“Push Pause and Buy Local: Technology at PSU”
Patricia A. Schechter
April 2nd, 2013
George L. Mehaffy doesn’t know his history. The keynote speaker at the January 16th reThink PSU symposium, Mehaffy frames his thinking about innovation in higher education with an anecdote about the pony express. His 2012 article, “Challenge and Change,” tells the story thus: a pony express company opened in 1860, sending horses and riders running in ten-mile segments across thousands of miles between Missouri and California. This company lasted for 19 months, closing in October 1861, “replaced”—a “victim” says Mehaffy—of the transcontinental telegraph. 1 This story is meant, oddly, as a rejoinder to colleges and universities—not the transportation industry—who persist in doing things the old way when technology is about to overtake their efforts.
Mehaffy’s story is a mismatch on many levels. First, the telegraph hardly replaced sending postal mail. More pointedly, education is not “the mail”—though correspondence courses and mail-order degrees sprouted in the 1920s and persist to this day. The pony express analogy only works for education if you ascribe to the definitions touted by publications like The American Interest, which assert that education is like any other “business that relies on the sale of information.”2 As told by Mehaffy, the pony express tale actually makes the entrepreneur businessman look foolish but no matter, because the real hero here is disembodied technology, “the telegraph,” as if it moves and deploys on its own, by magic or God. Mehaffy’s PowerPoint declares that “Technology changes everything” but history tells a much different story about people making choices in real time.
The telegraph was developed by an outstanding American painter, Samuel F. B. Morse, in 1832. After training in Europe and a distinguished career as a portraitist and landscape painter, Morse settled in New York City, taking an appointment at the University of the City of New York (now NYU) as a professor of the literature of the art of design. Morse spent a decade on faculty working on the telegraph idea on the side. He was so poor that he slept in his art studio on campus and his students brought him meals. On his own time and dime, he plunked along with the telegraph, courting private investors to no avail.
After 11 years, the U.S. congress finally gave him a small appropriation; Morse continued development, struggled to lay 40 miles of cable between NY and Baltimore, and still had no purchaser, though the wire itself worked fine. He spent a good deal of the next decade in patent fights settled only by the US supreme court in 1854. While telegraphy gained usage and credibility, investors—and Morse himself—focused on Europe and laying Atlantic cable—to a spectacular flop in 1857, succeeding only in 1866. Mehaffy mocks the entrepreneur who got up a pony express company out west in late 1860, but the telegraph was adapted slowly, major investors looked to the Atlantic, and, lest we forget, a civil war broke out in April, 1861. A pony express company made some rational economic sense especially if we recall that the union and confederate armies still got about on mules and that as late as 1904, a telegraphy wire could only carry 2 messages at the same time. The telegraph did not replace mail and delivery. And the defining features of the history of this technology are human choice making and human time frames in a dynamic social context.
An historical perspective is necessary to challenge the propagandizing of higher education concerning technology. Why didn’t the simpler technologies of the book or the library supplant teaching a long time ago, since these are also basic, inexpensive storage and retrieval systems for text and images and sound? None of the technology boosters stop to ask why, they are too busy with put downs and bad history. “For nearly a thousand years the university system has looked just about the same: professors, classrooms, students in chairs,” writes Harder. Mehaffy complains: “School calendars, created two centuries ago, remain apparently resistant to change.” Have faculties been conning everyone for “a thousand years”? If I were in business, I’d sure want university types in my advertising department, since they have magnificently perpetuated a situation that serves no one, except burnishing some romantic “image” of college life. The mantra about “access to information” over reflective teaching and research goes like this: no one reads scholarly publications, which are mostly “rubbish,” students are bored and undereducated, and the whole thing just costs so much that’d you’d have to be crazy to pay for it.3
The belligerence of this propaganda deserves note. Harder warns readers that technology is a “great destroyer” and that universities must innovate or “die.” Mehaffy insists that campuses “must innovate to remain viable,” but I’m suspicious of these threatening undertones. Last time I checked, the United States is still the leading global magnet for students from all over the world; there have never been more students interested and eager for education in this country. The fact is there is an enormous global student market for education and entrepreneurs and free market ideologues in the media are looking for a way to capture it. What better way than to erode the credibility of the extant structure and its cultural caché—dating back to 11th century Europe after all!—in order to cash in on this large, youthful, mobile, and wired market—also so easily saddled with consumer debt and cheap loans for schooling thanks to Reagan-era economic policies?
Make no mistake: these business advocates want something very badly they are snarling and snapping their teeth to get—or destroy—it: faculty reputation and campus brand loyalty. They want it so bad they are trying to intimidate us—even eliminate us—to get us out of the way.4 Harder writes: “pursuing a Ph.D. in the liberal arts is one of the riskiest career moves one could make today,” but only if we accept the divestment in education and the drip-line approach to tenure-track faculty appointments. We must demand more.
Students are the battle ground in this media bashing of higher ed. In Mehaffy and Harder’s hands, they are spoken for rather than heard in their own voices. Students want more “choice,” and “control,” we are told by Harder. Statistics are trotted out to demonstrate that “45 percent of the [college] students…surveyed said they had no significant gains in knowledge after two years of college.” While there is almost always room for improvements in teaching, I wonder if a college student really gauge their own educational progress by the end of sophomore year? Isn’t the best of education’s power and “return” seen over the course of a lifetime? Students‟ educational needs and desires are persistently reduced to flippant consumer “choice” and reflexive anti-authoritarianism. “I want classes I control not lectures I have to sit through,” declares an actor-playing-a-student in a Youtube ad for on-line learning.5
Harder, a Yale graduate, brags that “much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again on video,” which might save money but fails as a vision of an educated free citizenry—and certainly would not fly at Yale. In Harder’s future America, everyone—except Yalies—has the same teacher, reads the same books, takes the same tests from a small cabal of providers. Land of the cheap, home of the drones…unless you make the Ivy League. Is this an educational program for an empowered democracy? We must preserve learning approaches that foster the intellectual growth required for an inclusive, pluralistic society.
Heading off such dark visions, the technology shills put a friendly, innocuous face on change. Harder favors turning learning into downloadable, custom iTunes playlists, with students mixing and matching skills and credentials to their own liking. But what about education as knowledge creation, and the invention, application, and revision of ideas? What about the social project of education as an intergenerational work of discovery, reflection, and engagement?
Engagement brings me to Portland State. For the past twenty years, PSU has cultivated knowledge around community based learning. Faculty and students have developed relationships, scholarship, cultural capital, know-how and products of an amazing variety and applicability to this city and state, and its global—some social scientists say “glocal”—dimensions. With “Let Knowledge Serve the City,” we have successfully branded and marketed this approach, winning recognition from community partners, the media, and national professional bodies. A significant amount of this activity has digital and on-line dimensions; a significant part of it is done in real time and face to face. Let’s look past the predictions about “disruptive” change or “creative destruction” and determine for ourselves the right balance of research and teaching approaches for this community. Why not believe the evidence-based presentation by a local PR firm made to the Faculty Senate to check on our rebrand (when we got the new logo) a few year years ago? We were told that the community knows us, appreciates us, and believes in the value added by this university.
Mehaffy’s main advice is for faculty “to develop a welcoming attitude toward change,” because if his religion is true, we are doomed. He recommends compliance (and favors hybrid rather than fully on line courses). His labor management style may appeal to some administrators, but his history is just wrong. Technology doesn’t “do” anything. People do everything. Don’t believe the hype about “free” learning. Someone has to generate that content and right now MOOCs don’t pay.6 In early February, the technology crashed and several MOOCs melted down, stranding participants.7 Remember midterms, W2013? D2L crashed on our own campus. With live faculty on campus, our PSU students could be reached, taught, and supported. But with exclusive providers at remote locations, students are cut off from vital human connection to learning.
Oregon must make higher education a “buy local” issue. Does this community really want to be dependent on a few external providers for learning? Is that educational “choice”? Over the last decade, school “choice” in K-12 has reconcentrated resources in middle-class communities, leaving poorer schools to wither and starve, despite the drumming mandate for them to “become more competitive.”8 The new technology tune means taking the misleading, short-term bait of cheap and efficient delivery of “content” from providers who will find a way to charge us more and more for less and less. We at PSU must authentically occupy our own university. I hope that the reThink initiative—and I am a participant in that effort—will help PSU invest in our local strengths and knowledge ecologies rather than give in to the “monoculture mentality” and lack of choice portended by universal educational design.9
“Buy local” is more than a slogan. The idea of buying local is based on the social science, economic, and historical research about how business leaders tend to make decisions. After investors and entrepreneurs enter a locale for the natural resources or the skills or labor power of the population—often setting generations at odds in order to leverage the required labor discipline—they move on, leaving the population to reconstruct its own skills, cultural capital, and marketable resources (witness the global philanthropy and recent redevelopment efforts around,microbusinesses,‟ frequently targeting women, in post-colonial settings.)
We must let this happen in our major metropolitan university in Oregon. History has taught us better and our future depends on it.
1 George Mehaffy, “Challenge and Change,” Educause, Sept/Oct 2012. 19-42. He is VP at AASCU. Mehaffy repeats what popular history conveys about the Express, as in Christopher Corbett, “The Pony Rides Again (and again),” American Heritage (Spring 2010, Vol. 60, Issue 1). “[T]he click of the transcontinental telegraph shut it down 78 weeks later,” after the express opened, writes Corbett.
2 Nathan Harder, “The End of the University as We Know It,” The American Interest (January/February 2013). http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1352
3 Fukuyama, Publish Rubbish or Perish and Pay Through the Nose, the American Interest (blog) 28 April 2012. http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/04/28/publish-rubbish-or-perish-and-pay-through-the-nose/
4 Tikkun article http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/how-the-online-revolution-in-higher-education-will-eliminate-faculty-jobs
5 Colorado Technical University advertisement, “Are You In?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq6AIFIeFk8
6 Tamar Lewin, “Students Rush to Web Classes but Profits May be Much Later,” New York Times 6 January 2013.
7 “MOOC mess,” Inside Higher Ed (4 Febrary 2013); “Georgia Tech and Coursera Try to Recover from MOOC Stumble,” Chronicle of Higher Ed (4 February 2013); “Professor Leaves MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching,” The Wired Campus (18 February 2013).
8 Ravitch, Diane Ravitch, The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
9 C. W. Bowers, “How the online Revolution in Education will Eliminate Faculty Jobs,” Tikkun 4 February 2013. http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/how-the-online-revolution-in-higher-education-will-eliminate-faculty-jobs