This review has been accessed times since November 29, 2004 Robins, Kevin and Webster, Frank. (2002). The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets and Management. New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. x + 332 $24.50 ISBN 0-19-925793-0 Reviewed by John Rothfork Northern Arizona University November 29, 2004 I was initially excited to discover this book from Oxford University Press knowing that Oxford publishes many outstanding works. Unfortunately, this collection isn’t one of them. The anthology comprises 14 mostly journeyman essays that give the authors a chance to drone on about their personal interests rather than respond to a charge given by able editors to inform us about the emerging polices of distance education and how these contribute to restructuring higher education. The focus seems more British than American, although about 40% of the authors are American. Most of the essays are ho-hum; some are offered as the author’s stock or repeated message, others are taken from larger works. For example, a chapter from David Noble’s Digital Diploma Mills tells the story of how in the 1920s Columbia and the University of Chicago, among other universities, promoted correspondence education as a purely money making venture. Enrollment fees were nonrefundable and “together with fraudulent advertising and an indiscriminate enrolment policy, inescapably perfunctory instruction [by adjuncts] produced a dropout rate of 80 per cent” (p. 292). When a rare student completed the courses she would find them of little value because the credits could not be applied towards earning a degree, even from the school that offered them (p. 294). Noble suggests that distance education via the Internet may, in many cases, repeat this shoddy history. He asks, “If online education were truly the equivalent of classroom education, as its proponents suggest, why won’t the elite colleges and universities that have so avidly embraced it give full credit for this form of instruction?” (Noble, p. 23). Almost no one will give a direct answer to this question because it reveals too much. I think an important part of the answer is that senior faculty will not learn computer skills required to put their classes online, nor do the time-consuming work that online teaching requires. For different reasons, senior faculty and administrators agree that online course development and delivery is not comparable to publishing and is not evidence of professional growth. I assume many administrators are happy with the situation in which regular faculty give away their academic territory to more compliant IT (instructional technology) technicians and adjunct facilitators to offer a semblance of rigorous academic programs. The courses and programs are offered but they are ersatz. The reason they are not the real thing is that the “real” professor, who is a published authority in the area, may be involved in designing the course but not in teaching or delivering it. Some courses at some schools are accepted as “regular” credits. The online courses I teach at Northern Arizona University offer English department graduate credit that is undifferentiated from traditional classroom courses. In contrast, several California state universities offer what appear to be very similar courses. But they are offered by extension divisions, taught by adjuncts, and cannot be used to fulfill requirements in a degree program. (See, for example <http://www.unex.ucr.edu/certificates/technical.html>). Texas Tech has embarked on an interesting experiment in distance education. They are the national leader in the area of technical writing and they have just begun (fall 2004) to offer an online Ph.D. program <http://www.english.ttu.edu/tc/PhDOnline.htm>. This venture will likely succeed because it is not driven by the hope to attract thousands of students to produce windfall profits. The program is controlled by the English department and involves the regular faculty in developing and teaching the classes. Concord Law School offers another model of distance education that involves “real” faculty <http://www.concord.kaplan.edu/info/custom/concord/faculty/ faculty.asp?GUID=9DC3002583BE4B6A898C6C0691125B29238830058932521263>. These three schools offer examples of programs where the major difference from traditional education is in the medium of instruction. Tenured faculty continue to develop and teach courses. In contrast, a great deal of distance education is predicated on the bait and switch technique using branding to suggest that “customers” can buy a prestigious degree from a “real” university through online education. Students then find that rudimentary entertainment courses or minimally developed courses that hardly do more than offer a reading list are “facilitated” by ill paid M.A. level adjuncts trained to provide customer service satisfaction. They are not experts in some discipline who might offer rigorous professional judgments that continue to control “real” professions and disciplines. Western Governors’ University (WGU) Noble’s chapter is preceded by Timothy Luke’s essay describing the development of Virginia Tech’s Cyberschool <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/cyber/index.html/>, which the political science professor nominates as only “one among the nearly one thousand online universities that Forbes has counted out on the WWW” (p. 259). Unfortunately, he provides no citation to allow us to examine the list, which I could not find at Forbes <http://www.forbes.com/lists/>. Luke castigates what he calls “Noble’s paranoid anticommercialism” (p. 271) even though his bibliography suggests that he has only read a short online description of Digital Diploma Mills (2001) <http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/>. Luke believes that “Critiques like Noble’s run afoul of an assumption of ‘Disneyification’” (p. 272). By this he means that critics like Noble imagine big business to be a monolithic and fascist force possessing the power to arbitrarily mold society in any way it wishes. In contrast, Luke reminds us that “online learning already has been developing at universities for five years using much more basic and inexpensive techniques to generate a new mix” of interactive forms (p. 272). I doubt that anyone involved would agree that distance education is inexpensive, including Luke himself, who admits, “Digitalization costs more, not less” (p. 270). Prof. Luke’s other irritant is the Western Governor’s University (WGU: <http://www.wgu.edu/about_WGU/who_we_are.asp>), which he uses in a straw man argument. It is hard for me to imagine what institution WGU might threaten. The “WGU Mentors” page makes it clear that it also subscribes to the model of course facilitators and adjuncts, but it is hardly a match for the University of Phoenix. In November 2003, The University of Phoenix enrolled 91,000 online students. Luke is worried that “by 2006, or ten years after its inception, the WGU hopes to enroll 8,000 students in its competency-based degree programmes” (p. 262). He thinks “the real innovation of the WGU is this effort to create a new symbolic economy of academic achievement, moral economy of personal choice, and public economy of lower costs” (p. 263). What does this mean? Apparently Prof. Luke is concerned that WGU will be mistaken for a state university, will give degrees away by crediting “life experience” in place of real academic courses, and will charge less than Phoenix or DeVry. Although Luke has two degrees from the University of Arizona, he sounds strangely foreign and misinformed in writing, “Fortunately for now, the WGU lacks a great deal of credibility: it comes from the weakest, newest, and most powerless part of the US, or the Mountain West. Not one of its member institutions is considered a top-tier school” (p. 263). This is bad writing and sloppy research. WGU includes the states of Texas, Washington, Colorado, and Arizona. Is Luke is unaware that the University of Washington ranks second, after Johns Hopkins, on the list of universities receiving federal research money or that the flagship universities of these four Western states are listed among “The Top American Research Universities” <http://thecenter.ufl.edu/research2002.pdf>? Perhaps Prof. Luke would think I am wrong to associate “top-tier” schools with research universities. If Luke has some other basis for his judgment, it is perhaps implied in his conventional understanding of education: The WGU model of building a virtual university is unfortunate, because it purposely seems devoted to developing substitutes for traditional public and private universities by undercutting their missions of liberal education, civic socialization, and universal enlightenment with narrowly-focused labour force training agendas (p. 263). Calling distance education unfortunate, upstart, and plebian is not going to make it go away. Prof. Luke does offer the right suggestion when he writes, “The virtual university is a perfect place for academics to enter these discussions. Who builds it, how it is built, why it will be built, and where it is built are all questions whose answers will reshape academic life” (p. 278). But he is himself too much the traditional professor to accept that many of those involved in restructuring the university are likely to come from off-campus. Luke’s outlook and methods are illustrated in this rambling point about the “cyber space” nature of Internet communication and how this may influence one’s sense of identity: Moving from the spatio-temporal perspectives of territoriality to the acceleration effects of instant communication, all of Earth’s inhabitants may well wind up thinking of themselves more as contemporaries than as citizens; they may in the process slip out of the contiguous space, distributed by quota, of the old Nation-State (or City-State), which harboured the demos, and into the atopic community of a “Planet-State” that unfolds as “a sort of omnipolitan periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere” (p. 274). Too many of the essays indulge in this kind of ivory tower gobbledygook. Martin Trow: Consequences for Higher Education The clearest and more daring essay was written by Martin Trow <http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/mtrow/> who is a colleague of David L. Kirp. They are both faculty at UC–Berkeley’s School of Public Policy (see my review of Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (2003): <http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev302.htm>). Prof. Trow identifies five important points. The speed of change in hardware, software, and even the pedagogy of online instruction is so swift “that many big American universities are not doing much, if any, institution-wide planning for the adoption of the ICTs [information and communication technologies], but are giving these decisions over to departments and research units” (p. 303). An associated series of events—the spectacular and costly failures of Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and Britain’s Open University to create national or international distance programs—also cause university presidents to pause. Trow mentions more failures: “Everywhere we turn, we see major commitments by big institutions coming to naught […]. California created a Virtual University a few years ago, and gave it up a few months later. The Western Governors University, begun with much high level support, has scaled down its ambitions sharply” (p. 303). Trow also mentions the “total confusion in our courts and legislatures about what to do about Napster” and intellectual property rights that either seem meaningless anachronisms or impediments to the free flow of information on the Internet (p. 304). Internet based research and education blurs and weakens institutional and discipline boundaries making “all study inherently interdisciplinary.” The research library conceived as a vaguely monastic and elite institution to control access to rare information is a thing of the past. “Information comes online from everywhere, and liberates scholars from dependence on their own libraries” (pp. 305-6). This is heady for the mid-career scholar who knows how to do research. It is typically confusing for the undergraduate and novice because “the computer and web have an inherent bias towards research rather than scholarship” (p. 305). What Trow means is that the Internet provides raw data rather than scholarly explanation and guidance. It is not a classroom; it is not an edited anthology. When it seems to provide explanation, the novice finds it difficult to distinguish proselytism, propaganda, pseudo-science, and sales pitches from true scholarship. If one is not trained to understand rhetorical context and to interpret data in some academic or professional context, the “facts” either remain puzzling or are arbitrarily associated. In contrast to the Internet, research libraries are built by a long process of careful and learned judgments in selecting acquisitions. The Internet offers no reliable clues about the meaning of what we find there. Consider the first male pregnancy site: <http://www.malepregnancy.com/>. I have followed Mr. Lee’s alleged pregnancy for four years. When my colleagues ask their composition students if this site offers legitimate information they might use in a research paper, nearly half are likely to think it is legitimate. Prof. Trow identifies an essential point about the pragmatic nature of education: While research is increasingly independent of its traditional venues, research training is not. As far ahead as we can see, the physically close and extended relationship of student and mentor will be necessary for a student to become a scientist or scholar” (p. 316). This pragmatic understanding of knowledge and education, offered years ago by Bucky Fuller among others, is perennially discovered by those who persist long enough in trying to find out why Star Trek notions of what computers can do fail (see Dreyfus). The problem is that the Internet makes ever more information easily available to the consumer or entrepreneur who, as “customer,” is unguided by the context and technique supplied by years of education or professional practice. Trow says, “Commercial firms are indifferent to the status of the university or college where research of interest to them can be done. And with broader access to all institutions, the students in different kinds of institutions begin to look more alike” (p. 306). Initially this is liberating, allowing talented and insightful students to communicate with elite scholars, but the disrespect of academic boundaries cannot be sustained when, for example, half of the students (apparently informed by John Dewey’s pervasive political paradigm that requires everything to be discussed and voted on) feel entitled to express their opinion about Mr. Lee’s pregnancy without feeling obligated to learn enough about the biology of human reproduction to know that the proposition is absurd. Prof. Trow’s clinical and descriptive tone is frightening when he coolly predicts the erosion and loss of the familiar routine and context for much of higher education below the elite level where coaching and mentorship are indispensable for educating the truly gifted and talented. First he makes the usual point about commodification, writing that distance education transforms “knowledge into a commodity to be bought from scientists and scholars and sold over the internet worldwide.” Prof. Trow makes sure we get the point that it is not simply the objects of knowledge that become commodities, but “the teaching itself, and not just the books that are instruments of teaching.” Teaching is either tacitly invested in the commodity so that someone from the same culture understands the context and application or it is considered inessential until end users begin to complain or ignore the product (p. 307). “Here we see the blurring of the traditional distinction between secondary and higher education” in which secondary level students may have a general notion about a subject but lack a detailed and performance based knowledge of the techniques needed to produce or use professional knowledge. Prof. Trow predicts that “the rationalization of teaching through the new technologies must tend to reduce even further the professional status of the academic.” He says “we have seen it happen in secondary school systems around the world” (p. 311) and I would add that we see it rapidly changing the community college, which currently relies on adjuncts to teach 65% of the classes. It is not difficult to predict that the same trend will erode teaching at undistinguished, non-research universities where the difference between minimal competence and excellence is either unrecognized or a matter of bluster. Prof. Trow states the obvious, that until now distance education has been: less immediately useful for courses which involve the search for insight and understanding in art and ideas, where a teacher wants to be in the company of one or a few students, each with a copy of a book in his or her hand, exploring the significance and meaning of a passage or character or event or poem or philosophical idea (p. 308). This description of an honors class is not likely to change, but to be supplemented in various ways. Trow mentions medieval scholars from around the country “studying an illuminated manuscript more closely and effectively through an interactive video connection” than they could have had they all been in the same room (p. 308). The PBS science program Nova offered an even more convincing example in a recent program concerning the use of computer technology to recover some of Archimedes’ incredible and nearly lost work <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/>. Prof. Trow again states the obvious that most of us overlook or deny, namely that many undergraduates are primarily or initially interested in the university for the sports, parties, nightlife, and opportunities to meet girls or guys; and because the alternative is to get a dull job. Some parents are interested in “offloading late adolescents” (p. 315) into a kind of half-way house institution where they are less likely to get into criminal mischief and may pick up job skills. I like to imagine Prof. Trow addressing Prof. Luke when he says: The point here is that the survival of the traditional university does not depend on its maintaining a near monopoly of advanced teaching and research—a monopoly which it has already lost. The traditional university performs a variety of other functions, some having little to do with education per se (p. 316). Nostalgia, Haughtiness, and Sermons John Urry expresses nostalgia for a “relatively slow-moving curricula and traditions of scholarly work” that used to be “organized in terms of a daily cycle of unchangeable time-tabled classes, a seasonal cycle of weeks, terms and years, a lengthy cycle of degrees, and traditions and ritual that hark back to Medieval Europe.” He implies that the earlier academic pace and aesthetics have been scraped for what sounds like an American Main Street notion of college; “‘just-for-you’ (and ‘right now’) modes of higher education” (p. 24). Urry’s metaphor is one of cultural loss that fails to hide his upper class bias. Urry expresses a wish for university life to slow down or escape from “this chaotic, mobile, global landscape as analogous to the internet, as unstable, contingent, and fluid-like” as possible (p. 29). Naturally, he doesn’t tell us who is to pay for this refuge and leisurely pace. He notes the concern for university branding in which “McDonalds is the paradigm case.” He develops a bitter analogy to suggest that the emerging university will operate like a McDonalds franchise to offer “low skilled standardized jobs” to adjuncts; “new products” or programs resembling “Chicken McNuggets” that owe as much for their form to advertising and media technology as to their organic origin; and debased pseudo-rituals suggested by the student slang of “grazing,” which means “the eating of standardized fast food bought from take-out restaurants” as one rushes down the street towards some frantic and meaningless engagement. Urry asks, “There are apparently 140,000 students now doing UK degrees without actually being at a UK institution; what we can ask is the product that they are consuming?” (p. 24). The implication is that they are not learning to be gentlemen. Gerald Delanty offers an impressionist history of higher education that illustrates the trope of loss and decay, specifically a decline from British standards of class sliding towards American chaos and déclassé gluttony. Delanty finds the model for the university in the imperial German Enlightenment project that hoped to bring “about the rationalization of culture in the name of universalistic science.” In the twentieth century America developed “the ‘civic university’—based on disciplinary organized knowledge and the accreditation of professionals.” Delanty predicts that in “the coming global revolution of the twenty-first century […] the university dissolves disciplinarity, institutionalizes market values and enters the post-industrial information age” (p. 32). These three stages can be associated with the vocabulary of social class. The first model “was designed to produce gentlemen and clerics” (p. 35). “The American university sought to make the university serve the civic community” as it understood itself, which is to say that African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and women were either invisible or consigned to silent and servile roles (p. 37). The postmodern university resembles the Internet in offering information for personal and idiosyncratic use because, says Delanty, “universalistic values have withdrawn from most areas of life, leaving only procedural forms of rationality in the place of substantive values” (45). “Withdrawn” is it? This slick passive voice construction advocates the conservative pole in the culture wars. When were universalistic values anything more than colonial and class oppression? Delanty’s ending is theatrical. His suggestions of cultural confusion, indirection, and totally free individuals needing professors, if not aristocrats, to guide their life choices is, to say the least, exaggerated. The supposedly decultured individuals that Delanty images continue to speak English, apparently use the Internet, inhabit some political realm, and continue to follow bourgeois cultural scripts. This gives Delanty the hope that the university “can provide the structures for public debate between expert and lay cultures” and if we fail to generate some easy consensus, then “Perhaps it is the role of the university to enable society to live with choice and uncertainty” (p. 46). Prof. Maso Miyoshi teaches literature. His essay is a rambling complaint about how the current discussion of the emerging virtual university is “solely concerned with the institutional economy” and has “nothing whatever to say on the humanities, as if this branch of learning had already vanished” (p. 69). Miyoshi advises that “we should perhaps never talk about the modern university without recalling Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The relevance becomes apparent only when we recognize the implied claim that the forces involved in restructuring American higher education are no different than the European nineteenth century colonial oppression of Africa. Although he reports giving his paper on no fewer than eight previous occasions, Prof. Miyoshi’s moral indignation about the status of the humanities in the virtual university is both too general and too personal. Miyoshi offers the general litany involved in tracing the decline of the traditional university: “instead of regular faculty, contingency instructors”; “the for-profit behemoth, the University of Phoenix” (p. 58); the CEO as “the only model for presidents and chancellors of universities” (p. 59); and “the emergence of a global academic industry” (p. 68). So, what is to be done? He says the university is “no longer selling out; it has already been sold and bought. The deed has been written and signed, and the check already signed, too.” Nonetheless, the literature professor wants to continue some kind of good fight “to right the situation, to null the transaction and be just to all on earth.” To do this “we may have to relearn the sense of the world, the totality, that includes all peoples in every race, class, and gender” (p. 78), but this will apparently not be a lesson learned in literature classes at the new university where Miyoshi says the humanities will be offered “as a managerial training programme in metropolitan manners, style, and fashion, set aside for the socially ‘elite’ institutions” (p. 77). Urry and Delanty complain that distance education exposes and erodes the subsidy necessary to support elite education while Miyoshi complains that it serves only the likes of Babbitt. Benson and Harkavy also offer a rehash of papers “we have published elsewhere, beginning in 1991” (p. 169). In “Saving the Soul of the University” they express nearly religious ardor for their “proposed American system of higher education,” based, they think, on John Dewey’s work, which they “have to confess” they “knew almost nothing about” until 1985 when they began “to improve university-community relationships” (p. 195) for the University of Pennsylvania. They offer a socialist vision in which research competition for pure knowledge is the most egregious sin. They preach that the “egoistic, self-centered and self-aggrandizing competition among professors” as well as “the competitive ranking and rating game” (p. 205) produces “both university commodification and university-community conflict” (p. 199). They are absurdly parochial in making the suggestion that all higher education “should explicitly make solving the problem of the American [K-12] schooling system their highest institutional priority; their contributions to its solution should count heavily both in assessing their institutional performance and in responding to their requests for renewed or increased financial support” (p. 209). Putting the University Online In addition to the chapter from David Noble’s book, the editors include a chapter from James Cornford and Neil Pollock’s important book, Putting the University Online: Information, Technology and Organizational Change (2003). See the Education Review at <http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev274.htm> as well as my review in Kairos <http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/9.1/binder.html?reviews/rothfork/index.htm>. Conford and Pollock’s argument follows Foucault’s theory, which they awkwardly derive from Actor Network Theory. Foucault’s point is that how something is done largely defines what it is or what it means. We do not find ready-made ideas and theories; these are socially constructed, including the idea of the university. Cornford and Pollock are interested in the effects of academic management software as well as the effects of distance education software and methods. If professors forgo traditional modes of teaching and scholarship to facilitate online course delivery and increasingly do assessment clerking with academic management software, then the question is, what does it mean to be a professor? “The nature of academic work is changing as scholars find themselves using more technology” (p. 101). These choices seem to be either innocuous methodological preferences or to be technical and administrative decisions. In either case, senior faculty are mostly relieved not to be pressed into developing and delivering online courses. The result is that they give away their profession to IT staff and to adjuncts. Professors complain that when one of their colleagues retires or moves, the tenure track position evaporates because the money has moved to support a half dozen compliant adjuncts and IT technicians. Cornford and Pollock’s book is clumsily written but important in explaining how the restructuring of higher education is taking place without much notice or clamor because the changes are in how the university operates rather than in what professors teach in class. The adjuncts who replace professors will be in no position to complain about academic freedom since the model for what they do is largely offered by telemarketing: they follow a script developed by an increasingly centrally controlled institution committed to what the dean at the Fremont (San Francisco), California DeVry campus told David Kirp was “a ‘total quality management’ environment” (p. 243). Charles Crook means to offer a piece on the psychology of learning involved with distance education or as he puts it, “how our thinking about virtualization might be informed by psychological perspectives” and how this “has influenced the design of educational technology.” Like many of the other contributors, he gets lost on the way to spend his time telling us about behaviourism, cognitivism, and constructivism without making clear applications to distance learning. He does make one interesting observation concerning master teachers in traditional classrooms who “seemed actively to avoid the precision and explicitness of the software.” Instead of offering a cookbook recipe to follow, such teachers elaborated “an invitation for the learner (listener/reader) to engage actively with the presentation” (p. 121). Philip Agre contrasts what he calls the traditional “community model” of the university with that of “the commodity model—the university as a competitor in a marketplace” (p. 210). He cites other scholars to make the usual points. For example, he suggests that “Faculty might be deskilled in” the context of “a radicalized commodity model” to be “reduced effectively to the status of teaching assistants who tutor students on the material in the video.” He knows that actually teaching the material offers what he calls “value added,” but wonders if students will “pay the extra cost to get the virtues of the more labour-intensive programme?” (p. 211). He recognizes Cornford and Pollock’s concern for academic management software; “that the profession’s very institutions (conferences, journals, social networks, everyday information-seeking, and collaboration) may grow together with the disciplinary community of practice of the university.” Agre does not perceive a threat to academic labour in this and apparently is unconcerned about the proliferation of academic bureaucracy. He sees an opportunity for “publication and peer review […] extended to occupations that have not historically organized their own conferences and journals” (213). We now have university “professionals” dedicated, for example, to staging conventions and conferences. Professor Trow’s essay provides almost the only reason to obtain this book. This essay, along with others, is available from Prof. Trow’s Website (see Works Cited). The excerpts from Noble’s book and from Cornford and Pollock’s book provide lesser reasons to buy the book, only because obtaining their short books is preferable. References Cornford, James and Neil Pollock. (2003). Putting the University Online: Information, Technology and Organizational Change. London: Open University Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L. (1992, revised from 1979). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirp, David L. (2003). Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Noble, David F. (2001). Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press. Trow, Martin. “Some Consequences of the New Information and Communication Technology for Higher Education” <http://ishi.lib.berkeley.edu/cshe/mtrow/>. About the Reviewer John Rothfork English Department Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86011 John.Rothfork@nau.edu John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/. ~ ER home | Reseņas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | submit | guidelines | announcements ~