The Centralization of Higher Ed
posted by Frank Pasquale
Last month, I noted some important innovations in teaching, while striking a cautionary note about massive, open online courses (MOOCs). But for those who prefer MOOC-thusiasm, Tom Friedman’s recent column delivers:
You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.
“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot!
Friedman spends much of the remaining column arguing that universities need to a) get rid of “sage on a stage” lecture courses, while substituting in for them b) sages on YouTube like Sandel. The critical link to Education 2.0: intensive, individualized assessment & problem solving. So in Friedman’s ideal world, philosophers like Sandel would teach all the intro “Ethics” or “Justice” courses for millions, while local adjuncts would apply them to particular dilemmas (such as: should columnists disclose if they are “heirs to a multi-billion-dollar business empire”?).
The irony here is twofold. First, at least with respect to Sandel’s course, the 1.0 version (which I took, in the early 1990s) sounds a lot better than the MOOC version exported to China and Korea. We wrote papers, discussed them in weekly sessions with a TA, and generally formed communities of interest around the material. I don’t think that’s happening on YouTube or Youku, though the top comment on this lecture:
case of beer 17.95$
harvard lecture free
gaining a college education while getting smashed….priceless
indicates something of a grateful and exuberant audience.
Second, there is a deeper tension with this deployment of Sandel’s work. In Democracy’s Discontent, Sandel aspired to articulate a civic republican “public philosophy.” He believed that America needed a new public philosophy because the “liberal” standard for governmental decision-making, which tries to maximize “respect for the rights of freely choosing selves,” is too indeterminate a guide for social action. Echoing Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk, Sandel claimed that America’s most prominent politicians and judges left citizens with no concrete vision of human virtue or common good to aim for.
Civil Society Atomized and Commodified
Thus Sandel argued that the traditional liberal ideal of liberty–protecting individual choice and self-realization in the widest possible range of circumstances–is misconceived. In place of the subjective sovereignty elevated by liberal theorists on both left and right, Sandel suggested that we are only free when we are participating members of self-governing communities. As opposed to the personal autonomy prized by liberals, this collective autonomy is understood by Sandel as a “consequence of self-government;” one is “free insofar as [one is] a member of a political community that controls its own fate.” Civil society, and diverse institutions like churches and universities, are crucial to that goal.
It is sad to see, then, Sandel’s global educational endeavors pressed into the service of a model of higher learning that may well erode civil society and self-governance. David Golumbia has argued that MOOCs, far from democratizing higher ed, end up contributing to centralization and hierarchy. As Golumbia puts it,
The question of the need for faculty at all . . . . once we have digitized lectures on most topics from a few leaders, is one that as with Walmart and Amazon we may not be able to resist in terms of economic efficiency. But where we can argue about the negative and positive effects for the democratic experiment of those concentrated centers of capital, few would argue that actual civil democracy would be better served by a few massive, centralized and largely disembodied education “providers[.]”
Online education is offered as part of an economic analysis of the “business model” of higher education that, as in many familiar instances of computational “revolution,” accomplishes much of its work by initially mischaracterizing the phenomenon in question, in order to take it apart on economic or technological grounds. Higher education does not exist in this country primarily to train students for jobs; it exists primarily to ensure that a significant portion of the public reads and understands the thought on which our political system is founded. That “thought” extends far beyond political science proper [and encompasses the] “liberal arts” or “arts and sciences,” most of which is most effectively understood and made meaningful by personalized, embodied encounters with the material with one’s peers, under the guidance of those who have studied the matters closely.
The most daring and encouraging parts of Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent were theories of the “multiple sites of citizenship” necessary for the success of the republican project. Drawing on Vaclav Havel’s arguments for a “citizen’s Europe” as opposed to a “businessman’s Europe,” Sandel warned against letting global “economic power…go unchecked by democratically sanctioned political power.” But Friedman’s MOOCiversity subjects civil society to a corporate vision. If one thing’s clear from his op-ed, it’s the primacy of the market: “The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know.”
Friedman’s self-assurance here is jarring, given that an algorithm produces work almost indistinguishable from his usual columns. We can only hope that the Sandel of Justice 2.0 considers the implications of global MOOCiversity for the civic republican vision of Democracy’s Discontent.
Photo Credit: guilia.forsythe.
March 6, 2013 at 11:01 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law, Education, Teaching, Technology
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Responses (5)
Ray Campbell - March 6, 2013 at 11:40 pm
While I think it’s usually a good plan to view anything Thomas Friedman declares to be an unqualified good with healthy skepticism, I think your post is a bit too dour on the potential of MOOCs to do positive things.
For starters, look back at your 1990s version of Sandel’s course – the course was offered to a relative few, all selected to belong to an elite, with that selection process biased in many ways in favor of existing elites, mainly from North America. MOOCs, by their nature, bypass the gated community aspects of higher education, making the world’s leading thinkers available to the great unwashed around the world. That it is not quite up the full Harvard Yard experience does not mean that it’s not good enough, or that it may not be life enhancing to those able to access it. It would make as much sense to limit the circulation of books to elite college libraries as to artificially limit the reach of great presenters of ideas to elite college campuses.
I also think you seem to underestimate the capacity of the internet to form real and enduring communities. Perhaps my view of this is skewed by having run an internet community site as my day job for many years, but my sense is that the connections forged and the discourse made possible in that online setting matched and exceeded most offline forums. That people connect online does not mean they don’t connect, or that they cannot form valuable communities based online.
I do think that education as a product and the trend toward a few dominant branded providers justify concern, but I don’t think this is inherently tied to MOOCs (although I do recognize that the economics of the internet reward scale in a perhaps unique way that can exacerbate the second problem). These trends long pre-dated MOOCs and would likely continue apace even if MOOCs disappeared. The fact, wholly aside from MOOCs, is that those running higher education share widely differing views about its purpose and goals, and sometimes seem to agree only on the value of enhanced institutional prestige.
Ken Arromdee - March 7, 2013 at 5:06 pm
Actual university courses have a signalling effect. Massive online courses, and anything else that can be taken easily and cheaply, do not. I don’t see how massive online courses can get around this problem.
Ray Campbell - March 7, 2013 at 5:34 pm
I suppose the first question is whether the purpose of higher education is to generate “signalling effects.” Clearly, grades and degrees from prestigious institutions do have a signalling effect, but do you want to base a justification of the system on that? If you do, you are going to have to deal with the correlation between family wealth and such things as SAT scores and elite school attendance before you argue that the signals generated by our current system are altogether benign. Such a justification also discounts to near zero what some would think was the actual purpose of the higher education enterprise, which would be to change students in good ways by providing them with an education.
To the extent you want to limit the signalling effect to signalling demonstrated competence over a subject matter covered in a course, there’s no inherent reason MOOCs can’t meet that challenge. Just as is true in lecture courses at Harvard, guarding against cheating will be an issue, but there are good reasons to think that can be solved in the MOOC setting at least as well as it has been solved in the offline setting.
Frank - March 7, 2013 at 5:37 pm
A few points:
1) I think the MOOC could be a good bridge to the optimal liberal education, assuming resource constraints in the here and now. But the main point of Golumbia, Bady, Canavan, et al. is that the resource constraint assumption is invalid. Wealth is piling up in corporate treasuries, tax havens, & hectomillionaire and billionaire bank accounts. The decision to give banks near-zero interest rate loans and stick students with 7 or 8 or 9 percent rates is a political decision, not based on the social value of the institutions involved or default risks, but on the respective lobbying power of the two constituencies.
2)I’m trying to discern the long-term trends that MOOCification reinforces. Geoff Shullenberger makes valuable points here:
“MOOCs will enrich a select class of content aggregators, strengthen the hold of Silicon Valley “cyber-totalism” (Lanier’s term) on our intellectual life, and help perpetuate the dominance of the elite universities at the expense of low-cost public institutions….
“The institutions that have thrown in their lot with MOOCs are pursuing policies that benefit the well-established at the expense of the poor and vulnerable and compensate for it through ostentatious displays of generosity in the form of free online courses. The “top-tier” colleges are positioning themselves to be primary beneficiaries of a world in which “free” education, bankrolled by advertising and data-mining, is a branded global commodity controlled by marketing experts, engineers, and investors. Those of us who believed in free and open education before it was a Silicon Valley business scheme need to force university administrators and political leaders to discuss whether this is the future we want.”
–http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-mooc-revolution-a-sketchy-deal-for-higher-education
3) Let’s think about a parallel situation in the health field. Stipulate that doctors don’t want to practice in a rural area, and the state relaxes its licensing standards to permit nurses to do surgery, diagnose, read MRIs, etc.
Now in the short run, this is great—people who were getting no medical care get something. But wasn’t the better solution to fund medical education properly and assure some doctors practice there?
4) The case of Mao’s barefoot doctors may undermine 3) above. SandelTube may well be all that’s available to millions of Chinese students, given that per capita GDP there is so much lower than that in the US. But in our economy, we would be wise to consider the virtual classroom experience with about as much suspicion as we would direct toward a WebMD interface angling to replace a doctor. (Here again, though, Eric Topol and other Silicon Valley figures may be changing the discourse.)
Ray Campbell - March 7, 2013 at 11:09 pm
As it happens, there are plenty of schools in China, some of them quite good. But, SandelTube would offer something unique and different to many Chinese students, and I’m really not seeing why that should be troubling.
WebMD and its alternatives already replace – or at least supplement – physicians in the delivery of health care. Ask any doctor, some of whom are grateful to have pre-educated patients and some of whom are annoyed at being second guessed by someone who stayed in a Holiday Inn Express and read Wikipedia. I’m not aware of nurses doing surgery, but they already diagnose and prescribe in quite a few settings. MinuteClinic runs walk in clinics with nary a doctor on site and never a malpractice claim filed (in large part, because they limit what they do to what can be competently handled by nurses aided by technology). On the MRI, there is a pretty good chance that your radiologist, while a physician, is located in India.
All of this is based on fundamental economic changes made possible by technology. Higher education will not be immune. It will be, as Clayton Christensen keeps observing from his perch at Harvard, profoundly disruptive for existing schools. Offerings that are initially inferior but good enough for some purposes (Sandel in a MOOC) may improve enough to challenge the established vendors. If you just want a degree so you can qualify for a job (and, like it or not, that describes a fair number of undergraduates and graduate students alike), it may be that getting it online provides what you need with more flexibility and lower out of pocket costs.
Lower prestige institutions that are not clear about what they offer are indeed at risk, but that doesn’t depend on whether MIT and Stanford get on board with MOOCs. As the teaching and and credentialing and research and networking functions of the modern research university become disaggregrated, it will put pressure on some schools that today largely exist as credential vendors. MIT and Stanford recognize that it could, in time, put pressure on them, and I think the fear of becoming displaced rather than desire to dominate the weak explain their embrace of this coming technology.
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