YUFA News

Massed on the barren plain the new barbarians, corporate entities promising cost reduction, greater efficiency and productivity, and vast profits. Slouching among them the giants Jones and Phoenix, diploma mills dispensing fine degrees of mayhem. Skulking in the shadows, management picking off aging defenders of the wall.

Behind the wall of crumbling brick and mortar an unlikely band of heroes, the professoriat lightly armed with red pens and discussion papers, nervously prodding the black box proffered as a gift by the corporate entities.

Is it the ultimate tool for transferring knowledge, the new philosopher’s stone able to convert at high speed the common coin into corporate gold? Is it the tool of a corporate-management agenda to commodify education? Is there a cat inside and will it consume us, turning knowledge producers into content providers serving a team of technicians?

This was the dark vision of the conference and the great fear: faculty replaced by a bank of computers, the wall ploughed under by online and distance education (OE & DE), education itself “unbundled” and commodified, Taylorism (deskilling) triumphant in the last bastion of resistance to corporatization. Several speakers worried about management’s enthusiastic embrace of technology as a panacea for access to education and reduction in costs. James Sacouman (Acadia) described his ongoing battle at “the quintessential laptop university” to prevent the degradation of knowledge (the basis of faculty power) into information. Criticizing the assumption that the new is inherently superior, Ingrid Banks (Virginia Tech) has refused to teach online on the grounds that her presence in the classroom as a black woman is a crucial part of her pedagogy of difference. The dark vision weakened after a weekend of sober second thought, but remains as the dystopian spur to renewed faculty activism.

Other speakers reported getting it right or almost right after a great deal of work: Michael Gismond on Athabasca’s workload agreement in the context of a view of technology as liberating; Pam Grimm on the faculty’s successful negotiations on rights at Kent State (of which more later), and Steven Lerman on the concept of Open Courseware at MIT, where the mission has been to use technology to enhance the quality of education, and where faculty have achieved “complete control” of their project, if not entirely of time constraints on research. There were other faintly positive voices, but for or against OE and DE, all agreed that designing, developing, and teaching online courses requires so much more work than traditional courses that workload becomes the major bargaining issue and research suffers.

Time and workload issues recurred in every plenary session and workshop. Even traditional courses now take longer because of email and the indefinite extension of office hours. We lose time in front of the screen, finding files and losing them again, and worse we compress time into a series of peaks while overextending ourselves in course and committee work. Online courses require up to one hundred hours of development to produce one hour of course material. All of this eats seriously into research, and is our own doing. The more we chase the money seductively available for online development and support, the less control we have over how we spend our time.

Heather Menzies (Carleton) placed the technical demands of OE in another context, an erosion of shared time and space on campus and a loss of community, that community of shared passion and confidence that sustains us as intellectuals. We close our office doors, stay home when not teaching, stay away from brown bag seminars when, increasingly rarely, they exist. Her interviews reveal a syndrome on campus of disengagement, disaffection, and exhaustion. In contrast, one university in New Zealand still schedules a daily tea break that all faculty are expected, by one another, to attend. We need, she says, to reclaim the commons. We need to resist the intrusion of corporate values of profit and efficiency into the university and our own projects. We must remember and reinvigorate the social nature of knowledge. Online communication may contribute to the problem of disengagement; it may also become part of the solution when used flexibly in balance with the virtues of face-to-face teaching.

Online education may have serious consequences for academic freedom even if, as David Noble (York) argued, it no longer exists, in practice. As with engagement, use it or lose it, and as far as Nancy Olivieri is concerned, we lost it through a combination of cowardice, apathy, and disengagement. The corporate drive to produce and market online courses makes all of this worse, if possible. The transparency of online material makes it and us subject to surveillance by lurking third parties, especially after September 11, and this possibility unions must address. But faculty associations and unions have an even greater role in cleaning up an atmosphere polluted by silence, secrecy, intimidation, and fear. They must provide the crucial context, for individual expression, of a community with its mouth open. Chastened, silent, we sat, indeed, with open mouths.

Pressure on intellectual property rights arose because of the fabled profitability of OE. That myth has been punctured, and many universities are following Kent State’s surrender of property rights to faculty in 1995. Pam Grimm points out, however, that her union has still to negotiate the faculty’s right of refusal to teach distance learning, as well as the university’s right to contract out such courses. All changes in the circumstances of work have to be negotiated and every bargaining committee needs a member informed about the relevant issues. Hard bargaining remains on several fronts: faculty control, overload pay, the right of faculty to move at their own level. But protectionist language isn’t enough: we must address the larger problems of corporatization and the growing imbalance between full and adjunct faculty. Class size is probably the crucial issue, given that the computer is here to stay: 20 is the maximum size for effective online or distance education.

Larry Glen (Central Connecticut) reminds us that academics panicked over the introduction of the textbook, correspondence courses, and television education. Online education will not supplant faculty. Managed education on behalf of profit may, however, corrupt us as it has other humanist projects. We must defeat the entrepreneurs to the extent that they intrude on our mission: education as a public good that benefits the society. We were told not to be shy in defending the profession The way forward is to go back to basics. We’re there for the student, who isn’t, by the way, particularly eager for online education.

This fearful black box is finally what we make of it It fits perfectly, as it happens, into gaps in our beleaguered wall, especially in those places deficient in student-faculty interaction. Used in moderation to complement traditional education in hybrid courses, it seems rich in potential. I’m thinking especially of my own online course, English 1100 (developed by Allen Koretsky), where computer labs in addition to conventional lectures and seminars allow students to make astonishing progress in their ability to write clearly and coherently. Unfortunately, class size will increase from 20 to 30 next year.