Will Technology Commercialize Higher Learning?

Information technology is increasingly a mixed blessing for higher education in the United States.

On the one hand, technology enthusiasts revel in the rich information resources and the collaborative opportunities provided by the Internet. On the other, many educators and administrators are beginning to worry about the vast expenses imposed by trying to keep up with technological changes and the hiring of experts to run complex networks.

Concerns are also growing over the blurring of the line between education and training, and over the penetration of the university by corporate agendas, especially by companies that want to lock students and faculties into proprietary software and hardware standards. Two recent cases in California illustrate these worries rather starkly.

The first is the California Educational Technology Initiative, or CETI, proposed by the California State University system. CETI is a proposed 10-year contract between CSU and four large technology corporations: Microsoft Corp., GTE Corp., Fujitsu Ltd. and Hughes Electronics Corp. The companies would provide technology and networking to CSU campuses, which would in turn charge students and campus budgets to repay the for-profit partnership--a deal potentially worth more than $5 billion to the firms. The deal is on hold because of widespread criticism and alarm from students, the faculty, a few state legislators and companies not part of the partnership. The California State Student Assn. passed a resolution opposing any “privatization of the California State University as a whole.”

CSU administrators saw this partnership as a way to bring state-of-the-art technologies to their campuses without begging the Legislature for more funds.

But David Klein, a professor of mathematics at Cal State Northridge, wrote in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 11: “CETI would lock campuses into standardized, proprietary technology, placing graduates at a disadvantage for finding employment with non-CETI companies. Professors would be rewarded for marketing products to their students. CSUN’s mission would shift a few degrees away from educating students and a few degrees toward fleecing them.”

The second case involves another new university-sponsored for-profit corporation: UCLA’s Home Education Network, which is also a partnership with private corporations, including Times Mirror Co., publisher of The Times.

The Home Education Network is in the business of selling Internet-based education, sometimes called “distance-learning.” UCLA administrators are edging toward a policy in which UCLA faculty members may be forced to make their course curricula and other teaching material available to the Home Education Network as the “intellectual property” of the university, to be sold in a for-profit market that many experts think will boom over the next decade.

UCLA’s new venture and similar efforts around the country were blasted recently in an essay by noted technology critic David Noble, an American who teaches in Canada’s York University. “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education” has been circulating on the Internet and was published this month in an online scholarly journal, First Monday (https://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/index.html). It’s been generating a good deal of discussion among academics.

Noble writes: “Universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education.”

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Distance-learning and online courseware are hot topics among university officials. Two weeks ago, Gov. Pete Wilson announced a “California Virtual University” project, with a proposed budget of $12 million over the next three years. Western Governors University, based in Salt Lake City, grants degrees using online courses, collecting courses from 16 states and Guam. Duke University in North Carolina offers a master’s degree in business administration online. The cost: $82,500.

University officials typically cite the growing market for “lifelong learning,” especially among people who can’t take time off from jobs to return to college. Noble cites a report from the investment firm Lehman Bros., which estimated the market to be several hundred billion dollars in the near future, a “focus industry” for investment. “In the future, an institution of higher education will become a little like a local television station,” Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt has said.

Faculties have many reasons to be alarmed by such trends, of course. The ultimate realization of “virtual universities” would be a market-driven panoply of courses offered by “stars” in each respective field, eroding the need for depth in university faculties and fostering a kind of celebrity hierarchy driven by profit.

There is also a disturbing trend pointing toward “competency-based” training online, substituting for full, well-rounded liberal arts education. In response to President Clinton’s announcement last week of millions of new dollars in training funds to support the expansion of the nation’s high-tech work force, Barbara Bolin, the associate vice president for Austin Community College in Texas, said, “Industry needs competencies,” not degrees.

There are rumors of plans underway at Microsoft for a “Microsoft University” that would confer “certificates” of competency for specific Microsoft software products. Western Governors University already offers such certification programs.

In fact, critics of the White House plan for training high-tech workers have pointed out that tech companies will run with this money and simply attempt to expand their user base rather than truly train workers for an ever-changing economy.

Underlying the misgivings of many academics about the trends illustrated by CETI, the Home Education Network and virtual universities is the suspicion that administrators, legislators and university trustees, under pressure because of mounting technology expenses, are capitulating to the high-tech industry’s political agenda, which is clearly hostile to educational principles such as faculty governance and social critique.

In other words, some academics are starting to view their institutions as emergent clones of market-driven high-tech companies instead of as universities and colleges. Recent attacks on tenure across the country--a principle not coincidentally reviled by many high-tech leaders--only fuel such suspicions.

By now, nearly every faculty member and student in every college and university uses a computer every day. But the glowing screens of those machines may come to represent, for some, the ghostly presence of some alien and unwelcome ideas.