Rees.SIP.DU

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My brother is an economist at the University of Colorado Denver. While we both gripe about the general

stinginess of our mutual employer, the State of Colorado. he is on an entirely different salary plane than I am. I

understand how markets work, but this still doesn't make me particularly happy. After all, I actually teach more than

he does. This symbolizes the way that faculty members tend to be stratified. Economists over historians, at least

with respect to compensation. Full professors over Assistant Professors. Tenure track faculty over adjuncts. It

would be difficult for any individual to represent the point of view of all those sub-groups.

I'm also a bad representative of the faculty point of view because I think most faculty don't have a point of

view about the future of higher education. They're too busy, especially the adjuncts. As a labor historian, I have

always been more prone to think about the terms and conditions of my employment more than my peers. What got

me directly involved in these issues was a note from my Provost about seven or eight years ago. It explained that

our university had made a terrible oversight in the paperwork they had used when hiring people for the previous

decade. Every instructor hired at that time was supposed to sign a statement swearing to protect and defend the

Colorado Constitution and they had neglected to give us that document. I wasn't planning on plotting a coup, but I

had no idea what was even in the Colorado Constitution.

I'm not sure why, but I sent an e-mail to the American Association of University Professors (or AAUP)

asking them if I could be fired for not signing. I got a call back within half-an-hour. The staffer on the other end of

the line explained to me that this had been tested in court many times and that, yes, I could be fired for not signing.

I signed. But, more importantly, at the end of the phone call, the staffer noted that my campus had no AAUP

chapter. Would I consider starting one? Any organization with such useful information at its fingertips seemed like

it would be an asset to me and my colleagues so I said yes. This is how I became interested in university

governance issues. The AAUP will gladly offer any faculty member a crash course in higher educational best

practices to anyone who chooses to participate. I dove in head first, and then started writing about the experience.

The AAUP will be celebrating its 100th year in 2015. In that time, it has studied and reported on all kinds

of issues facing campuses of all types. What role should faculty have in picking a new president? The AAUP has a

best practice for that. You say your dean is interfering with the internal affairs of your department? The AAUP has

a best practice for that. Adjunct faculty on your campus are being exploited? The AAUP has a best practice for

that. Seriously, if you're in higher education and you don't have a copy of the AAUP Red Book, then you are


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missing out on what may be the best resource available for running or simply just participating in university life.

That goes for administrators and faculty members alike. The AAUP has been recording the best practices in

university governance for almost a hundred years. It has seen everything, and therefore has much to teach interested

administrators who are willing to learn.

If forced at gun point to choose the most important lesson which the Red Book contains, I would offer up

two words: shared governance. What is shared governance? It is the foundational principle that since universities

are dedicated to higher education, the people who do the educating should play a significant role in determining how

the university operates. The greater the effect of a particular decision on the practice of higher education, the greater

the role that faculty should play. I can't remember the exact moment that I first heard the term shared governance,

but I remember what my immediate reaction was. It was, Wow, we can do that? Shared governance is not

something that gets mentioned in graduate school. Your dean, unless he or she is an extraordinary person, will not

tell you about shared governance. Shared governance is something you learn about from your colleagues.

Unfortunately, as higher education becomes increasingly adjunctified and more and more of it moves online, fewer

faculty than ever will ever even hear that term, let alone be able to practice it. Therefore, the fact that I am

discussing it here makes me a bad representative for the faculty point of view.

However, this does not make me a dangerous radical. Shared governance does not mean the faculty control

campus. It means that governance is indeed shared. I liken it to the kind of workplace administration that trade

union organization like the Congress of Industrial Organizations used to espouse during the 1930s: Labor and

management sitting down to work out issues facing an enterprise in an environment of mutual respect and

cooperation. Shared governance is not a philosophy designed to promote a communist takeover. It is a philosophy

that promotes the idea of labor and management working together for the benefit of themselves and students alike.

To champion shared governance is like begging to be managed rather than simply controlled. While the word

management may seem antiquated during an age when so many employers cut health benefits for employees or

move jobs offshore to China, management used to mean showing employees carrots as well as sticks. Faculty are

highly-skilled workers. Recognize them as an asset and they can make any university stand out in a crowded field.

There I go being a bad faculty representative again. I'm talking about universities as if they were

businesses. Of course some universities for-profit universities are businesses, but if there's anything most


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faculty members will agree upon it's that most universities aren't businesses. They're a public good. None of us got

into this line of work because of the money. Even the business school professors I know with salaries that would

make my brother the economist green with envy could be making more in the private sector. Nevertheless, nearly

all of us have entered academia because we believe in the value of higher education for both students and society at

large. Start treating higher education like a business, and that value gets diluted if not entirely lost. A good

university is a public trust. It's not supposed to make money. Whatever losses it experiences will be more than paid

back to society by the revenues that its graduates generate over the course of their working lifetimes. When we talk

about reforming higher education to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, we have to remember the success that

American higher education has had during the previous hundred years. Even today, more than 40 of the 100 top

universities in the world are in the United States. In our lust for reform, let us not throw out the baby with the

bathwater. That would by my cue to start talking about MOOCs.

A few years ago, I started a blog. I named it More or Less Bunk after my favorite Henry Ford quote. It

was originally a history blog, and it wasn't very good. It picked up steam when I began discussing online education.

I had been offered an opportunity to teach online and was appalled by the low standards that were required for these

endeavors. I researched the subject and reported my findings on my blog because I figured few of my fellow faculty

members knew about this either. Then, maybe a year-and-a-half ago, a textbook publisher friend of mine blogged

about a computer science course out of Stanford that had 30,000 students in it. They can't be serious, I thought to

myself. How can you possibly teach 30,000 students at once? They were serious, and you can't (but I get ahead

of myself). I can't remember if they used the term in that article, but this was the first time I ever encountered

MOOCs (or Massive Open Online Courses).

Since then MOOCs have become a mania, the one thing that will single-handedly change higher education

as we know it. What separates MOOCs from regular online courses is not only their size, but the entire student

experience. While many commentators on my blog who taught online explained to me that good online instructors

can work pedagogical miracles through good course design and close personal attention, MOOCs are inherently

impersonal endeavors. MOOC professors, superprofessors is now the popular term, do not deal with students.

Indeed, many MOOC syllabi instruct students to not even e-mail them. The students' written work (if any is even

required in a MOOC) is often graded by machine, or passed off to peers who probably know little about the subject


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matter. Otherwise, why would they even be taking the course in the first place? This is industrialized education at

its worst.

The Industrial Revolution began in America around 1815. Most historians place its end around 1930, but

really it's ongoing as many industries have yet to industrialize, including higher education. What does it mean to

industrialize? I wrote a book on industrialization that came out last year, and in it I define industrialization as

Mechanization + The Division of Labor = More Stuff.

Let's take those terms one at a time. Mechanization is the easiest term here. That simply means replacing

people with machines. The division of labor means breaking a job into its component parts and having workers

repeat just one of those parts all day rather than trying to do everything. It is the same principle that makes the

assembly line possible, but it predates the assembly line. In the nineteenth century, this could be measured in terms

of physical manufactured product. In the twenty-first century information economy, this can also be measured in

terms of efficiency.

Mechanization is what separates a MOOC from regular online educational offerings. While I am still not a

fan of online education in general, these classes at least require a living, breathing professor at the other end of the

computer screen who is dedicated to the success of every student in the class. The only way for a MOOC to operate

at a massive scale is for the entire process to be automated. Students log on, they watch the product that the

superprofessor and their team of tech experts produces. They still work essentially alone.

The division of labor here involves the relationship between providing content and the rest of the functions

of teaching. The superprofessor provides the content. If the MOOC is being used on a college campus, then there

might be a local professor who has wrapped his course around the MOOC. In an ideal world, that person can give

students the individual attention they deserve. In a less than ideal world, local administrators fire that person in

order to save money and replace them with a less-qualified teaching assistant.

If you think the product of higher education is education, then the comparison between industrialized

factories and MOOCs breaks down with the output. However, if you look at the product of higher education as the

number of students and sadly I think that's the way most administrators think served then there's no problem with

this analogy at all. Even if the students in a MOOC aren't paying, the data they provide offers a potential source of

income if not instantly, then perhaps somewhere down the road. This is the revenue model pioneered by


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happens, I believe that students will forego college in droves since nobody wants to pay thousands of dollars to be

treated like just another face in the crowd.

Faculty's role in this discussion should be to serve as a check on administrative budget-cutting zeal. We

are, after all, the ones who say what education is. If MOOCs do not provide an adequate educational experience, we

should not award credit for completing them. If we work in an environment in which there is pressure to give credit

for MOOCs anyways, then that is as much a failure of shared governance as it is a failure of any particular

university to do its job.

In short, it's not really the MOOCs that are the problems. I've taken two so far and have largely enjoyed the

experience. They would be an asset to the world nerdy edutainment for the intellectual crowd if it weren't for

the entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and administrators who are assisting MOOC providers by supplanting living,

breathing professors with their videos and computer programs. What professors should fear then are not the

MOOCs themselves, but the kind of university governance that makes this kind of abuse possible.

That said, those of us who don't think MOOCs are worth the cost still have obligations to the future. We

need to explain how our industry can still use technology to benefit students without becoming automated.

Speaking personally, I believe in a professor-centered edtech world where we can pick the tools that help us teach

better and eschew the ones that simply don't work, or are run for the benefit of investors rather than for students.

The learning management system Blackboard, for example, goes through constant updates whether faculty and

students need them or not. Hosting my syllabi on the blog website Wordpress, on the other hand, I can control every

aspect of its presentation and use and count on the system being mostly the same from one semester to the next.

Shared governance offers the vehicle we need to make sure the professoriate's collective preferences are

heard, even if they aren't necessarily implemented in their entirety. I believe that faculty, administrators and

students alike are all better off as long as that principle continues to be respected. There is an old joke among

university presidents that trying to manage a faculty is like herding cats. Ultimately, I'm a terrible representative of

the faculty point of view with respect to technology in the future of higher education because I'm only one cat.

Nonetheless, I do think that most of us believe that this kind of intellectual diversity is a strength in higher

education. Superprofessors who teach tens of thousands of students at once only teach one point of view: theirs.

Imagine a future where everyone took classes from Harvard, MIT and nowhere else. What an empty future that


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would be! Diversity should be cultivated, not treated like a liability that should be targeted through technology or

any other force that may somehow transform higher education.

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