The Dylan reference is probably unfair. But whenever I read a piece like this (“Value Students? Then Value Adjuncts“) I can’t help but feel more than a little frustrated. Academics– not just adjuncts– just don’t seem to understand the basic paradigms of power in a capitalist economy. I know that in part it’s just a figure of speech, but it’s absurd to ask the university to “care.”

It just does not work that way. No capitalist institution, no matter how rooted in the liberal arts (or organic foods or solar power or anything else) is going to willingly give up power over something as basic as labor costs. Adjuncts, especially in writing programs, like the author of the piece, are money making machines. Too often (but not always) they are very compliant money machines too.

The real problem, in the end, is that academia needs to give up its genteel notions of power and influence exercises through persuasion, specially in a written form. It borders on a kind of fetish– this notion that the way you change the university is by writing texts to persuade them that your cause is just. Writing is fine, but power comes from organization.

My educated guess is that the class divide that seems to have become so normalized economically is going to become ever more sharply reflected in the cultural capital of education. I think this will first happen in the institutional capital of universities, particularly in the way they represent learning. These new emerging class divisions will turn on technology.

More and more, I think, online education will come to be seen as analogous to the large lecture halls of the public research universities and the community colleges. That is, as cost and labor saving techniques by and large inappropriate to the higher reaches of the hierarchy. Elite institutions will use distance education, but only as a supplement to their experiential pedagogy.

It won’t be perfectly clear cut– what social phenomena ever is? — but increasingly the class divide will be reflected in the relative pedagogical weight of experiential, ‘hands on’ education, and distance education. At the top, cultural capital will be accumulated in small workshop seminars and in various forms of professional collaboration; at the bottom, via online courses.

I think you get a hint of this in Yale’s ongoing attempt to redefine its Architecture program to reflect what the American Institute of Architecture Students calls “a culture of optimism, respect, sharing, engagement and innovation” (“New Blueprint for Architecture” Inside Higher Ed, October 19, 2009). The reforms are understandably oriented towards undoing the old “work until you drop” model.

That’s a good thing, no doubt. Most subtlety, though, the changes all seem to suggest an emphasis on the sorts of educational work that can only be accomplished in person. “Students will be able to spend a semester in New York City taking courses,” says Dagmar Ritcher, architecture chair, “working at internships and “networking with alumni who are very active in practice there.”

As an online teacher I have to be concerned about the ways that new communication technologies tend to magnify, not simply reproduce, socioeconomic inequity. I think we can teach writing online as well as the traditional classroom. More and more, though, elite institutions will distinguish themselves by the social cultural capital we cannot provide our students at a distance.