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DIGITAL DIPLOMA MILLS: THE
AUTOMATION by David F. Noble All material copyright © 2002 by Monthly Review Press |
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January 2002 |
Introduction This book began life as a series of articles on the automation of higher education, written from the trenches. Having studied the automation of other industries and its consequences for the workers of those industries, especially in my book Forces of Production, and having tried in my own way to contribute to their struggles, I suddenly and unexpectedly became witness to the very same assault on the industry in which I worked. What I had learned, what I presumed to know, would now be put to the test of practice, on my colleagues’ and my own behalf. Did historical understanding and experience of the trials of others give us any advantage in our own? What were the lessons of those earlier episodes that might be applied here, to forestall and potentially reverse this latest offensive on people's lives and livelihoods? First and foremost, my knowledge endowed me with a small degree of foresight, and the conviction that all too often in the past people had only belatedly realized the dimensions of the calamity that had befallen them, too late to act effectively in their own interest. Thus, above all these articles were written to sound an early alarm, a warning timely enough to provide some opportunity for defensive preparation and the envisioning of alternatives. Second, as a scholar, journalist, and activist I have chronicled and fought against the commercialization and corporatization of higher education. In my first book, America by Design, I described the distant origins of this development during the first three decades of the twentieth century. At around the same time, in the mid-1970s, I began to observe a contemporary recapitulation of this earlier episode and, as a journalist, reported on the increasing collaboration between academia and corporate industry, particularly in the area of scientific and technological research. (The earliest of these articles is included as an Appendix to this volume.) At the same time, as an activist, I undertook efforts with others to alert people both within and without academia to the threat to the integrity of academic research that such collaboration entailed. These efforts culminated in the establishment of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, which I founded in 1983 with Ralph Nader and Al Meyerhoff. This organization, under the direction of Leonard Minsky, concentrated on the media, the courts, and congressional hearings to bring extra-academic pressure to bear upon university administrations who were selling out their colleagues and the public in the pursuit of corporate partnerships. As well, the organization sought to galvanize student and faculty opposition to the corporatization if their institutions, chronicling the consequences of this trend while aiding those who suffered abuse and retribution for refusing to go along. In most of these efforts, attention was focused on the commercialization of academic research, and the related neglect of the educational function of universities at the expense, both literally and figuratively, of students. In the mid-1990s, this situation began to change with the belated commodification and commercialization of this educational function by means of online delivery. Like research, the instructional activity of the academy had now come to be viewed by academic administrators and their corporate partners as a “profit center.” Digital Diploma Mills describes in detail this extension of academic commerce from research into instruction, the heart and soul of academia. Third, as a student of the social history of technology who had devoted thirty years of scholarship to disclosing the political, economic, and cultural underside, and ideological origins, of so-called technological progress, I observed with dismay how technology was once again being used as a vehicle of, and cover for, political agendas, this time within academia itself. Hence, as I had done in other arenas, I undertook to examine the political economy of online education. The results of this undertaking now fill these pages. At the same time, I sought to expose the ideological compulsions, rooted in a blind faith in the necessity and ultimate beneficence of technological innovation that both propel proponents of this seemingly “technology-driven” institutional transformation and handicap the opposition. In earlier books, Progress Without People and The Religion of Technology, I had described the nature, sources, and effects of this peculiar yet hegemonic system of belief that was now contributing to the mindless deformation, degradation, and delimitation of institutions presumably dedicated to the life of the mind. Caught up in, or paralyzed by, this ubiquitous enchantment, faculty for the most part confronted this fundamental threat to the integrity of academia not with the creative and critical thought and robust and rigorous debate supposedly emblematic of academia but rather with the same fear, defensiveness, fatalism, and silence characteristic of all other hapless victims of seemingly technologically driven assault. Their disarray is understandable for their fear is warranted. The ideology of technological progress takes no prisoners. In this cultural context, any and all critics are at once disarmed and marginalized, dismissed as ignorant cranks, Luddites, and lunatics who dare to stand in the way of inevitable progress. Their criticism, however compelling in evidence and argument, is not taken seriously because it is beyond the bounds of respectable discourse, irrelevent and irreverent, heresy. Little wonder, then, that in this environment thoughful people tend to keep their wayward thoughts to themselves. And for those of us for whom silence in the face of injustice, even that clothed in the garb of technological progress, is not an option, there is a price to pay. My own continuously careening academic career testifies to that fact, having been fired from jobs at MIT and the Smithsonian Institution, two citadels of the faith, for my critiques of technological progress. When the students at Harvey Mudd College, an elite engineering school where I recently taught for two years, voted to have me as their commencement speaker, despite my having been defamed by the administration as “anti-technology” (whatever that means), the president blocked it. When I successfully opposed the establishment of the International Space University, a finishing school for space cadets, at my current institution, York University, I was publicly assailed by my own president as “anti-science” and even “anti-intellectual.” Even as I write this, my appointment to the endowed Woodsworth Professorship in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University is being blocked by equally ideologically blinded administrators because of my criticism of online education and the corporatization of academia. Moreover, and perhaps most disconcerting of all, is the fact that even otherwise insightful people are captive to the same ideology, as the peculiar publication history of the original articles attests. The first article in the series—now Chapter Two of this volume—was originally commissioned by Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation. When it was delivered, however, she and her staff refused to publish it, declining even to consider any revision. Likewise, the editor of Lingua Franca rejected the piece outright. It seems that these people too, however critical in other respects, are constrained, when it comes to any discussion of technology, by the same boundaries of respectable discourse that inhibit those who run the universities and their quiescent would-be opponents. They apparently feared being tarred, by association, by the same ideological brush that has tarnished my academic reputation and undone other critics of technological progress. Happily, the article was ultimately published on the Internet, through which it was enthusiastically received as a “manifesto” of resistance, distributed worldwide, and repeatedly republished, as were the subsequent articles in the series. There are some who would see an irony, indeed a contradiction, in this, that the author of a critique of computer-based education would use the Internet as a medium of publication, that a critic of technology would use technology to his advantage. But such a perception merely reflects the Manichean worldview of the ideology of technological progress which, like other dogmatic belief systems, allows for only orthodoxy or heresy, in this case “pro-technology” or “anti-technology” (sometimes psychologized as “technophobia”). But it is precisely the mind- numbing effect of such meaningless and dangerous categories that has been the focus of nearly all of my work. A critic of technological development is no more “anti-technology” than a movie critic is “anti-movie.” Would anyone see it as ironic, or contradictory, to find that movie critics go to the movies? Or dance critics to dance performances, or art critics to galleries and museums? The aim of criticism is not indiscriminate rejection but rather sober, serious, and sustained scrutiny and evaluation as the basis for informed and enlightened discrimination. The point is neither to embrace nor to reject technology but to use it wisely. Finally, as a working-class, first-generation beneficiary of public higher education, a graduate of the University of Florida, I have a deep and abiding appreciation for what is at stake here in the struggle over the future of academia. I left Miami for the university ignorant, unaware of my world and of my place in it. There I met kinds of people I never knew existed, people who dedicated their lives to ideas, to understanding the world, to transmitting and thinking critically and imaginatively about the received wisdom of our culture. The experience changed my life as it has changed the lives of countless others. In the not too distant future, young people with a background like mine—that is, without means—will not be welcomed to the campus and into the community of this rare kind of people for a genuine education, but will be told instead to go online for training, and to do it all alone. It goes without saying that it is not the same, that something essential will have been lost, but in time that will be all that anyone remembers. The struggle ahead is to forestall that dismal future. If it is about job security and academic freedom and scholarly integrity and the public's trust in its institutional heritage, it is, above all, about the preservation and extension of affordable, accessible, quality education for everyone who wants it. In the end, that is what this book is about, not technology, not even power, but the perpetuation of promise. Toronto, 2001 If you have any technical comments or suggestions, about this web site, please send e-mail to Our Webmaster at mrwebmaster@monthlyreview.org.  |
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