Category Archives: Writing

The thing about right wing rhetoric is that it is upside down, a kind of unconscious irony that lacks all insight. Individual liberty means the freedom to carry a gun and to believe that climate change is a hoax and evolution a thinly supported theory. Never mind food and housing and health care and good wages and a pension. That’s not liberty; liberty is being able to carry a concealed weapon. Individual liberty also means freedom from government regulation.

Never mind that we are only now emerging from a world-wide economic collapse rooted in a wildly unregulated, often illegal, financial sector. Never mind that bridges are collapsing or that we are all growing poorer while the rich get richer. Never mind. We need to be free. I’ve often wondered how far this will go, if unchecked. Would the right-wing advocate, say, deregulating the food industry even in the fact of an outbreak of salmonella?

It’s not an outrageous idea. After all, they were arguing for less gun control– and they prevented some very minor measures– right in the middle of another set of mass murders. Liberty is apparently the liberty to get shot at school or at work or at the library. Liberty is the fantasy that, one day, someone somehow will be there to shoot back at the bad man, thanks to our newly liberalized concealed weapons laws. It’s never happened yet, but still.

Now, apparently, in their ongoing campaign for liberty, the right-wing has put libraries in their cross-hairs. I don’t mean the Santa Monica shootings, I mean the libraries in Kentucky which are now under threat of closure thanks to lawsuits against the property tax they rely on for funding. These are not moribund institutions, either, according to the president of the American Library Association, Maureen Sullivan:

More than 1 million Kentuckians depend on their libraries for job searching, Internet access, small-business development, after-school homework help for students and other essential services. In libraries throughout Kentucky and in more than 16,000 public libraries across the U.S., people find a lifeline to technology training and online resources for employment, access to government resources, continuing education, retooling for new careers and starting a small business.

“NKY needs its libraries” Maureen Sullivan

The list of things lost to right-wing anti-government / market fanaticism seems endless. Once the post offices and the highways and bridges and the libraries and the public schools are all gone or sold off, what will be left for us?

One of the strangest facts of U.S. academic culture is that it seems to have no sense of its own immediate or long-term history. As the cliché goes, those that are unaware of history are doomed to repeat it, first as tragedy, then as farce. Too much of the current debate over online education in general and MOOC’s in particular, seems to be skipping the tragedy and going right for the farce. The problem is the obsessive concern with markets.

Education, in the market view, is a commodity, students are consumers, the product has become too expensive (that is why there is so much debt) and we can use the internet to fix it. This model has never worked in higher education any more than in any other public service. Just the opposite; as in the economy at large, the market model is now being called on to fix the mess it created. The market model has a big problem: education cannot be fully measured.

The big problem is measurement and accountability: How do you prove that these far-flung students are actually learning anything of value? William G. Bowen, founder of a nonprofit that studies high tech in higher education, sounded a cautionary note when he told the New York Times earlier this year, ”There’s great promise here, great potential, but we need more careful research, and there has not been sufficient attention to that.”

“The $7,000 Computer Science Degree — and the Future of Higher Education” Martha C. White

This isn’t really a problem created by online education; it has always been the dilemma of education in a capitalist economy. If you cannot measure success (quality, consumer experiences, etc.) you cannot price the product. Online education, though, seems to offer administrators a chance to start over from scratch and solve the problem once and for all. It sounds great– we’ll finally know the value of an education– but it’s a Trojan horse.

What do you have to do to achieve this goal of a cheap and measurable (commodity) education? Walmart has shown the way. The first thing you do is that you drive down labor costs. Or, rather, you drive down labor costs at the bottom of the hierarchy. At the top (Deans and Provosts and up) it turns out that you have to pay well or you won’t be competitive. The “education product” you deliver is then trimmed down to the “measurable.”

“Computer science problems have a right or wrong answer and lend themselves to objective, rather than subjective, assessment and evaluation,” the program’s FAQ section explains.” The result? “We believe this program can establish corporate acceptance of high-quality and 100 percent online degrees as being on par with degrees received in traditional on-campus setting.” It’s an education system that is far more corporate than democratic.