Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education [Paperback]

"The moral of the story is that, through higher tuition, students have been subsidizing the commercialization of the university. They are paying more but their money is being used to underwrite the very thing that is destroying education. Students are paying more for less. Class sizes increase, teacher-student ratios go down."

JAMIE SWIFT: How does this book connect with your previous work on the history of technology and the relationship between culture and technology?

DAVID NOBLE: I've spent a lot of my career studying the automation of other industries and also the impulses behind that automation. And now "Digital Diploma Mills" is an examination of the industry I work in.

JS: How does what you call the "religion of technology" -- and more specifically the automation of education and the rise of on-line learning -- affect professors and students?

DN: There is no evidence of any pedagogical value for any of this. The economic viability, to the extent that it exist at all -- and that's questionable -- demands a dramatic reduction of labour costs. So the whole edifice of so-called on-line learning rests on the rather frail backs of indentured servants, part time and adjunct faculty who are paid next to nothing. The first chapter of the book is a history of correspondence education in the twentieth century. We're now seeing a repeat of an enterprise that was based on minimizing instructor costs. All the money went into advertising and promotion.

Today the technical foundation is not the post office but fibre optic networks and so on. The investment in infrastructure is enormous. In the book I call it a "technological tapeworm" that exists in the guts of higher education. The tapeworm must be fed -- maintained, serviced, and upgraded. The costs of actually producing courses is much more expensive than had been anticipated, exactly the same as with correspondence courses.

JS: Who will pay those costs?

DN: They try to get the customers to pay. But there's a problem because there aren't many customers. Just as there was little evidence of pedagogical value with correspondence courses, there was also little demand. The impulse behind today's initiatives was that, for a while, there was the expectation of big dollars to be made. That bubble has burst. What we're left with is massive infrastructure like the Technology Enhanced Learning building at York. In addition to that infrastructure there is a cadre of careerists who have staked their careers on this boondoggle. They are doing everything they can to keep the thing afloat. The names change. Before technology enhanced learning there was on line learning. Before that there was distance learning.

The implications for students are horrendous. Tapeworms deplete the energy and health of the host. In this case, there's a real toll on the educational function of the university. At York a hundred million dollars are going into the Technology Enhanced Learning building where one floor is leased to corporations. Meanwhile a ten per cent cut is being imposed on everything else. Class sizes are increasing. Staffing is being cut. Curriculum and course offerings are being eliminated. Adjuncts are replacing full time faculty.

JS: How does this affect the tuition and the higher costs that we hear so much about?

DN: As an historian, I've found it interesting. You rarely get things to line up so neatly. In the US in 1980 the Bayh-Dole Amendment to the Patent Act gave universities automatic ownership of all patents on federally funded research. That turned the universities into patent holding companies. Peddlers of intellectual property. Universities began building commercial labs and hiring expensive researchers to the impoverishment of the rest of the university. In the US tuition began to outpace inflation in 1980.

In Canada the same thing happened in 1990 through a fiat -- like a papal bull -- from Ottawa. Patents that had reverted to the Crown became property of the university. In 1990 tuition started to outpace inflation in Canada. The moral of the story is that, through higher tuition, students have been subsidizing the commercialization of the university. They are paying more but their money is being used to underwrite the very thing that is destroying education. Students are paying more