A few pointers to some more or less recent articles on contemporary higher education:
The bottom line of the neoliberal assault on the universities is the increasing power of management and the undermining of faculty self-governance. The real story behind MOOCs may be the ways in which they assist management restructuring efforts of core university practices, under the smiley-faced banner of “open access” and assisted in some cases by their “superstar”, camera-ready professors. Meanwhile, all those adjunct faculty are far more subject to managerial control and regulation than are tenured professors. Aside from their low cost, that is one of the principal reasons why they are so attractive to university managers. (Tarak Barkawi, “The Neoliberal Assault on Academia”. Al Jazeera America. April 25, 2013.)
Prioritizing is what you get when you hire administrators who can’t distinguish a university from a Walmart. Each department is to be evaluated as a profit centre. The knowledge factory that the university is currently running under the rubric of basic research will remain untouched (and probably augmented), for there is no aspect of its present operations that can be so easily and so profitably commercialized. Generally, however, the priority that each department receives will depend upon the revenues it can generate from research grants and from selling classes to its customers. The insistence on evidence-based evaluation is critical, lest some of the woolly-headed intellectuals retained to do the teaching should have derived some values through reading something other than the Globe and Mail Report on Business. (Jay Cowsill, “There’s a New Sheriff in Town: Cracking the Whip at the University of Saskatchewan”. October 10, 2013.)
The problem is not that the Open Movement is wrong. The problem is that the need for reform goes far deeper than simply making papers and data available under CC-By or CC-Zero. Exploitative publishing regimes are symptomatic of larger problems in the distribution of wealth and power. The concentration of wealth that warps so much of our political and economic life will inevitably warp the Open Movement toward unintended and unwanted outcomes. (Eric Kanza, “It’s the Neoliberalism, Stupid: Why Instrumentalist Arguments for Open Access, Open Data, and Open Science are not Enough”. The Impact Blog. LSE. January 27, 2014.)
I can’t express adequately just how pissed off I am about MOOCs – not the concept, but all the hubris and nonsense that’s been talked and written about them. At a personal level, it was as if 45 years of work was for nothing. All the research and study I and many others had done on what makes for successful learning online were totally ignored, with truly disastrous consequences in terms of effective learning for the vast majority of participants who took MOOCs from the Ivy League universities. Having ignored online learning for nearly 20 years, Stanford, MIT and Harvard had to re-invent online learning in their own image to maintain their perceived superiority in all things higher educational. And the media fell for it, hook, line and sinker. (Tony Bates, “Time to Retire from Online Learning?” April 15, 2014.)
The threat that plans like TransformUS holds are both serious and ubiquitous. As it goes, the TransformUS brand is so deeply ironic that it offers an indication of what lies ahead. TransformUS is, at once, an incantation for complacency, as though self-transformation is impossible or inefficient (i.e. Please, Transform US!), and an unacknowledged reference to the transformations that helped to engineer America’s system of higher education. Indeed, TransformUS intones the rise of the market as a transformative agent, and the University as a key site in the manufacture of consent and consumption. (Eric Newstadt, “Why Buckingham’s Tenure is Small Stakes in a Big Game”. Impact Ethics. May 16, 2014.)
Arts Squared: A Virtual Square for the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.
A technology that allows for limitless reproduction of knowledge resources, instantaneous global sharing and cooperation, and all the powerful benefits of digital manipulation, recombination, and computation must be a “bag of gold”36 for scholarship and for learning. It is well within the power of educators to play a decisive role in the battle for the future of the web. Doing so will require the courage to buck prevailing trends. It will require an at-times inconvenient commitment to the fundamental principles of openness, ownership, and participation. It will require hard work, creativity, and a spirit of fun. It will require reclaiming innovation. Our choice. (Jim Groom and Brian Lamb, “Reclaiming Innovation”. Educause Review 49.3. May/June 2014.)
“I wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president,” said Vedder. “They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.” (Jon Marcus, “New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators”. The Huffington Post. June 2, 2014.)
Posthegemony 