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Does the Online University
Need Faculty, Adjuncts, or Clerks? John Rothfork 1. You have no doubt read academic job descriptions
in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the MLA Job List, or a similar
publication. You may have experience with hiring or tenure committees,
or been involved in conversations with colleagues that sought to define
what faculty do. Ads and conversations often focus on course load and
content area, such as “we are looking for someone to teach in the area
of nineteenth century British literature.” Once hired, faculty
are expected to be expert in their content area and to consequently
decide what to teach in their courses. Almost without exception, faculty
are vigilant about academic freedom and about creative choices
in regard to what they teach or research. Ironically, more than a few
of us teach postmodern views such as those of Foucault who tells us
that “there is no knowledge without a particular discursive practice”
(183). This means that how something is done largely
determines what it is. In the last few years, computer technology has
profoundly changed how many faculty teach and
how they keep academic records. Because these changes affect how the
university operates, rather than what is taught in classes, they have
escaped formulation as policy issues for faculty discussion. Instead,
it has more often been the case that administrators have felt compelled
“to fit the university to the demands of technology” made by commercial
software vendors (Cornford 111). The consequences
are profound for both the institution of the university and for the
historic role of faculty. In Steal This University (2003), Ana
Marie Cox says that “pursuing corporate models” of higher education,
such as the University of Phoenix model that she condemns, “could be
the end of higher education as we know it” (Cox 28). This may seem exaggerated
but nearly 65 percent of community college teachers are adjuncts and
the trend seems to be to employ only adjuncts (AFT's
“Portrait of the Adjunct as an Older Man”). This short paper will
consider how computer technology used in two areas—distance education
and academic management—threatens to change, if not subvert, the nature
of the university and the role of faculty. 2. In 1948 Dwight Eisenhower accepted the presidency
of Columbia University. In his first speech to the faculty he expressed
his pleasure at meeting the employees of the university whereupon he
was interrupted by a famous physics professor, I. I. Rabi, who corrected
him, saying, “Sir, the faculty are not the employees of the university,
the faculty is [the] University” (“Comments
from James Hopkins”; there are other versions of the story). Rio
Salado is very different
from Columbia University. One of eleven Phoenix (Maricopa County), Arizona
community colleges, Rio Salado employs 26
full time faculty and “over 700
adjunct instructors each semester”to teach 300
Web courses to 20,000
students. The Rio Salado campus serves only as an administrative center. Faculty have no offices and no classrooms. They are freelance
entrepreneurs, almost anonymous and interchangeable adjuncts, whose
contracts are for a single class and whose tenure is for a semester.
Generally making less than $3,000 per class, adjuncts are part-time
help. The Organization
of American Historians reports that part-timers earn “in the neighborhood
of $15,000 annually, which involved teaching three or more classes per
semester.” Professor Isidor Rabi—a Nobel laureate
involved in defining national science policy—was far too august to serve
as a model for the adjunct faculty at Rio Saldo.
But the question is whether online course facilitators at schools like
Rio Salado are faculty at all. The American
Association of University Professors (AAUP) considers “virtual learning
nothing more than a scheme to eliminate much of the teaching faculty”
(Maeroff 240; see also the AAUP’s “Statement
on Distance Education”). Many of those
involved in distance education via the Internet come to conceive the
mission of the online university as information delivery (Cornford
42). This reduced understanding of teaching or instruction, as essentially
a commercial service—the downloading of information—causes distance
education to adopt “a far more corporate structure capable of coordinated
action with formalized roles and standardized practices” that reduce
faculty to interchangeable hired help (Cornford
76). In Digital Diploma Mills (2001) David Noble summarizes the
characteristics of academic “commodity production: speedup, routinization
of work, greater work discipline and managerial supervision, reduced
autonomy, job insecurity, employer appropriation of the fruits of their
labor, and, above all, the insistent managerial pressures to reduce
labor costs in order to turn a profit (4). General
Eisenhower may have been prescient in assuming that
university faculty are simply corporation employees, knowledge
workers, and that an Army General is likely to possess the requisite
skills to manage the enterprise. 3. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that
the “explosion in distance-education enrollments” will likely cause
many colleges to buy ready-made courses from commercial vendors. The
author suggests that “institutions may eventually buy courses the way
they now purchase textbooks” (Carnevale).
Blackboard offers what it calls course cartridges “prepared by professional
authors, editors, and publishers for use as online course materials”
(Blackboard). WebCT also collaborates with book publishers to offer what
it calls e-Packs,
which are ready-made online courses. Cox reports that “numerous universities have
started using their control over course content to license and then
sell courseware to for-profit online entities.” Half of David Noble’s
book describes recent battles at UCLA and UC Berkeley over this issue.
Cox says, “This sort of arrangement is a familiar pattern at [the University
of] Phoenix, where tightly structured, centrally developed lesson plans
allow Phoenix’s administration to dictate how a professor spends time,
right down to fifteen-minute intervals . . . .
What’s more, streamlined courses are easier to shop out to low-paid
adjunct professors” (Cox 22). 4.
MIT is both participating in online course development and giving the
results away—although what they are giving away is questionable. MIT’s
president says their Open Knowledge Initiative will make “the primary
materials for nearly all of our 2,000 courses available” to anyone who
wants it (Vest). Like “the open-source-software-movement,” MIT
“permits the reuse, modification, and redistribution of content” developed
by their faculty (Unsworth). But this is not a “turn-key” resource that will
allow instructors to easily import a course to their school’s server
and save them the trouble of course development. The course
I looked at in technical communication offered little more than
a reading list of sources that remain inaccessible at the site because
they are copyrighted 5.
When Professors discover that what they teach in online courses is likely
to be dictated by commercial vendors, they face two problems in asserting
their academic freedom. Few professors are expert enough in computer
use to design, develop, and teach their own courses. At Northern Arizona
University the English department has thirty-seven full time faculty.
Seven teach Web courses but only two are dedicated to using the Web
as a primary medium of instruction even though the development of distance
education is a stated university goal. If faculty decide that the stakes
in developing their own course are worth the effort, they typically
find lots of help from “support specialists”—course designers and trainers
expert in instruction or platform programs, such as WebCT and Blackboard; graphic artists and Web designers; “new”
librarians who offer to help with electronic sources; compliance experts
who give advice about the visually impaired; marketing advisors who
give recruitment advice; assessment experts who advise faculty about
“best practices” for Web courses; and media experts who suggest that
every good Web course includes video and audio clips, and is perhaps
best rendered as a game. (For example, see the help
offered at UCLA). 6.
When I took WebCT training one of the technicians
displayed an undergraduate course in social studies rendered as a word
game. I thought it might be used in an elementary or junior high course.
It was offered as an exemplary three hour undergraduate course. The
pride of the technician who demonstrated the program suggested the clash
of values between support staff and the faculty they were helping. Faculty
are dedicated to the content of their courses and curricula.
Support staff are dedicated to their professional methods, which renders
the computer medium as both an interesting technique and as an end in
itself. I am sure the technician thought I was being obstinate when
I suggested that the graduate technical writing courses I teach are
probably not the best candidates for such innovative methods. Months
later I was surprised by an assessment of one of my online courses,
which I had submitted to a WebCT exemplary course competition because I had worked hard
to create the course and because students gave me perfect marks in course
evaluations. I was told that “WebCT has many
powerful tools” and that I should use them all, including “the incorporation
of audio and video.” I did not ask the obvious question why?
knowing that the answer would involve asserting their support staff
interests, assumptions, and techniques over my faculty concerns. At
about the same time I was involved in a demonstration of WebCT’s
Vista program that was touted as the solution to the problems encountered
in using the Campus Edition (at a cost of $500,000 and redesign of all
of our existing WebCT classes). When we identified problems that Vista still
did not seem to solve, the product developer in Vancouver told us that
we should concentrate on what the program could do. 7.
In these cases the “experts” giving advice about online course design
and delivery knew nothing about the content of various courses. They
simply offered a sales pitch for a “one size fits all” commercial product
they could not use in the same way that faculty use the program. More
generously we might acknowledge that support staff
are committed to values grounded in their own professional activity,
but as boosters and salesmen, who may have an M.A. in educational technology,
they do not return the favor. They believe in their commercial product.
It is not entirely comforting to know that “over 80 percent of public
institutions have a faculty technology center available to help faculty
develop courses” (Campbell). Many faculty are skeptical of such help seeing
it as a strategy to disaggregate the skills involved in teaching so
that “the job of instruction is assigned to a team of designated specialists
in course design, development, content, delivery, and distribution”
(Noble 88). Many of us also scoff at the debased and warped results
that offer elements of commercial entertainment and require sophisticated
computer techniques that mock or ignore our professional dedications. 8.
If professors succeed in fighting off most of this well-meant pedagogy
and assessment advice, and acquire enough computer skill to build their
own courses, they face a second problem explained by George Landow
who spent thirty years at Brown University where administrators found
his Web work to be interesting but insignificant as publication or as
indications of professional work. Incredibly, Landow
says his various literature websites received “as many as 8 million
hits” a month and were “endorsed by the ministries of education” in
several countries. Nonetheless, when he brought his work to the attention
of administrators at Brown as something they might use for recruitment
or to demonstrate faculty research, he reports that the university leadership
was uninterested. Landow continues, “I suggested to one senior administrator
that we could publicise either a proposed
department of digital culture or the entire university by putting a
statement of Brown sponsorship in each document. I even offered to hand
over management of the sites to a committee, a group of editors, whatever.
This proposal was not deemed worthy of a response” (Landow
112-3)! 9.
In A Classroom of One (2002), Gene Maeroff
writes that “one obstacle to faculty involving themselves more extensively
in learning the ins and outs of online courses has been the slowness
with which the academy has recognized such tasks as worthy of consideration
in evaluation procedures leading to promotion and tenure” (Maeroff
243). Department chairs and administrators above that level are unlikely
to have developed or taught an online course. Consequently, they have
little experience in making judgments about the quality, creativity,
or time involved in producing and teaching Web courses. Indeed, their
managerial interest is likely to be in employing adjuncts “who are paid
less and lack the academic credentials of the average faculty member.”
After courses are developed or bought, the administrative interest may
be to “dispense with regular faculty in online courses” (Maeroff
238). 10.
Edward Ayers, a prominent historian, laments the slowness of
his colleagues to produce online research, because “not many institutions,
despite encouragement from the Modern Language Association and the American
Historical Association, have aggressively broadened tenure and promotion
procedures to encourage the risk taking of digital projects. How should
those projects be evaluated?” he asks. “As
teaching? Scholarship? Service?”
For the moment it seems easier to leave the question unanswered and
to wait for some direction from elite schools other than Brown. Meanwhile,
Ayers says, potential young faculty “look at the job ads and note that
positions require exactly the same credentials as a quarter-century
ago” (Ayers). Ayers infers that humanist scholars avoid investing their time
and effort in technology. I think this investment is expected but not
explicitly recognized, expected but not counted in an assessment of
professional skills. Few universities offer credit courses in typing
or word processing because these are assumed to be minimal competency
skills. Faculty Web construction skills seem to be thought of in a similar
fashion as competency skills that do not rise to the level of being
recognized as professional skills except, perhaps, in cases where faculty
teach Web design and development. Evidently unaware of the furor
caused in 1997 when UCLA required “computer websites for all of its
arts and sciences courses” (Noble 25), my university just announced
that “WebCT shells will be built for all courses,
regardless of delivery mode” so that faculty will have dedicated Web
space to develop resources for even traditionally delivered courses
(Fischer). How long will it be before department chairs begin to inquire
why some of their faculty are not using this
resource? Public universities report that in 2003, “48 percent of their
courses had an associated Web page” (Campbell). In the academic year
2000-01, 56 percent of two- and four-year colleges offered distance
education courses to nearly 3 million students (Tully). 11.
Most of my university colleagues do not recognize the details of how
distance education methods are quietly subverting,
or at least changing, the nature of the university and the status of
faculty. They do, however, recognize the territory of their traditional
classrooms and perceive that it is increasingly a contested area that
requires them to do more than shut the door to control what goes on.
Many complain about the expectations to develop an online syllabus or
a few Web pages for their courses the way they complained a decade ago
about having to learn how to deal with email. Faculty are much less aware of how enterprise-resource-planning
(ERP) software is redefining academic management until they are forced
to participate. These systems are developed by vendors like PeopleSoft
and Oracle, who make only cosmetic changes in their commercial software
to manage the course bulletin, registration, class rosters, grading,
transcripts, and advising. For example, to get to my class rosters in
the PeopleSoft program I first choose a hyperlink called “SA Self Service,”
which is undefined and meaningless to virtually everyone who uses the
system. I then choose “Learning Management” that has “Management” as
a subset! In the classroom, where I teach professional writing courses,
I am used to critiquing such errors in logic and audience analysis.
But when I do academic data management, I have no choice but to learn
the program and follow its cues. 12.
Even though students are customers only in an inessential sense, officials
at Cornell university say they are to going to strive to minimize their
modifications to PeopleSoft “and use the application as delivered,”
not only because custom changes are expensive, but because they “want
PeopleSoft to support it.” They say, “That’s the whole idea of purchasing
this kind of package.” Their decision
involves more than outsourcing university services and paying for them—an
estimated $663 million to convert the California State University system
to PeopleSoft (Olsen). The online program forces faculty to spend more
time clerking to do personnel work imposed by ERP programs. No wonder
this incenses many humanist scholars; because the process operationally
demands a kind of simple reading and minimal writing that mocks their
professional talents to write and analyze complex texts. 13.
Faculty are compelled to learn computerized management and assessment
techniques and to spend a significant part of their time clerking to
passively follow what ERP software dictates. These programs foster a
kind of tunnel vision because “everything not already included within
the system appears disordered,” unnamed, and irrelevant to the vocabulary
of assessment (Cornford 65). Cornford and Pollock
argue that ERP software does not simply reveal “an established problem”
that it solves. Instead, like any analytic technique, the software creates
as much as discovers the problems that it solves (61). They also argue
that ERP software creates a “‘direct pressure’ to spend more effort
on ‘management and administration’, and to provide more data and information
on ‘relative performance’” of students and programs (55). Because the
program can produce more varied measurements, we devote more time and
effort to shuffle these bureaucratic papers. 14.
As Professor Isidor Rabi suggested to General
Eisenhower, the organization of the university has been recognized for
centuries. The university exists in order to teach and the faculty
are trusted to know how to teach because they have demonstrated
a mastery of professional techniques that students aspire to learn.
Administrative and management functions have been ancillary and supportive
of the teaching mission. If it is true, as Maeroff
says, that “the best teachers in colleges and universities get plaques
and commendations, but their teaching skills alone seldom win them promotion
or tenure,” then what is the point of so much increased interest in
assessment and reporting (Maeroff 26)? What are we measuring with ever increasing frequency?
Whatever it is, the concern has been foisted on the university by commercial
software vendors and their partisans. As always, technique is more important
than, and contributes to, what we purport to measure. ERP management
and assessment has two relevant effects. First it contributes to the
Frederick Taylor-like project of objectively defining what faculty
do so that this can be packaged as “coordinated action with formalized
roles and standardized practices” for commercial delivery via the Internet
(Cornford 76). In the area of curriculum and instruction this
is called making a program “teacher-proof” (Russell). Secondly, ERP software provides techniques and
vocabulary shared by administrators, faculty, staff, and politicians.
This allows all four communities to conceptualize the university as
a commercial service using “a set of priorities that are ‘known’ and
seemingly ‘understood’ by everyone” (Cornford
58). 15.
Most faculty will acknowledge the necessity to report what we do in
something like the formal methods required by ERP software, but we also
typically qualify this to ourselves, and perhaps to our colleagues,
as largely a waste of time and resources because we think it so badly
misses the point of what we do. We think of such assessment as imposed
by those who have different values and agendas than ours. And now the
business world is defining categories to assess what faculty
do in the university. I am reminded of Milan Kundera’s
short story “Nobody Will Laugh” about an art instructor who is motivated
to teach his class at the university in an underground manner to evade
a bothersome and persistent amateur art critic. The teacher is also
an art journal editor who hopes to duck the amateur rather than “tell
him in two sentences that” his submission is “crap” (Kundera
2196). The rejection letter becomes a symbol for assessment, institutional
reporting, and accommodating to a bureaucratic regime. Because the teacher
refuses to crush the illusions of the amateur by filing the report,
which would allow him to appear in class at the expected time and place,
he loses his job and is told, “you’ll be glad if they’ll let you in
some gallery as a clerk” (Kundera 2214). 16.
Since the Renaissance, when Boccaccio
and Rabelais began to imagine what the university might be and to propose
it in place of the monastery as the incubator for a new world, the university
has offered something different from a commercial service. In another
brouhaha over a joint university and commercial venture to sell
academic content, the University of Washington faculty declared that
their university “is a vital resource to our community, not a factory,
not a corporation, not a software package” (Noble 53). The university
has both prepared students for jobs and professions, and served as an
alternative and refuge from the so-called “real world.” Now with the
simultaneous erosion of support from state legislatures for higher education
and with commercial vendors offering software to define the terms and
techniques for both academic management and online instruction, the
nature of the university is imperiled as never before. In part this
is because the threat is unperceived, seeming to affect only how the
university operates rather than what it is. Those of us who teach Foucault
and other postmodernists should recognize that how things are done largely
define what they are. 17.
Hubert Dreyfus, a famous UC Berkeley philosopher predicts that “distance
learning will produce only competence, while expertise and practical
wisdom will remain completely out of reach” (Dreyfus 49). By practical
wisdom Dreyfus means the kind of knowledge one acquires from first being
in the presence of an expert who performs some difficult skill and then
trying to imitate the skill while being coached by the master. In
contrast to this model, Dreyfus suggests that online learning does not
even download information; it simply provides an opportunity for a kind
of elevated gossip and catharsis. Some of the first advice offered by university
technology centers to help faculty prepare online courses is that they
will function more as facilitators than as traditional classroom teachers.
Many courses rely on asynchronous discussion posts. The similarities
between posting comments to newsgroups or writing email and posting
academic judgments to course discussion areas often make it difficult
for students to see the difference that Dreyfus has in mind. In humanities
classes we study texts because we believe that they illustrate a paradigm
model of clarity, style, or values grounded in some other context. A
teacher analyzes various texts of a disciplinary canon to exhibit their
excellence to those who aspire to become members of the profession.
In contrast, we easily imagine students in online classes to be sitting
in front of monitors with hands poised on a keyboard ready to express
their opinions. The consumer and commercial metaphors informing much
of distance education, evident for example in characterizing students
as customers, suggest that many online courses merely offer opportunities
for self-expression. The term facilitator implies both that the purpose
of the class is to express one’s opinion and that everyone’s opinions
have about the same merit. Dreyfus uses Kierkegaard’s thought to predict
that the amorphous character of our online experience would form “a
detached world in which everyone had an opinion about and commented
on all public matters without needing any first-hand experience and
without having or wanting any responsibility” (Dreyfus 76). 18.
I can imagine some in academe—for example, those who agreed with Allan
Bloom and Bill Readings’ accounts of how the university was degraded
by bourgeois attacks in the twentieth century—will take a kind of aristocratic
comfort in suggesting that these forces most affect community colleges
and non-research state universities that have (they believe) already
compromised academic standards. If students at these second tier schools
lose a physical campus and classroom, and contact with faculty who have
scant sense of research, it hardly matters. Ana Marie Cox uses the familiar
Wal-Mart analogy to ask, “Could a nonprofit [university] become as cost-effective
as the University of Phoenix, [by] wiping out residential features,
libraries, and such?” She says, “It seems impossible at a large state
school, but what about a small private commuter college? Or
a community college? These two types of institutions are Phoenix’s
real competitors and are schools that stand to lose the most students
when Phoenix or a company like it moves into town” (Cox 27). 19.
From Princeton University, Professor Katz opines that “too much of what
is now being called distance education at most institutions is not an
educational idea; it is a business idea” (Katz). He would likely agree
with Ana Marie Cox’s highly critical analysis of the University of Phoenix
as a virtual fraud (“for-profit institutions like the University of
Phoenix are the Enrons of higher education”) that “has done more than almost
any other education enterprise to shift the meaning of college from
that of a process one goes through to a product one buys” (Cox 23, 16).
The effect on education policy is to increase the contrast and distance
between elite education, where students are coached and mentored by
world-class researchers and academic stars, and plebian education, which
increasingly resembles commercial training taken via the Web and facilitated
by anonymous adjuncts. Cox agrees, but puts her emphasis on the for-profit
model of higher education as the misguided policy rather than on computer
techniques, saying, “The rise of the for-profit has merely exacerbated this divide,
precisely because in the for-profit future, only the richest private
universities may thrive” (Cox 29). I have suggested that the for-profit
model of the university is better recognized in the commercial software
used for distance instruction and academic management than in policy
issues offered for analysis, discussion, and choice.
Those techniques and methods, which define how the university
works, may well doom most of those who aspire to teach to adjunct jobs
as facilitators and clerks. Works
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