I have very eclectic interests. Labor history. The history of technology. The history of food. Monty Python. Ferris Bueller. The music of the Rolling Stones. The survival of higher education in America. All this makes the fact that I’ve stuck to one subject on this blog for so long really quite amazing.
The advantage of having these eclectic interests is that it makes it possible for me to draw some connections that other people might miss. So let me begin by briefly summarizing two rather amazing articles that I read this morning and then trying to pull them together. First, the distinguished Atrios guest poster alumni and Corrente blogger Lambert Strether published a higher education post over on Naked Capitalism that really is quite epic. I’m not sure there’s all that much here that I didn’t know already, but it is certainly very helpful to see it in one place.
He begins with a discussion of the actual privatizing of public universities, citing this Bloomberg piece:
After gaining greater independence, many public universities have increased tuition, raising fears that West Chester would follow suit.
“For any university that leaves the state system, tuition and fees will likely go up — creating an added burden for students and their families,” Frank Brogan, chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, said in a statement opposing the bill when it was introduced.
The independence drive is analogous to the rise in K-12 education of charter schools… Like charters, breakaway universities want less red tape and more freedom to experiment with academic programs.
I had actually heard that the University of Alabama (of all places) actually increased faculty salaries after doing something similar, but anybody who puts their faith in the majority of college administrators (or even a significant minority) to do the same thing is deluding themselves. As Lambert goes on to point out, the usual effect of more revenue at a corporate university is for it to become even more corporate, despite the fact that their students still need to depend upon public assistance through student loans in order to attend there at all. Welfare is to Walmart as student loans are to the corporate university, especially the for-profit corporate university, but even the ones that you’d have thought were better than that too.
Skipping a lot (please do read the whole thing), Lambert concludes with an analogy to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine:
It’s almost like there’s a neo-liberal playbook, isn’t there? No underpants gnomes, they! Defund, claim crisis, call for privatization… Profit! [ka-ching]. Congress underfunds the VA, then overloads it with Section 8 patients, a crisis occurs, and Obama’s first response is send patients to the private system. Congress imposes huge unheard-of, pension requirements on the Post Office, such that it operates at a loss, and it’s gradually cannibalized by private entities, whether for services or property. And charters are justified by a similar process.
Having read that book more than once now, what I want to point out here is that this Shock Doctrine-style privatization actually began a long time ago. No, you don’t have to get a charter to operate as if you were corporate, all you have to do is outsource large sections of your core mission to private companies, just like the U.S. government did in Iraq.
Consider, for example, education technology. This is where the second great article I read this morning comes into the picture. While I normally wouldn’t be caught dead reading the Educause Review (since David Noble called them out as corporate stooges about fifteen years ago), they might actually be getting better as they published this remarkable article by Jim Groom and Brian Lamb called “Reclaiming Innovation,” [h/t David Kernohan].
As you might imagine, my favorite part is where they go after the Learning Management System. For purposes of this post, the key argument of their five-point LMS condemnation is #4:
The expense of enterprise LMSs is an inexhaustible drain on institutional resources. Even when they are operating at optimal efficiency, the commitment required to maintain them represents an immense set of challenges. And any technologists who have been involved in a migration from one system to another, or in significant upgrades of the same system, can testify to how time-consuming and troublesome these processes will be.
In other words, all the techies you’re hiring to keep the thing operating could be going to keeping tuition low. More importantly for my audience here, all that money going to Blackboard could be going to raising faculty salaries or even just giving adjuncts a living wage. And the really insane thing is that none of these G.D. things make anybody (students or faculty) who uses them particularly happy!!! They are solutions that solve nothing. In fact, what they mostly do is create new problems.
Read the whole thing to see Groom and Lamb’s elegant solutions, but what I want to point out here to the education technology-inclined is that no matter how convincing you happen to be in your advocacy for open source anything, you’re still going to have to overcome the neo-liberal mindset that Lambert describes so well. You want to design something truly innovative and all they offer you is an electronic beast of burden. Worse yet, their ultimate neo-liberal wish is to use that beast of burden to put you out on the streets – to put you out, put you out, put you out of misery. Like the coal companies in Colorado one hundred years ago, they’re more interested in mules than people and that goes for students as well as faculty.
