See Education Review for a second review.
A Review of Putting the University Online: Information, Technology and Organizational Change
James Cornford and Neil Pollock.
London: Open University P, 2003
ISBN: 0-335-21005-8 £19.99; $30.95 pp. 121Review by John Rothfork
Northern Arizona University
In this book, almost exclusively concerned with higher education policy in Britain, James Cornford and Neil Pollock identify how distance methods are changing the mission of the university and the role of faculty. Both authors are affiliated with Newcastle University; James Cornford is the co-director of the Centre for Social and Business Informatics while Neil Pollock is involved with urban development, specifically with the virtual university.
Methodology
What Professors Do The Online University Actor Network Theory Academic Management Software Putting Courses Online Conclusion
In spite of the text's annoying self-consciousness about methodology, the authors imply that the adoption of commercial computer programs by the university threatens to subvert both the university's historic mission and the role of faculty, social constructions that have remained largely unchanged – as graduation gowns and hoods suggest – since the Renaissance. This book because of its critique of technology, pedagogy, and the role of faculty should be a focus of discussion among faculty at every university in a rush to offer online classes.
Unlike authors of other works with similar titles, such as Gene Maeroff's A Classroom of One: How Online Learning Is Changing Our Schools and Colleges (2003), Hubert Dreyfus' On the Internet (2001), or David Noble's Digital Diploma Mills (2001), Cornford and Pollock seem to be as concerned with the effects of academic management software on learning outcomes in self-designed Web-based instruction as with commercial distance education programs like WebCT or Blackboard. Cornford and Pollock's short book appeals more to an academic reader than administration. The threat of the effects of technology that they describe is all the more insidious because it is largely an invisible process of "adjustments to fit the university to the demands of the technology" that is produced by and for the commercial sector (111).
The authors caution about being aware of a form of technological determinism that shapes faculty's roles and responsibilities; as a new technology causes social processes, it ultimately produces distinctive policies and institutional structures. Despite the authors' awkward allusions to actor network theory to offer a nuanced understanding of something slightly less than technological determinism, Cornford and Pollock continue to subscribe to a qualified version of technological determinism in an outlook that owes as much to Lewis Mumford as to Michel Foucault. The authors quote authorities to claim that information and communication technology "rarely cause social transformations" (11), but then they seek to illustrate the opposite in spite of their talk about how technologies are never finished artifacts (22) and how technology use is a negotiated rather than dictated practice (84). What the authors seem to intend is to reject Modernist theories that seek to explain complex events by relying on a single, monolithic cause. The larger and more theoretical influence here seems to be explained by Critical Theory, which resulted when old-fashioned Marxism was rethought from the point of view offered by Postmodernism. For example, Cornford and Pollock paraphrase Bill Reading's thesis in The University in Ruins (cf. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom) that sought to explain the development of American higher education after World War II in these words:
driven, in the sciences by the defense budget (the protection of national culture from threats from overseas), in the social sciences by the needs of the expanding welfare system (the extension of citizenship to all citizens), and in the humanities by the need to define a canon of national culture. (3)
Without trying to disprove or deconstruct these simplistic claims, Cornford and Pollock suggest that none of these forces continue to drive the development of the university in the twenty-first century. Instead, they worry that online distance education "is overwhelmingly concentrated on narrow, vocationally oriented courses" taken by "the advantaged, the upwardly mobile, the 'over-employed' [...] and the well educated" (6). They worry that the physical space of the university campus, which has provided "a place-based 'rite of passage' for entry into middle-class professions," will be appropriated by commercial ventures like Microsoft, which calls its corporate headquarters a campus (10). The authors, too, worry that faculty more and more resemble the cartoon character Dilbert, forced to do clerking and personnel work imposed by PeopleSoft, Enterprise, and other online academic management programs. Such programs threaten a kind of institutional fascism because "everything not already included within the system appears disordered" and irrelevant to the vocabulary of assessment (65).
Cornford and Pollock rely on Foucault and the Postmodern admonition to consider institutions and social structures in terms of technique or what they do rather than in terms of what they say in mission statements. Accordingly, they identify the virtual university as "a new social, technical, temporal and spatial division of labour in higher education – it is work made mobile" because it disaggregates processes from their traditional contexts and associations (27). This implies the usual recognition of how online classes are typically accessible to students 24/7 from any computer linked to the Internet and how online classes often rely on asynchronous posts and uploaded presentations. The authors also understand "mobility" in another way, which allows "actors and institutions who never cooperated before" to come "together in new alliances and affiliations to produce novel forms of higher education not previously available" (32).
I recognize this kind of "mobility" in the online courses I teach in professional writing, which can be used to earn an English or a business graduate degree. Not only is "the nature of academic work […] changing as scholars find themselves using more technology," we also find that our traditional academic disciplinary boundaries are changing because computer technology and the Internet foster the kind of easy cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration that previously involved time and physical planning. Instead of being driven by high-minded theory or policy, Cornford and Pollock report, too, almost casually creating a virtual seminar that brought together "a wide range of actors and entities across a number of large organizations with no procedures for interacting other than those mediated through the technology" (36).
When the university goes online, the experience of walking around a physical campus with a special identity as a student is lost. Also lost are the opportunities to be coached in physical skills in disciplines from music to laboratory sciences. Cornford and Pollock never quite recognize the pragmatist philosophy they rely on to make the point that the virtual university is defined "almost exclusively in terms of information" that lacks an obvious professional context, which was traditionally associated with a physical space, with architecture, and with physical interaction among students, faculty, and staff (40). With absence of references to basic sources in pragmatism, such as the work of John Dewey, Michael Polanyi, or Hubert Dreyfus, authors Cornford and Pollock rely on their colleagues to make the point that the virtual university is "based on a 'naïve sociology' which ‘ignores the role of apprenticeship and implicit craft knowledge in the generation of technical progress and scientific discovery" (41). Cornford and Pollock worry that in going online, the traditional university loses two of the functions it has had since its inception in the Renaissance: to be a refuge (against the church and later against the government) for ideas and experimentation, and to be an agent for creativity and social change. The function of the university as a refuge from commerce is imperiled by the concept of the virtual university as "an information process […] concerned with the movement of information from one place to another" without regard for context, tradition, or application (42).
The authors confound commonplace thinking, which might expect them to follow academic conservatives like Bill Readings or Allan Bloom to lament "the university in ruins." Instead, they ask us to notice technique rather than policy or the chimera of administrative decision and control. They ask "us to move away from an analysis of learning solely in terms of its informational content and to" notice "the forms which that content comes in" (43). How do we study the form of the emerging virtual university? Cornford and Pollock suggest two processes: first, those in higher education need to "describe the construction of distance education courses in terms of the construction of an actor network" (44); second, those same individuals need to imagine the university as a corporate structure (44, 76).
Actor network theory derives from the work of Bruno Latour who followed Thomas Kuhn in offering a postmodern sociology of science. Cornford and Pollock say that actor network thinking explicates "how the development of scientific, organizational and bureaucratic processes and practices, simultaneously" involve the development of scientific institutions, organizations, and the modern state (80). Instead of looking for a single, monolithic cause, it looks for multiple, reciprocating, and mutating causes for social events. In
referring to distance education as an entity or policy, Cornford and Pollock want us to notice the "thick description" of distance education as "the painstaking piecing together of people (lectures, authors, technicians, librarians, graphic artists, publishers, assessment experts, administrators, students, etc.), machines and other physical items (computers, telecommunications networks, offices, etc.), texts (textbooks, course lists, examination papers and assessment forms, etc.), and, of course, money (budgets, accounts, direct debits, etc.)" (44). All of the "et ceteras" indicate that the lists of what is involved in distance education should be extended, noticed, and studied, especially in their temporal evolution and negotiation with other agents.
The authors recognize the virtual university as a project that has "the goal of transcending the constraints of the campus" to construct "a far more corporate structure" more directly involved with commerce and government (44, 76). Paradoxically, this is likely to cause faculty to be more, not less, concerned about the physical space and perhaps the traditions of the university.
Many at Northern Arizona University (NAU) perceive a contradiction in the two chief goals of the school: to offer the best undergraduate residential education in Arizona and to offer excellent distance education. Cornford and Pollock suggest that rather than having to choose one or the other, we may be considering two sides of the same coin.
As an undergraduate in the 1960s, I registered for courses by standing in various lines to collect computer punch cards. It seemed rather "high tech" at the time. Teaching from the 1970s until now, my focus, like that of my faculty colleagues, has been almost entirely on the classroom and on the texts students and I examined there. In the last couple of years, NAU adopted a PeopleSoft program that put online the processes of registration, class rosters, advising, submitting grades, getting paycheck stubs, and dealing with the human resources office. Ten years ago many of my colleagues complained about having to learn how to use a computer to read and write e-mail. Now they literally cannot teach without participating in online academic management processes. Cornford and Pollock describe a similar academic and business management system at their university, called Enterprise, which deals with "finance, human resources, project management and, eventually, student records" (53). To some degree, computer technology has changed the job description of university faculty in every discipline. Cornford and Pollock identify how a professor's role in the modern university integrates much more of the business office responsibility, for as they describe it:
[T]he role of the computer system is no longer just presenting and accounting for the university to funding bodies. There is now a "direct pressure" to spend more effort on "management and administration," and
to provide more data and information on "relative performance." (55)
The implied roles and responsibilities are not innocuous changes or minor additions of duties.
Cornford and Pollock imply that online academic management programs erode both academic freedom and professionalism by compelling faculty to learn computerized management and assessment techniques and to spend a significant part of their time clerking to passively follow what the software dictates. In some cases, these responsibilities incense humanist scholars; the process tacitly demands a kind of simple reading and minimal writing that mocks their professional talents to analyze texts. Moreover, "The process is not the bringing forth of an established problem" defined even by academic management, much less faculty, "but the act of producing the problem" by techniques offered by commercial software (61). The consequence of using commercial software to define what the university does is profound: "universities can be thought of as composed completely of 'information groups' (i.e. students, buildings, projects), 'information items' (i.e. teaching materials for a course) and 'information standards' (i.e. the attributes of groups and items)." What is more, these are also all performance roles or technique that are largely, if not entirely, invisible to formulation as policy for discussion and decision (60).
In 1948 Dwight Eisenhower accepted the presidency of Columbia University. In his first speech to the faculty he expressed his pleasure at meeting the employees of the university whereupon he was interrupted by a famous physics professor, I. I. Rabi, who corrected him, saying, "Sir, the faculty are not the employees of the university, the faculty is [the] University" (there are other versions of the story). Fifty years later, Cornford and Pollock fear that information – in the sense of academic clerking – "has become the unifying principle in the university, the basis around which all actors are ordered" (60). It may be an exaggeration to claim that the "university can be redefined as an 'information institution'" (65), but it is certainly worth noticing that management software is adopted at universities in an unperceived and almost covert way and consequently, these processes can very much alter the understanding of what faculty do at the university. In America Gary Rhoades suggests that the administrative claim of technical exigency has become a tactic to "bypass collective faculty control" of the university (Academe 38).
Cornford and Pollock argue that it is too late to entirely resist the technological determinism of an information institution, and that, in any case, computer technology is too pervasive for the university to resist. They say putting the university online will create a less autonomous university; they describe this new university as follows:
A more "corporate" form of organization where both policy formation and policy implementation are more stringent, and goals, roles, identities, abstract rules and standard operating procedures are made explicit and formalized. It is in this sense, then, that the virtual university is a far more "concrete" organization than its predecessor. (72)
General Eisenhower in 1948 may have been prescient in assuming that university faculty are simply corporate employees and that an Army General is likely to possess the requisite skills to manage the enterprise.
University management software, or so-called enterprise programs, are "turn-key" products, meaning that commerce imports its model to the university making only cosmetic rather than substantive alterations to accommodate a fundamentally different institution. Because operations are performed rather than conceived, university personnel inevitably "end up fitting their organization to the system rather than the other way around" (83). Students are customers only in a limited and inessential sense. If one can simply buy degrees, then education is entirely subverted by commerce.
The authors caution faculty to recognize what putting the university online means to teaching. In the past, university teaching was very much controlled by academic disciplines without the kind of discernible control evident in obtaining teaching credentials to teach in secondary or primary schools. In delivering learning online faculty are now confronted with numerous "support specialists" – course designers and trainers expert in the delivery or platform programs, such as WebCT and Blackboard; graphic artists and Web designers; "new" librarians who offer to help with electronic sources; compliance experts who insure that Web courses can be "seen" by the visually impaired; marketing advisors who seem to have replaced recruitment personnel; and assessment experts who advise faculty about "best practices" for Web courses. In addition to this group of specialists, there are also fiscal agents to explain how faculty can obtain additional money especially appropriated by state legislatures to circumvent the established financial support of higher education to accelerate the switch to distance education, which legislatures hope will greatly reduce the commitment of the state to support public higher education. All of this leads Derek Bok to recognize that "Internet courses, unlike traditional classes, are not the work of a single teacher; they require a team of up to twenty people" (92).
Cornford and Pollock warn that "the ultimate aim" of all this help is to establish "precise structures, roles, and responsibilities" for online instruction in order "to rebuild the institution around the technology" (75-6). They describe the usual pattern of online course development as a team process in which a faculty member is outnumbered and influenced by support personnel, who often trump faculty concerns by claiming to better know what works in online instruction. The model also often uses senior faculty only to design courses that are delivered or facilitated by lower paid adjuncts or graduate students. In America this model works toward constructing schools like Rio Salado, one of eleven Phoenix, Arizona area community colleges. Rio Salado employs 26 full time faculty and "over 700 adjunct instructors each semester" to teach 300 Web courses to 20,000 students. With examples like this, it is no wonder that some believe putting the university online is simply a tactic used to subvert the university by redefining what faculty do. Because most senior faculty have little facility with computers and online instruction, Cornford and Pollock explain that "attempts to build the virtual university from the bottom up, course-by-course, without reconstructing the basic structures of the university, appear to be very slow, labour-intensive and highly prone to failure." Instead, computer technology creates "a powerful incentive to formalize, to standardize, to make explicit, to make concrete" both what faculty do and what the university does (77). The result is more of a commercial product rather than an educational experience.
Putting the University Online is more significant for what it implies than for what the authors explicitly state. Cornford and Pollock are hampered by their self-consciousness about methodology. Sometimes they seem to wish to interpret changes in the definition of the university and university faculty as simply illustrations of the actor network theory to prove that "there was no university there to fit to the system" because "the university is made up of locally negotiated practices and interactions, many of which are difficult to capture accurately or to articulate in the language of ERP" (Enterprise Resource Planning, 84). The more alarming thesis that Cornford and Pollock would have done well to better concentrate on and to more boldly announce is that commercial software adoption by university managers and administrators threatens to redefine both the historic mission of the university and the role of faculty. Their major claim seems to be that the systems adapted from commerce do not quite fit the systems for teaching in higher education, as they explain: "Much change, we argue, stems not from direct university or senior management policy but from adjustments to fit the university to the demands of the technology" (111).
Dire as the warning from Cornford and Pollock is, the university may be saved from becoming another commercial institution because of its conservative nature. For-profit and largely online schools, like the University of Phoenix, are still exceptions to the more conservative model of higher education. I want to suggest that Putting the University Online should be corrected to reflect the reality of Putting Some Universities Online or Putting Some of the University Online. But my confidence in the stability of the university is shaken by the quick evolution of the community college into the model offered by Rio Salado where the campus serves only as an administrative center and where faculty are freelance entrepreneurs, almost anonymous and interchangeable adjuncts whose contracts are for a single class and whose tenure is for a semester. I think Cornford and Pollock are right: universities that embrace this specific model of the university in hopes of solving fiscal problems forfeit their academic character, located in the nature of what their faculty do, to offer commercial services. Cornford and Pollock, too, are right to identify the threat to higher education as largely unnoticed and consequently undiscussed. Instead of a threat to what faculty teach or write, the threat comes in changing how they teach, which is difficult to escape because it is disguised as help, technical support, and improved efficiency.
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