Antibiotics, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, the internal combustion engine, and the silicon chip make the 20th century a glorious time to be alive. A geologist enters digitized seismic information into a Rockware program and a laptop displays ten thousand feet of strata. An archaeologist punches in locations on a GPS as he walks over an ancient Mayan city and his computer prints out the city on a surface map. A colleague in Advanced Spanish Conversation assigns his students to read and report on the websites of Spanish language newspapers. A former professor compares notes on the Internet with a colleague in England for a work on the political status of ancient Sparta. A history student takes a virtual tour of the Smithsonian. With the computer we can get a ticket to southern France, charge dinner at the Rex, correct the trajectory of a Mars rocket, or drop a bomb right on top of a surly tyrant.
The efficiency of the computer has created a euphoria among diploma mills, for-profit universities, corporations and politicians, who have discovered that anybody can be a university! Higher education administrators now fear that the University of Phoenix and its imitators will deprive public colleges and universities of their students. The excitement with which we approach the third millennium is aggravated by the entertainment industry since it has found out that the TV camera puts a proscenium in front of everything and so turns the whole universe into entertainment, thus making mayhem a spectator sport and providing a safe and second-hand life for everybody. This second-hand life is now being complemented by a second-hand education, consecrated by science and technology and the metaphysic of the marketplace.
Politicians and higher education administrators are yelling in our ears that there is a crisis in American education and that we must respond to it through technology, "as the telephone, the computer, and television become seamlessly merged" (Duggan, p. 53). But there is no crisis in education for the wealthy private universities (where average SAT scores run from 1350-1400 and over). There is no crisis in education for the winners in our culture: there is only a crisis for the losers, and the "new" solution for the losers is to continue to provide them an education for losers, and that is a distance learning education, the televised/computerized education.
The most recent example of this social engineering through control of education is the Western Governors University, a piece of naïveté which reflects a general cultural isolation of the western states. This kind of education will have just the opposite effect on the Montana economy that the politicians had intended. Technology regularly gets out of hand: François Mitterand remarked that the machine was invented in the 18th century in order to save men labor, and then created a great deal more labor for them in the 19th century.
Don't the expensive universities do distance learning? Well, yes. Harvard has had an on-line calculus course for three years, and Johns Hopkins has a popular distance learning course on business practices for physicians--such courses do fairly well for people with the attention span to do calculus or take out your prostate. The people who can really profit from computerized or distance learning courses are the ones who don't need a live professor, but the ones who really need a live professor will get distance learning. The Western Governors University (WGU) intends to give Associate of Arts degrees and work up to the bachelor's degree, providing courses to people who desperately need a live teacher.
This situation will not affect the winners in the American dream:
Surely it's uncontroversial that faculty members ought to use technology that will really enhance their teaching. But one obvious thing that has not been said clearly is that the members of the ruling class will certainly continue to send their sons and daughters to schools with live teachers in small classes, and would never suffer a satellite broadcast of Philosophy 101 (or even, one suspects, Chemistry 101)--any more than they would submit their progeny to the terrors of the public secondary schools (Parkhurst, p.33).
Consider the project of the WGU, as they put together on-line degree programs from a number of colleges, universities, or wherever they can find them. The chief academic officer of the WGU explains what they will do:
Conduct pre-admission, interim, and final assessments of specific competencies.
Provide individual counseling and advising, as well as assistance in accessing centralized services (such as the smart catalog and on-line counseling and advising services).
Provide access to information on learning resources, requirements for certification and credentialing and assessment resources.
Provide access to information technology and services, including computers, audio and video classrooms and Internet connections.
Identify unmet education and training needs in the local or regional area and provide the WGU with information on needs assessment and market analysis.
Serve as the gate keeper and supervise the performance of entries in the WGU virtual catalog.
Provide quality assurance in the selection and adoption of assessment tools.
Compile needs assessments and market analysis information, and determine needs and priorities of individual learners and prospective and current employers.
Establish priorities and coordinate the process for the cooperative development, acquisition and utilization of assessment tools, courseware, and learning modules.
Establish criteria for and enter into agreements with other organizations and entities for the operation of local and regional WGU centers.
Develop training, monitoring, and auditing procedures to ensure high quality and proper operation of local and regional WGU centers.
Provide centralized services including financial management and the maintenance of academic records regarding certification of competencies and program completion.
Develop standards and implementation strategies for the provision of student services, including financial assistance, library/information services access and utilization, technical support, counseling and advising.
Establish requirements for degrees, certificates and other credentials offered by or through the WGU in collaboration with subject area specialists and provide mechanisms to assure maintenance of academic quality and integrity both in learning and assessment.
WGU will validate and coordinate the assessment processes leading to the awarding of a degree.
Assure compliance with regulatory and accreditation standards (Albrecht, p. 489).
Nowhere in the above list is there mention of teaching anything. Instead there is a lot of evaluation, coordination, establishing, assessing, developing, monitoring, training, auditing, compiling, assuring, collaborating, cooperating, utilizing, identifying, analyzing, assisting and conducting. Add to these activities the administrative, committee and staff work of the various institutions supplying faculty, and you have a bureaucratic teratology that numbs the mind. Anyone who has ever sat on a college curriculum committee trying to approve a single new course knows about pseudo-work and frustration and becomes convinced that the WGU is an aberration which simply will not happen because it cannot work. The cost of such a bureaucratic nightmare would mean the end of teaching and scholarship and the taxpayers and the students should have none of it--at least in Montana. Nevertheless, IBM has been hired to construct an initial version of the on-line catalog by late fall of 1997.
The University of Phoenix, the quintessential virtual university, has convinced politicians and administrators that higher education will not survive as we know it. The library of this "second largest university in the United States" is "wherever there is a computer" (Traub, p. 115). It has forty-seven sites, mostly in the West, which consist of an office building, or a few floors near a freeway exit ramp. The "campus" is the program director and three other people. There are no tenured professors and consequently no criticism from the faculty. The president stated that "The people who are our students don't really want the education. They want what the education provides for them-better jobs, moving up in their career, the ability to speak up in meetings, that kind of stuff. They want it to do something for them" (p. 115). They have thus gone from 3,000 to 40,000 students in the last ten years, offering accredited bachelor's degrees in business, nursing, education, and an MBA The stocks of the Apollo Group, of which U. of P. is a subsidiary, rose from $2 to $35 in ten years.
The U. of P. goes after the more than 14 million high school graduates, only a sixth of whom are full-time students, living on campus. The other five sixths want "The kind of relationship with a college that they had with their bank, their supermarket, and their gas company" (p. 116). "The institution that sees itself as the steward of intellectual culture is becoming increasingly marginal..."(p. 116). The Halls of Ivy are decidedly not cool.
John Sperling (BA history, Reed; MA history, Berkeley; Dr. Phil; economic history, Cambridge) is an energetic man who by experience found that teachers and police officers were the ones who really wanted to learn, but he could not get his program accredited at the University of San Francisco. In 1976, he opened the University of Phoenix, accepting anyone twenty-three or older who had a job and 60 college credits upon arriving. Today, the required number of credits for admission is zero.
When visiting classes, the writer James Traub found a "lack of intellectual, as opposed to professional, curiosity" (p. 121). Students may get credit by demonstrating knowledge in personal experience, such as Parenting, Family Life, and Loss and Bereavement. Credits are $216 each, bringing a bachelor's degree to more than $20,000. The classes appeal to hard-working people in a hurry, who therefore need night classes, who find community colleges juvenile, and who don't like to wait for closed classes to open in regular universities.
Traub suggests that "the line between corporate training and academic education has clearly blurred" (p. 121.) Thus the "corporate university" provides its own education to middle and upper management, and these contact hours for employees in one year (1992) exceeded enrollment growth "at all colleges built between 1960 and 1990" ( Ibid.). Arthur Levine, of Columbia University, predicts that corporations may take over postsecondary education and everything else will mostly disappear except a few large research universities. At present, the U. of P. has been denied accreditation by the North Central Association for an apparent lack of rigorous academic assessment. "They seem more concerned about customer satisfaction" (p. 122). But schools such as the U. of P. look forward to the arrival of school vouchers, which "will create huge opportunities for private, for-profit schools,"according to the chair of the school's Academic Cabinet ( p. 123). When asked why all students shouldn't have the full academic experience that he had at Berkeley, Dr. Sperling answered, "Because they can't afford to. I'm not into social reform...Microsoft is a much more powerful force shaping the world than Harvard or Yale or Princeton..." (p.123). To the old question, "Dare the schools build a new social order?" Dr. Sperling thus answers: No. This Jimmy Swaggart of academia will reinforce the present system of winners and losers that American education too often fosters by its differential education system, rewarding the winners and paying off the losers with a promotion, a "university" diploma and a raise that allow them to think that second best is glorious. The children and grandchildren of the Great Depression are still worried, more eager to please the boss than to learn French and thus acquiesce in this differential education.
This general identification and reinforcement of the system of winners and losers in American society and culture by the differential education which is distance learning, education redefined as training, and the corporation-as-university characterize what is becoming a second-hand life in American culture. We already have managed health care, which places a dollar limit on one's life and which will affect every person reading this article; spectator sports which create a life of passivity and a mind-set of slavish admiration; identity based on the brand of an athletic shoe made by child labor; a destiny defined by a certified psychic on the TV psychic network; a TV shopping channel which isolates the consumer from the provider; distance sex over the phone at $5 a minute and interactive talking dirty on the Playboy channel. Our failure to teach the humanities, especially literature, philosophy, and music have contributed to the boring and angry chant of rap and the adenoidal despair and self-pity of country western music. Now, to finish the affair, we have distance learning, with an administration which wants to emulate the University of Phoenix, a Montana commissioner of higher education who told us that professors want to and must escape from students, and a governor who tells us (in an essay in this issue) that the liberal arts must be controlled in favor of industrial and commercial training.
The demise of the liberal arts is the end of the ability to criticize and judge the quality of life. Only the worker will be trained, only homo operans, man constituted as worker. But there will be no education for the voter, the citizen, the parent. the soldier, the senator, the lover, the retired person, the musician, the poet, the consumer, the medical patient, the teenager, the tourist or especially the social reformer. When you weaken the liberal arts you mutilate the mind, you destroy the basis for intelligent judgment--and the possibility of a graceful, intelligent life is becoming increasingly doubtful as people turn to their psychic friends on TV at five bucks a minute and to crackpot cults, the Jim Joneses, armed bands of paranoids, the Church Universal and Triumphant and its bunkers, Reverend Moon (who just married 38,000 of the spiritually bulimic en masse) and space ships full of castrati riding the icy tails of comets. When education deprives the population of the participation in and proprietorship of the thousands of years of the adventures of the mind, then we create the spray-paint culture of alienated vandals. We cannot rectify this situation even if we rent all the corporate prisons in Tennessee and Texas. The professoriate of the Montana University System will resist this second-hand life and education-at-a-distance. Stoll said it tersely: "The student deserves a live professor."
The recent report of the Montana Academic Forum sums up well distance learning for Montana:
Distributed learning...and information technology are in early stages of development...and it makes no sense to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars without investing tens of thousands to see if the larger amounts are being well spent. Montana is a sparsely populated and poor state. Distributed learning is expensive and likely will remain so . Even with additional resources realistic for our state, we cannot expect to have a cutting-edge system of distributed education.
Coordination of faculty and staff will require time commitments and refocus of resources. We need an entirely new component of professional support staff, with continuing needs for hardware and software. There will be a long-term cycle of quick obsolescence and the frequent need to upgrade the hardware and software. There will likely be some relatively expensive "trials and errors." Faculty may occasionally seem resistant because of concerns with academic quality. There will be an emphasis on faculty development with associated release time. Some programs will involve additional workloads that require extra compensation for participating faculty. We will have to change the way we assess student work. Faculty will have to spend additional time and energy to develop and participate in distributed educational programs. We will have to change the way we think not only of workload but also of "time in the classroom." Funding for technology has not been an item for which either the state or the university system has traditionally budgeted, putting a great deal of pressure on already strained resources...and cannibalizes existing programs to fund technology. Technology funding is a recurring cost, not a one-time equivalent and its budgets must be provided separately from existing budgetary considerations. Information technologies are capital-intensive and labor-intensive; preparation, logistics, communication with distant students often require considerably more time...compared to traditional classes where students are in one physical location. Faculty reward structure must be changed to encourage risk-taking [since] distributed learning presents a risk to faculty because the format is untested...and student complaints may reflect negatively on their promotion and career advancement.
Considering that the university system is underfunded and that we are an impoverished state, the costs of implementing the Western Governors University are bound to be substantial. We have had chronic difficulties funding the university system historically. State support for higher education has eroded significantly in the past six years; general fund money now represents less than 50% of overall funding. Tuition, according to the Board of Regents, has reached its maximum level. Administrators and the Commissioner have already concluded that general fund support will likely decrease still further after the next legislative session (1999).
Yet, Governor Racicot claims, in this issue, that with regard to funding the university system, "Montanans have never abdicated the responsibility of supporting what they created." The drop in state support for higher education in recent Montana history directly contradicts his assertion. We cannot support the system as it is currently constituted and the anti-government rhetoric has grown ever more strident since the Republican takeover nationally and locally in 1994. Since the members of the Montana Academic Forum agree the technology will require substantial, even extravagant funding--and it will require a commitment for permanent, on-going funding to upgrade the technology periodically--it is chimerical to think that the Montana government will adequately support this project. The legislature eviscerated proposed funding for technology and distance-learning this past spring and only an eleventh hour stand-off between the governor and the legislature forced some funds back in for modest technology upgrades. The price-tag will only go higher in the coming years and the legislature will not support it with any more enthusiasm than it supports other system initiatives. Governor Racicot's assertion is the faultiest assumption upon which all else rests. The money is not there now and will in all likelihood not be there in the future-particularly in light of the fact that the correctional system is becoming a state budgetary leviathan. No one wants to contemplate apparently the connection between building prisons and depriving the citizenry of participation in their history and culture.
Moreover, if we can expect no new money to fund the technology, whence will the funds come? "Reallocation of resources" is the latest administrative cant. The human costs will be high. Layoffs will fund the acquisition of gizmo-laden computers that the state won't even be able to afford to upgrade. This is a human disaster in the making.
If this were not enough, the movement toward the Western Governors University represents the continuing trend toward prostituting the academy to a narrow and naive view of private enterprise, the business world, and the national economy. As trans-national corporations set the world scene for competition and the education it will require, it is these trans-nationals which will determine the nature of training and education, redefining and transcending national boundaries and redefining local educational, cultural, and commercial values. Devaluing the liberal arts leaves even local values open to alteration by the global economy. The Centers for International Business Education Research (CIBER) spread around the nation's universities increasingly show the acceptance of global cultural and social values in the search for a better market.
The governor suggests that we need to continue working on building "the infrastructure for delivering actual work forcetraining," that the academy must "retain its role as a major provider of education and training for our professional and skilled employees," and it "must heed this call from industry and America's workers and find mechanisms to adequately fill the work force training gap which presently exists in Montana."
Yet the evidence indicates that private enterprise mostly wants people who can communicate effectively, who can be "team players" and who are personable. Look at the films put out by the CIBERs on the foreign customs an American businessman must understand merely to be socially acceptable in a foreign market (note that "market" is a substitute term for culture). These CIBERs emphasize the importance of knowing a foreign language in dealing with trans-national corporations. Are we intent on training merely low-level employees, office boys and typists? Industry has begun complaining that students currently don't have the cognitive, critical, and analytical skills needed in today's workplace (especially among those individuals who receive business degrees). A liberal arts education clearly is crucial. Yet, instead of calling for renewed government support to provide this education, Governor Racicot's proposal is a further movement to reduce the university to a vo-tech. and gut funding even more dramatically.
Rather than educate students, the WGU will be expected, apparently, to be a skill-provider for employees. Faculty should resist this trend by any means they have available to them. By cheerfully jumping on board the technology train we will be simply accommodating a closet Marxism that educates the human for the job, providing him and her with the same groveling materialism which destroyed the initiative of the Soviet worker while the life of the mind and the free-thinking human was shoved into the background. Politicians and the general public fail to realize that the machine is not value free, that it is as well a social organism which forces standardized values onto the individual. We like to proclaim that "Guns don't kill people! People kill people!" Yet thousands of people are killed by guns every year. Operating on a superficial understanding of our relation to our tools and our machines and on a blind faith in an unanalyzed freedom and the nature of social existence, we go energetically about controlled by the artifacts of our civilization and proclaiming our freedom and individuality.
The governor claims that the traditional liberal arts curriculum will not be threatened by the WGU, that it will be mostly geared toward apparently far-flung nontraditional learners who need to upgrade skills in a few business or professional courses. But because this experiment is wholly market driven and designed to ward off competition from emerging wildcat on-line universities such as the University of Phoenix, once a competitor offers on-line English, art, history, philosophy, literature, or foreign language classes, the WGU will scramble to follow suit. We are dubious, at best, about the "outcomes." There is no doubt that a computer in a classroom can bring a stunning array of visual imagery, that computer databases can assist students in pursuing research. But the most advanced technology is no substitute for on-site trips, the intensive and spontaneous face-to-face interaction and debate with other students and the professor that in many cases form the crux of the course and the real experience of education. Can a student in Oklahoma, Japan or Maine, staring at a computer screen truly have the same educational experience that one in a Missoula, Billings or Bozeman classroom receives?
Equating the history of legislative support for higher education and the WGU initiative is misleading, if not simply dishonest. The former represents the civil dialogue between university officials, citizens and their district senators and representatives, the latter represents a unilateral leap of faith to embrace a technological solution to a problem that exists only in the minds of our Governor and the few university presidents who support this plan. Why make this huge investment of dollars without providing the folks expected to spend it with information on projected costs and profits based upon the sort of basic market study any investment initiative would need in order to attract the support of the stockholders?
The WGU will further drive a wedge between social classes in Montana and the American West. Even key higher education administrators in Montana, individuals such as George Dennison, President of the University of Montana, says in his article in this issue: "I concede that, under the current conditions, a fundamental difference separates those students served at a distance using information technology and on-campus students. Much as we seek to treat them all as students entitled to the same services, we have yet to develop the means to assure full equity." There is the underlying assumption that all students will be able to afford the latest technology (in their homes) and will be able, furthermore, to upgrade periodically. The poor--anywhere--cannot afford the basic necessities of life now, let alone computers with Pentium microprocessors, modems, CUCMe video cameras, scanners, and faxes. Unless the various state governments contemplate a massive infusion of financial aid to the chronically poor rural population (hardly a constituency with much political clout), then the only ones who will be able to partake of WGU will be the middle and upper income groups. Even if our funding for technology is directed more toward the lower income groups at some point, as a Forbes editor put it recently, in the future the poor will be chained to computers and the rich will get the teachers (Oppenheimer, p. 14). The rural poor will get a watered down, inferior, computer-based, vo-tech education and will remain impoverished because they won't have the skills or analytical education needed to compete for good jobs, while the urban wealthy at the universities will continue to advance and buy ranchettes and summer homes in Montana.
You will read in Governor Racicot's essay [in this issue] the following oxymoron: "I would like to point out that while the ethic of the liberal arts will not be sacrificed, it must adapt to an economy and public which decreasingly values [sic] the product of a broad-based, liberal arts education." This is an utterance that rivals in naïveté Henry Ford's: "History is bunk." History, art, literature, music, philosophy, languages, and the sciences will not adapt to lowered expectations which a politician thinks the public has. We know that "those in positions of power will attempt to define what is taken as knowledge"(Apple, p. 35). We believe that "the linkage between technical knowledge and schooling helps generate, not reduce, inequality" (p. 19). We are convinced that "management ideologies in organizing schools and selecting curricular knowledge" point out "their lack of ethical, social and economic neutrality and their use as mechanisms of political quiescence, consensus, and social control"(p. 25.) We assure Governor Racicot that the liberal arts will not be disciplined.
Repressive governments always move to manipulate the liberal arts: the Romans built arches of triumph to bully the conquered peoples; the classical doctrine of royal favorites in 17th century France extended the control of political rationalism into high culture; the Vatican put much of the western world's great literature on the Index; Soviet ideology co-opted painting and literature in socialist realism; National Socialism stifled modern art--all efforts to prevent dissent. We remember what Mr. Hitler said a few years back in his book, Mein Kampf. "What a waste," he wrote, "to spend so many years studying French, when you will never use it and will just forget it all. Better you should learn something useful!"
Robert Albrecht. "The Western Governors University: A New Learning System for the 21st Century." Facilities Manager Sept./Oct. 1997.
Michael W. Apple. Ideology and Curriculum. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Goldie Blumenstyk. "A Feminist Scholar Questions How Women Fare in Distance Education." Chronicle of Higher Education 31 Oct. 1997.
James Brook and Ian A. Boal, editors. Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information. San Francisco: City Light Books, 1995.
Ervin S. Duggan. "Higher Education and the New Age." Facilities Manager Oct. 1997.
Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967. Trans. of La Technique ou l'enjeu du siècle. Armand Colin. Paris: 1954.
Herbert Marcuse. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Todd Oppenheimer. Letters. The Atlantic Monthly Oct. 1997.
Michael Parkhurst. Letters. Chronicle of Higher Education 14 Nov. 1997.
Clifford Stoll. Silicon Snake Oil. New York: Anchor Books, 1995.
James Traub. "Drive-Thru U: Higher Education for People Who Mean Business". The New Yorker 20 & 27 Oct. 1997.
Joseph Weizenbaum. Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976.