Open Education: A Study in Disruption
126
Open Education: A Study in Disruption
126Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/13/2014 |
| Series: | Disruptions |
| Pages: | 126 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d) |
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Open Education
A Study in Disruption
By Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides, Simon Worthington
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides and Simon WorthingtonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-209-2
CHAPTER 1
The University in the Twenty-First Century
There are at least two reasons it is important to experiment, critically and creatively, with the institution of the university at this particular moment in its history. In the chapter 'The Rise of the Global University' in his 2009 book, Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross predicts that it is only a matter of time before we see the beginnings of a global university on the 'model of the global corporation' such as News Corporation, Time Warner, Coca-Cola, Elsevier, and Pearson. He proceeds to present a somewhat gloomy vision of the future for universities if, in their drive to be ever more business-like and profit-orientated, they continue to follow the corporate model:
In this labor-intensive industry (the majority of education costs go to teaching labor), the instructional budget is where an employer will seek to minimize costs first, usually by introducing distance learning or by hiring offshore instructors at large salary discounts. Expatriate employees — assigned to set up an offshore facility, train locals, and provide credibility for the brand — will be a fiscal liability to be offloaded at the first opportunity. If the satellite campus is located in the same industrial park as Fortune 500 firms, then it will almost certainly be invited to produce customized research for these companies, again at discount prices. It will only be a matter of time before an administrator decides that it will be cost-effective to move some domestic research operations to the overseas branch to save money.
As far as the domestic record goes, higher education institutions have followed much the same trail as subcontracting in industry — first, the outsourcing of all non-academic campus personnel, then the casualization of routine instruction, followed by the creation of a permatemps class on short-term contracts, and the preservation of an ever-smaller core of tenure-track full-timers, crucial to the brand prestige of the collegiate name. Downward salary pressure and eroded job security are the inevitable upshot.
As Ross's account of the U.S. domestic situation suggests, we should take care not to console ourselves too quickly with the thought that such globalised corporate scenarios belong to an as yet still distant future. In fact just one year after the publication of Nice Work If You Can Get It, an article in the U.S. Chronicle of Higher Education detailed how the director of business law and ethics studies at the University of Houston was outsourcing the grading of undergraduate papers to Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., whose employees are mostly in Asia:
The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task — and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's [teaching assistants] can. The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. ... The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research.
Even closer to home, the United Kingdom's University of Warwick and Australia's Monash University announced in February 2012 that they had formed a partnership aimed at enabling both institutions to compete in the 'globalised higher education market'. Ed Byrne, Monash's vice chancellor and former director of private healthcare firm Bupa, was quoted in Times Higher Education as saying that, thanks to globalisation and technological change, higher education 'is really going to become a global marketplace', a process which will 'alter the traditional university model'. The same article has Byrne echoing an airline analogy used by his Warwick counterpart Nigel Thrift to emphasise the potential of such global university partnerships: 'in the Star Alliance that includes Lufthansa and United Airlines, independent brands had realised that "to cover the globe" they "needed to come together to form a different type of partnership"'. Hence the reason the 'two vice-chancellors believe that global "university systems" will be needed to respond to future demands in education and research'.
Yet if we are highly critical of the way universities today, in their drive to be ever more business-like and profit-orientated, are closely following the corporate model, complete with distance learning, outsourcing, off-shoring, global 'university systems', and all, and at the same time have no desire to return to the paternalistic and class-bound ideas that previously dominated the university, replete with all the hierarchies and exclusions around differences of class, race, gender, ethnicity, and so forth they imply, then what — to echo the title of Cardinal Newman's book from the nineteenth century — is our idea of the university? Or as Stefan Collini has recently put it when offering his own (albeit ultimately rather conservative) response to this question, What Are Universities For? We shall return to these queries throughout the argument that follows.
A second and related reason for embarking on an experimental project around the institution of the university at this particular moment in time concerns the central role higher education plays in twenty-first-century global capitalism's 'knowledge economy'. In the past, 'the factory was a paradigmatic site of struggle between workers and capitalists'. However, it has been argued that in today's cognitive capitalism it is the university that is a 'key space of conflict, where the ownership of knowledge, the reproduction of the labour force, and the creation of social and cultural stratifications are all at stake. The university, in other words, is not just another institution subject to sovereign and governmental controls, but a crucial site in which wider social struggles are won and lost' — and all the more so post-2008, a point in time which signals the beginning of the so-called global financial crisis and the age of 'austerity'. The importance of the university as a site of struggle may explain why the police and the British state are reacting to student and staff protests against the future direction of higher education with such extreme force. In December 2010, many of those demonstrating outside parliament in London against the introduction of university tuition fees found themselves met with a surprisingly violent response on the part of the police. This involved being kettled, struck with batons, and charged with horses. Since then a number of activists have been given harsh prison sentences. They include Charlie Gilmour, a student at Cambridge, who was sentenced to twelve months for, among other things, swinging from a union flag on the Cenotaph war memorial in London's Whitehall; Edward Woollard, a schoolboy, given two years and eight months for throwing a fire extinguisher from the roof of Conservative Party headquarters in November 2010; and Francis Fernie, who had just completed his A-levels at the time of a March 2011 protest against the austerity cuts. He was sentenced to twelve months for throwing the sticks from two placards outside the upmarket department store Fortnum & Mason. Meanwhile, Alfie Meadows, a university student who was struck on the head with a police baton during the 2010 protests and left with bleeding on the brain, had to face a long, drawn-out trial before finally being found not guilty of violent disorder in March 2013.
Protests are continuing nevertheless. From October 2013 onwards a number of university occupations have taken place with a view to opposing privatisation, including the outsourcing of services and the selling off of the student debt created by the introduction of tuition fees. On December 4, police evicted protesters from an occupation at the University of London, with many of the latter again alleging police brutality. Forty-one students were subsequently arrested. Over the same period two students at the University of Birmingham were asked to pay tens of thousands in court costs for their role in an occupation, while five students were suspended from the University of Sussex for similar actions.
In the light of the above events, some political analysts have gone so far as to claim that, if anywhere, political revolt today is most likely to come from the middle classes, in part due to the increasing cost of the education they need to sustain their position in a society where, according to the U.K. Office of National Statistics, 40 per cent of the national wealth is owned by just 10 per cent of the population, and wages for low- to middle-income families are predicted to be the same in 2020 as they were in 2000. This is certainly one of the explanations given for the most recent wave of protests. The December 4 occupation at the University of London, for example, had its basis in the '3 Cosas' campaign in support of outsourced service staff at London universities — many of them workers from Latin America — and their demands for equal rights with other university workers, including sick pay, holiday pay and pensions. So students and lower-level members of the teaching body are clearly fighting not just for themselves and their own interests: they realize they have more in common with these service workers than with the highly paid vice chancellors who are busy turning their institutions into businesses. (The highest paid vice chancellor in the United Kingdom is the Open University's Martin Bean, who in the academic year up to August 2013 had a salary of £407,000 — possibly because he was recruited from Microsoft. But others are not far behind. They include the LSE's Craig Calhoun, who received £466,000 — although reportedly £88,000 of that was to cover his relocation expenses from the United States.) The protesters are also conscious that, far from a university education being a route to social mobility and financial security as it might once have been, many of today's undergraduates will have debts of around £50,000 when they graduate, and that they themselves are likely to become low-waged precarious workers — if they can get a job at all.
Interestingly, while further middle-class protests have taken place in Brazil in 2013 and in Thailand in 2014, the U.K. Ministry of Defence was referring to the role of what it called 'The Middle Class Proletariat' as far back as 2007:
The Middle Class Proletariat — The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx. The globalization of labour markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples' attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world's middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.
From this perspective, the university today does indeed emerge as a key site of political struggle: not just in the United Kingdom at UCL, Birmingham, Sussex, Middlesex, Leeds, Westminster, SOAS, and Goldsmiths, but also internationally, with protests and occupations having taken place in recent years in the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Italy, Greece, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Chile. This is no doubt one reason why so many experiments involving attempts to rethink the university have emerged over this period, with the list of such projects including the Occupy University (and its London variant, Tent City University), The Really Free School, Chicago Mess Hall, The Public School, Worker's Punk University, Free Slow University of Warsaw, and the University for Strategic Optimism. The political ideologies of these projects are many and varied, but as Dougald Hine — himself a co-founder of a grassroots platform turned dotcom, School of Everything — writes:
There's something important coming together around networked technologies and new sociable collaboration spaces, that's beginning to feel plausible as an alternative home for the spirit of the university. And it's happening just as long-term strains within existing institutions, together with the acute effects of economic crisis, are prompting many people to look for such an alternative.
If a major disruption of our existing institutional forms is under way, then this is also a good time for a deeper enquiry into the promise at the heart of the university, the social good for which it has provided a home, and the ways in which this is (or isn't) made available to people through both existing institutions and emerging alternatives.
Given our interest in the ability of new forms of networked technologies, open access digital publishing, collaborative web tools, and sociable spaces to help enhance and disrupt educational activity, the 'free', self-organised learning communities, or 'universities', that have emerged in recent years, not least with the student and anti-austerity protests and global Occupy movement, have undoubtedly served as one of the motivating impulses behind the production of this book. Despite our recognition of the importance of these wider political events and movements, however, we have taken the decision not to comment substantially on them here. Not because we consider them to be uninteresting or unimportant with regard to thinking about how we might experiment with the institution of the university. Far from it. It is more that, if it is an articulation of these events and movements that is required, then a good deal of interesting work is already available on the subject, including contributions from Alain Badiou, Manuel Castells, Noam Chomsky, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and, in a less celebratory register, from the editorial collective Endnotes. We are also wary of using these recent political occurrences as intellectual capital: as an opportunity to reinforce our own position and credentials as an engaged group of collaborators. Is there not a danger that attempts — particularly on the part of those of us who work 'in' the university — to represent, or speak to, these protests and movements (even when we do so in an approving fashion that is critical of other intellectual, societal, and governmental responses) may actually fly in the face of a lot of what they are about? Do slogans such as 'They don't represent us' not point towards a non-representational political practice, one that goes beyond the idea that the politicians of representative democracy support the interests of the 1 per cent rather than those of the people? In addition, it seems to us that political discourses of urgency and crisis around the student and anti-austerity protests, global Occupy movement, Arab Spring, and so on often risk closing off access to the 'political', and the decision as to what should be written about and responded to most urgently.
Certainly, we support many of the ideas and values behind the creation, 'outside' of the established institutions, of free, autonomous, self-organised universities that anyone can be part of and which, because of their insistence that the whole of mainstream society needs to change, often refuse to make demands of any of its specific (institutional) manifestations. At the same time we would maintain that:
• There is no outside to the university in any simple sense, this idea of an outside to the university being itself an academic (that is, a philosophical) idea, even if it is one that has not been theorized rigorously.
• Efforts to occupy a place or space that is autonomous from the traditional university (whether they are physically located outside the institution or not) too often end up unwittingly trapped inside it, in the sense of unconsciously repeating many of its structures and problems. In particular, such efforts tend to take insufficient account of the way many of those involved in establishing such supposedly autonomous institutions are themselves the products of, and maintain a relationship with, the traditional university. (After all, if what was reported is true, and some of those who took part in the 2011 student actions in London were familiar with the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists, this is at least partly because these texts are taught on many university courses in the arts and humanities.) Moreover, the university is also one of the places where some of those involved in the creation of such autonomous institutions find employment and support from time to time.
• Attacking the 'public' university poses a danger of lending force to neoliberalism's practice of bolstering global corporate institutions while simultaneously undermining nearly all others.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Open Education by Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides, Simon Worthington. Copyright © 2015 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Gary Hall, Ted Byfield, Shaun Hides and Simon Worthington. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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