Open World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
Presentation to Higher Education Workshop at Berlin Conference Against Deregulation and For Labor Rights For All
By DAN KAPLAN, Executive Secretary, AFT Local 1493
I want to speak this evening on the relationship between the
development of online education and the corporatization of higher
education, or to use other language, the commodification of education,
turning education into a commodity and selling it in the marketplace.
Let me tell you a story. It may be thought of as a cautionary tale. At
UCLA in 1997 the faculty in the Division of Letters and Science were told
during the summer that they had to put online all of their course
materials (syllabus, lecture notes, exams, etc.) by the start of the fall
semester. Of course, not all faculty complied with this demand. But the
University not long after began asserting that it owned all faculty
materials that were located on the University server! What follows next is
obvious. If the University owns this material, then of course they can
hire someone other than the professor who created the class to teach it.
Like a part-time faculty member who is paid a fraction (in the California
community colleges something like $0.57 on the dollar) of what a full-time
faculty member is paid to teach the class.
In other words, online education should not be thought of as just another
mode of delivery for a college class. And more and more the part-time
faculty member is told that the class they are being hired to teach will
be online. Especially in the community college system, even though these
students typically don't possess the characteristics that have been
identified as necessary for success in online classes. At the same time,
these classes are not promoted nearly as much in the UC system, where they
are thought to be inferior to the traditional class experience.
On the subject of running a country's higher education system as if it
were a corporation: in the California community college system, and
increasingly throughout all levels of higher education in the U.S.,
two-thirds of the faculty are part-time (some 30,000 individuals), often
with only minimal medical and retirement benefits, and very little
academic freedom, given that they have no security of re-employment beyond
semester to semester contracts.
Why is this happening today in higher education? It really is no mystery
if you read the business press in the United States. In the pages of
Business Week or Forbes you regularly read financial analysts talking
about wanting to do to education what they have achieved in the health
care field. That is, they want to create Educational Maintenance
Organizations (EMO's) that are modeled on the Health Maintenance
Organizations (HMO's) that have created such discontent in the health care
field! The U.S. education "market" alone is thought to be worth
over $450 billion a year.
At the same time, in December, 2000, in the GATS negotiations, U.S.
officials submitted a broad proposal to reduce international barriers to
trade in higher education. This little-known proposal has caused deep
concern within the education community because it is clear that this
proposal reflects the interests of for-profit education providers,
including distance-education institutions in particular. This proposal
should be viewed as an attack on quality public education systems
everywhere in the world. It represents one more effort at privatizing
education around the world.
I must say that in the United States a full understanding of these most
retrograde developments in higher education is just beginning. But there
is a developing alliance of students and faculty who are starting to
actively resist the corporatization of higher education. At the forefront
of this movement has been a Professor of History at York University, in
Toronto, Canada, David Noble. He has just published a book that you should
all read, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.
If you go to the website that my union, AFT Local 1493, maintains at www.aft1493.org
, you will be able to
read the different chapters that now make up Noble's new book. You will
also find there a lot of additional material that concerns other issues
related to tonight's discussion.