracy. Schedule some press conferences, preferably with rich people who work in Silicon Valley/have given TED talks/are the governor of California.
8. Announce frantic, heavily funded effort to have private companies fix things because the public sector is so poor and dumb and inefficient. Emphasize gigantic online “classes.”
9. Hope that people, even those in a position to send their kids out to get four-year degrees, are too busy fighting to keep their health insurance to care about the solution not being a solution.
One of the grimmer ironies of the past decade is that the decay of American higher education, and in particular the decline of its commitment to humanism and the core sciences (i.e., the liberal arts), has moved a number of professors to write excellent books, articles, and blogs about said collapse. For example, there’s Chris Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University; Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors; Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island; Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works; Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty; and Bob Samuels’s “Changing Universities” blog, which focuses on California and has for years tirelessly mapped the dangers of joining “the Republican desire to shrink big government and privatize public institutions . . . with the Democratic need to be associated with progress and private-public joint ventures.”
On that note, from The Awl back in January, here is Maria Bustillos with a fitting title: “Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea for the Future of College.” The depressing takeaway:
Now California state universities are set to begin enrolling students in MOOCs for credit. Earlier this month, the president of San Jose State University, Mo Qayoumi, announced that his institution will commence a pilot program: 300 students will receive course credit for online classes in remedial algebra, college algebra and statistics. Qayoumi was joined at the press conference by California Governor Jerry Brown and Sebastian Thrun, the controversial ex-Stanford prof and co-founder of Udacity, which will supply classes for the program at the cost of $150 per customer, er, student.
“This is the single cheapest way in the country to earn college credit,” Thrun “quipped.”
It’s not quite free, as early MOOC proponents began by promising. It is worth mentioning, too, that Udacity is a venture-funded startup, that classes will be supervised not by tenured profs but by Udacity employees, and that Thrun declined to tell the Times how much public money his company will be raking in for this pilot—or what more may have been promised should the pilot prove “successful.”
Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?
A more recent post here on TGR deals with how this pilot program turned out.
And take funding back to prior levels? I feel like the cop in that scene from The Big Lebowski where the Dude goes to retrieve his car from the impound lot. Leads!
I am shallow when it comes to books, and buying most of mine used hasn’t compromised my pickiness; it has deepened it. The aesthetics of a cover, of a spine, of a novel’s typeface, are important to me. An ugly cover; a brutalized spine or floppy, grubby corners; a big USED PRICE sticker on the back, below the final blurb; too much marginal notation from a previous owner; a clunky font; whatever, and I’m out. Indeed, the terrible covers favored by Vintage Contemporaries in the 1980s (see examples here and here) have led me into a half-decade-long project of replacing my copies. (Poorish young people end up with these dated designs when people who used to be young and poorish upgrade.)
Regardless of how well-kept or aesthetically pleasing a book is, I don’t care for hardcovers. Besides costing too much, they take up more space in your bag; long experience as a student using public transit taught me to hate them. Moreover, they don’t turn up nearly as much in used-book stores. And there is also something earthier and more democratically authentic about paperbacks. I like their portability both on a personal level and a philosophical one. They pass through a lot of hands, they make many people happy, or at least divert them, until they end up on some dork collector’s bookshelf.
Pretty archaic, huh? Print media. Wow. What with all the Internet and the technology, it must be dying out, that format.
Granted, most of the Digital Natives in my college writing classes prefer printed texts to digital ones (over and over, despite their general addiction to screens, for class they want something they can highlight and underline with a pen), and, granted, nobody ever seems to adduce hard statistics to prove that digital formats are anywhere close to universally favored by the buying public, but nonetheless one of the contemporary West’s favorite narratives is that printed books can’t compete with e-books, which are just too slick and easy to get. Print is dying, people don’t read print anymore, print is too expensive, print is old-fashioned, and despite whatever your teacher with his/her graduate degree in the humanities might tell you, print is, you know, dying. Haven’t you seen any TED talks or read a Thomas Friedman column? Print is dead, y’all. Long live digital things.
Leaving aside that it is historically stupid to believe that some new Technology is going to ecstatically solve every tedious efficiency the world presents us with, and leaving aside the fact that this is true even though humans, as a tool-making species, are always coming up with new technologies (e.g., the wheel and antibiotics), there is another gigantic, flashing reason to be skeptical about the extinction narrative: the enormous companies that produce e-books profit enormously from convincing people that only e-books are worth buying nowadays.
Always be on the lookout for the percentage. In other words, ask who stands to make money off of some “inevitable” trend. It usually turns out that some large player (or more often, a small set of players) has an interest in playing up the supposed inevitability:
Gerry Donaghy, book buyer at the largest indie bookseller in the US, Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, says that the major publishers have a compelling reason to perpetuate a paperbacks-are-dying narrative, for one simple reason: because paperbacks are the most common books to be bought secondhand. “Publishers have a vested interest in keeping the e-book dominant—it allows them to control the ecosystem, because there are no used e-book sales,” Donaghy says. A paperback copy of, say, Eat Pray Love, can be sold and resold ad infinitum, thanks to Amazon and your local used book store. But for multiple people to read that same book on a Kindle or Nook, each of them has to buy it for $10.
Read the rest of the article here. Or read a summary here: “Paperbacks will survive in many prominent genres and only die out if enough consumers buy into the corporate publishing industry’s greedy bullshit.”
Used paperbacks are a desperately needed form of cultural continuity (all those texts passing through all those hands); in a purely material respect they are more varied and interesting than the latest e-book download; they don’t need batteries, and they aren’t scared of dust or the occasional blip of moisture; they are usually cheap. That final factor always helps me make up my mind.
If you love post-middle-class America, buy paperbacks, even if you buy them from . . . Amazon. But, figuratively speaking, fuck your Kindle.
The General Reader 
