Fortunately, it appears none of his department administrators seems to know just what is IN the course. Apparently they have never reviewed its content or philosophy. I suppose they are too busy “managing”. It will probably be taught for years until the technology (NOT the scholarship) becomes obsolete to the point where it has to be re-written.

Nobody gets tenure, nobody gets job security or even benefits. Its as if professors are an obstacle to the business of education, which I suppose they are. The emphasis is more and more on automated academic functions, not just teaching, but registration, examinations, grading, even assignments and scheduling. Students have to have computers and network access and skills for all routine academic activities, even if they are in the liberal arts. Everything is geared to having more throughput: larger numbers of students, smaller numbers of less qualified staff, more “efficient profitable use of resources”.

This desperation to increase productivity seems misplaced when the university seems determined to hand out degrees in disciplines which only serve short-term, short shelf-life business needs (“coders”), skills which could just as easily be learned on the job (“Sports Journalism”), or diplomas designed primarily to ideologically indoctrinate worker bees for the commercial sector (anything in Business Administration). Even technical skills, such as the sciences and engineering, are being degraded to certifications that require little actual preparation in the field, but provide paying customers with documentation primarily crafted to look good on the resume of some otherwise barely literate middle class kid who managed to borrow enough money to get through the program. You can get a Bachelor’s in Chemical Laboratory Management with only 12 hours of actual chemistry courses. I presume that qualifies you to tell chemists what to do.

My old undergraduate major, Astronomy, no longer exists at my old school, but lots of money is being lavished on churning out ever more MBAs, Medical Records Administrators, Forensic Accountants, Paralegals and Real Estate Investment Counselors. And as I have pointed out before, my old graduate degree in Geography has been replaced with an MA in Geographic Information Systems–a graphical user interface I was expected to pick up on the job, on my own time, by reading a manual.

And of course, the administrative and executive functions of academia, the role of the former State Board of Regents, are no longer carried out by scholars and educators, but by “business and community leaders”. These drones are not teachers. They’re fucking Rotarians.

The commodification of American education will result in the most thoroughly credentialed work force in history, and the most docile, ignorant and incompetent one.

“And I’m never going back to my old school.”

But it was the word “proctor” that leapt off the page and stuck in my craw. As in “…have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done”. Proctor. That’s not teaching, that’s administrative work. Proctoring is the grad student watching porn on a smartphone while students take a test. Proctoring is administering the “comprehension test” that came with the video to bring “accountability” to the process. Because isn’t that the important thing, after all?

In the several years I worked on course delivery systems, I was constantly reminded that the perfessers view video and online courses (and ITV before it) as an attempt by administration to do away with teachers entirely, in favor of recordings of said teachers. They view video cameras with existential dread. It’s gotten worse as money’s gotten tighter, and the professors aren’t being paranoid–too many administrators are tempted by the thought of doing away with those messy academics once and for all, and finally putting education on a “businesslike footing” much like the entertainment industry.

They reason like The Jackass Johnson, that one lecture is pretty much like all the others, so why not just pick the one best lecture and play that for everybody, until the end of time?

It’s such a peculiarly conservative thing, to want to have that cognitive closure on everything, to put the issues to rest, to have total conformity of opinion. To put “The Last Lecture on _____” in the can, and finally be done with it. No more intellectual “drift”, no more debate and dissent…fossilized thought, uber alles.

I’m cool with the video, extremely not cool with reducing teachers to proctors.

Part of it is historical, we are a bourgeois society with a long tradition of hostility to an aristocracy (which in the eighteenth century meant formally educated). In America, the life of the intellect is viewed as elitist, effeminate, anti-democratic. It is considered arrogant and conceited to display any sign of intelligence, except when it comes to knowledge of business or sports.

The other part is practical. If education is a commodity, it can be controlled in both distribution and effect. And most important, it can be marketed. Have you noticed how just in the last few years an education has merely become the means by which you can get a good job. And once you have convinced the proles of that, they will pay,(or borrow), whatever they possibly can to get one.

The founders of this nation were highly educated men, they studied things like history, science, literature and the classics. But they worked as businessmen, soldiers, politicians and farmers. I wonder what Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin would have had to say about Johnson’s theories on education. For that matter, I wonder what Ken Burns would have made of them.