The Tortoise Stirs

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I have said more than once that the higher education distance system is a mix of fast private enterprise rabbits, where I work, and slow public tortoises, where I would like to work one day. I love my job but I miss the job security, among other things. Especially here in Illinois, for example, the public retirement system, in which I am already invested, is much stronger, recalling the good old pre-Reagan days when pension funds meant something. The Illinois constitution has a section that prevents the state from touching already existing pension plans. I doubt that any private school is going to protect my retirement so well.

I love my matching-funds IRA plan becuase it forces me to save, but it can’t match a guaranteed benefits plan that’s constitutionally protected (see section 5). So it’s great to see the ACTA, nemesis of most things humane and reasonable, supporting the California commission’s idea that distance education programs, becuase they don’t need buildings and parking lots and so on, could be a way to increase access and decrease costs. What tends to hold back progress, though, is a rigid free market notion that these programs have to be either budget neutral (possible but not likely) or profitable (not in a million years).

No one asks the interstate highway system to make a profit, but for some reason we expect the postal infrastructure, just as much a public service, to make a profit. In fact, the argument over the profitability of public services, including education, has only served to facilitate privatization. The profit motive, as the modern mercenary-based military shows, is no guarantee of efficiency or effectiveness. The public tortoise won’t have a chance if we force college level distance education into the same private box. We just have to figure out how to stop them from using this to make us work more…

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Professional

E-Textbooks: Half-Measures Save Profits

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There should be some sort of capitalist aphorism that says, “half-measures save profits.” That’s how I feel about my cable company. If they really took advantage of the technology available, I’d be able to create my own cable channel subscription, skipping things like those sports channels, and saving myself a lot of time and money. It’s so simple that it’s hard to see anyone doing it.

It’s be even better if I could change my line-up whenever I wished. If I realized that I didn’t like a channel mid-month I could unsubscribe and not be charged the rest of the month; if I wanted to save money, I could cut down the number of channels temporarily. The same might go for phone service if I had a cell and didn’t want to pay for the land line for a particular month.

“Half-measures save profits,” means the cable companies will use technology but that it will take them years to get to the point where I can take full advantage of the new possibilities. This is exactly what I was thinking about when I read “The End of the Textbook as We Know It.” Universities should be switching to Wiki-based textbooks, not helping textbook companies.

It’s not the end of the textbook, it’s the start of the end of one profit system and the attempt to create an equally profitable alternative before someone realizes we don’t need either. It’s all enormously wasteful and unnecessary. We should just skip this step and instead invest the money in a new non-profit network of shared online textbooks. It’s simple and cheap.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional

Property is Theft: Come on In

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In the academic job market, dominated on the one hand by adjuncts and casual labor, and on the other by a shrinking pool of tenure and tenure track professors, publicity matters. We all need to hear much more public discussion of the over-use of adjuncts and casual labor; when it hits the evening network news, we’ll know we are on our way. And that tiny group of full time professors need publicity to earn their way into the star system that passes for job security.

So I am never surprised when I read a story (“Play It Again, Professor”) about a professor pulling a publicity stunt. (It’d be interesting to know more about the logistics: did Marcus Boon notify the Chronicle beforehand to ensure he got his story?) On the other hand, I have to give Boon some credit becuase his stunt– reading from books other than his own at a book reading– does have a point. I am not sure how Boon would make the point, but the Chronicle makes it seem pretty wishy-washy post-modern academic.

It’s not. The idea of copyright, and the subsequent maturation of individual authorship, arose–among other things– out of a need to make sure that authors got paid for their work. It’s become completely naturalized, of course, and as a result many if not most people cannot imagine a world with any other kind of intellectual property right. That’s why the idea of a creative commons license is both so important and so difficult for so many to fathom. I don’t think, though, that it changes what we teach students.

Whatever it’s connections to bourgeois property– it’s certainly analogous to it– intellectual property is a lesson that we teach students in order to teach them a kind of social responsibility. We use citations becuase it’s a way of demonstrating mutual respect, even if at times it’s honored more in the breach, as when Dylan risks our ire by claiming personal authorship when he draws from the collective pool. These are all issues that are bound to generate some ‘future shock’ and I not sure this sort of stunt does much to address that issue.

Posted in: Writing