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Editor's Note: Stephen Downes is an extraordinary, multi gifted educator, technologist and a well-recognized leader in Distance Learning. We are privileged to present this research and creative analysis of the complex, controversial issues within present academic structures, practices and philosophies. A wry analogy illustrating Stephen's Downes' personal philosophy on Distance Education follows: "everybody keeps trying to stuff the DE cat back into the F2F bag. I'm going to do my damndest, in my own small way, to help the cat stay out. It's well and truly out. But that does not stop some people from holding and even defending the bag. My own interest, of course, is in the cat.

Unrest in the Ivory Tower:
Privatization of the University

By Stephen Downes

Academics must resist the trend toward the commodification of education or universities will become privatized is the position well stated and supported by Steve Eskow and many within academia. On the contrary: the more professors resist, the greater the likelihood that privatization will happen, and that would be a tragedy.

Stephen Downes, August 7, 2001

Introduction: Mensa and Academia

I once had a desire to join Mensa. I'm bright enough; their IQ tests are pleasant diversions but no real challenge. And I enjoy hanging around with bright people as I have for the two decades I've spent in an academic environment, quaffing a few fine ales at Dewey's or Dinnies Den, debating matters far and wide of varying degrees of importance.

As I learned more about Mensa, however, disillusionment set in. While one would have thought that society's brightest minds were focused on the pressing issues of the day, these minds were focused most of all on puns, word games and clever tricks. By comparison, even my regular trivia games have more merit. And my sudsy sermons Pulitzer prose.

Over time I have become less enamored of the university environment for similar reasons. Not that universities even approach the banality of Mensa; the people across the road continue to amaze (islet transplants, fun with phage cancer treatments, human livers in mice...) and the university is recognized - here, at least - as the city's key economic engine. But university professors can and do obsess over the minute. They can put their own momentary comfort over the needs of academia and society. And they can be as self-absorbed as the most narcissistic Mensa meeting.

I say this lovingly, of course. Nobody spends two decades associated with institutions and people they despise (or even dislike). Twenty-first century academia is a treasure, one of humanity's shining pillars of achievement. It is worth saving, or at least, spending a few hours on a Tuesday morning talking about how it may be saved.

The Privatization Scenario

I now turn to a hypothesis, popularized by David Noble (1998) and others, that is gaining increasing currency among academics. It is what Steve Eskow (2001) calls the "Privatization Scenario."

Hypothesis: There is a growing movement afoot in the US and elsewhere to identify distance education as one of the knives to achieve the dismembering, and the death, of the university.

Proponents of the hypothesis argue that distance education and online learning are being used to subvert the nature and purpose of a university education.

They argue that this form of subversion is often unconscious and is often disguised as a desire to "improve" the university, to make a university education "more affordable" and the process of teaching and learning "more efficient."

These critics point to a pattern whereby the effort to improve education leads to the objective of privatizing education on the grounds that the "market" is a more efficient guarantor of quality than the "elite" guild of academics.

This essay is a response to the Privatization Scenario, and in part, a response to the position held by those groups represented by Drs. Noble and Eskow.

I most certainly agree with this part of the hypothesis: there is a movement toward privatization. It is a trend affecting all of learning, not only universities. The move toward charter schools, home schooling and various alternative education projects highlights this trend in the elementary sector. Trade schools and colleges face increasing competition from private institutions.

Moreover, it is not only the institutions of learning that are being privatized. Their product, the books, journals, ideas and opinions produced by professors and their colleagues are being increasingly placed under corporate lock and key, whether through funded research or collected in fee-based archives such as XanEdu (See Downes, 2001). Patents and copyrights are moving the learning that used to be freely circulated in the public domain into a closed marketplace of privatized knowledge (See. e.g., Lynch, 2001).

Universities and especially university professors are easy targets precisely because, like Mensa members, they become self-absorbed. Part of that comes with the territory - you cannot be expert at anything unless you become a little fanatical - but part of it comes from a blindness, an inability or unwillingness to look at some wider trends sweeping society, trends that have the potential to sweep the university system with them.

So let's subsume the 'Privatization Scenario' under this larger picture, the one in which human knowledge itself is being privatized.

Why Defend Universities?

As I mentioned above, I am a defender of the university. Perhaps you may not believe that, given my staunch defense of distance and online learning, and given my occasional carping about universities and university professors. But I am a defender of the university because I am a defender of knowledge and, in particular, that view of knowledge as a public trust, intended (and to be used) for the benefit of all of humanity, freely shared and freely used.

If we were talking about money, not knowledge, I would be classed as a socialist, perhaps even a Marxist or communist. I am not sure whether there is a corresponding term for the public ownership and free distribution of intellectual capital (I may as well take yet another stab at historical significance and call it Downesism). Whatever it is, it is that that I support and my support for universities is as a means to this end.

This is important: universities are not worth defending in and of themselves. They are worth defending only insofar as they foster the free distribution of knowledge, whether it be by means of allowing people an affordable education, by means of discovering and announcing fundamental truths, or by means of advancing our science, technology and human sciences for the good of society as a whole.

Knowledge is different from capital, and from material goods, in that there is no inherent scarcity to knowledge. A piece of knowledge, once produced, may be replicated almost for free, distributed around the world in the blink of an electron, fed almost as easily to one person as to one billion people. Oh sure, there are some pragmatic issues: knowledge can be expensive to create, and as those of us involved in distance and online learning will attest, distribution is not free. However for the greater good, people in a society - and across societies, in a global society - pool their resources, funding public universities for the production of knowledge, and a public education system for the distribution of knowledge.

We allow and accept a market system for the distribution of knowledge where it is appropriate. We recognize that a person owns his or her own ideas, and that the inventors of new technologies have the right to profit from their work. We allow that money may be exchanged for knowledge. So long as the objective - the widespread creation and distribution of knowledge - is met, we can allow a multiplicity of methodologies. And just so society today has created great public universities, great private universities, public-private collaboration, government sponsored research, and corporate research. When we look at the intellectual achievements of the twentieth century, we regard not only M.I.T., Harvard and Stanford, but also Xerox PARC and Texas Instruments, NASA and National Geographic as equally significant contributors.

Now the 'Privatization Scenario' is concerned about the privatization of universities. It argues that the privatization of universities is being accomplished via a set of processes and paradigms that I will look at below. And so it is true: these processes and paradigms are being used as the thin edge of the wedge by those who would privatize universities, and indeed, privatize knowledge generally.

But these processes and paradigms only accomplish the goal of privatization if they are effective. Were they not effective, they would not be a danger to universities at all. Nobody is trying to privatize universities by means of beer sales or fox hunting competitions, because there is no great demand from the public for university beer sales or fox hunting competitions. The people who are advocating privatization are hitting the universities where it hurts: and they are appealing to society's larger objectives in an effort to transform the university system.

The advocates of privatization are aided and abetted by those who resist many of these changes, for while many of these changes would result in an improved educational system for all, the reluctance of public universities to adopt them is, by itself, the single greatest cause of the privatization of universities. University professors, by taking the parochial view, hasten their own demise.

The Means of Production

The 'Privatization Scenario' proposes that the process follows a distinct pattern, a pattern characterized by: first, the "three Ms" of massification, marketization and managerialization; second, a changing rhetoric of education, using such words as "customer" and "efficiency"; and third, changing processes of quality and control. Let me look at each of these three patterns, beginning with the three Ms.

A. Massification

Massification, in my understanding, is the employment of the instruments of mass production for the development and distribution of knowledge and learning. By this is meant not only the production of goods or services in mass quantities, like the safety pin, the automobile or the McDonald's burger, but also the use of specialization and standardization as essential components of production. If a pre-massification scenario could be illustrated by a single tailor making a few shirts, each shirt by hand, then a massified enterprise would be illustrated by a team of workers, each performing some small part of the task of making a shirt, each day producing hundreds or thousands of shirts.

Critics already point to the massification of education even today. They point to such institutions as Britain's Open University and the concept of mass education as espoused by Sir John Daniel. They point to the segmentation of the learning process into neatly standardized classes, each of which teaches a certain subject, through which students progress year by year, tier by tier, as though on an assembly line. And they see this process making inroads into the teaching process itself, where the process of teaching a class is, as Jeffrey Young (1997) described it, "unbundled."

Yet insofar as massification has entered the world of the university, it hasn't been a disaster. Modern medical labs, for example, resemble production centers much more than they do Thomas Edison's garage. Teams of scientists, following strict protocols, work in assembly to synthesize, test and produce thousands of compounds. The sequencing of the human genome was possible only through mass techniques. Such researchers also use the means of the mass to disseminate their knowledge: journals are mass-produced and shipped to every corner of the globe where identical scientists in identical labs reproduce their discoveries. Scientific progress is not possible without massification.

Only in the field of teaching does academia seem to have successfully resisted massification. Only in the field of teaching is the product the result of the individual craftsman, toiling alone, each bit of lecture a custom fit for the small group of students assembled before him. It is a source of continual frustration to society as a whole - why can't we devise a means of reaching everyone, and not only those favored few with the time and money to spend attending university lectures? And when we look at the challenge of providing a university-level education to a global population of 7 billion and more, it becomes obvious that teaching must evolve. Were cars hand-made, only a fortunate and wealthy few would have them. The same is true for education.

A profession that insists that all its products must be handcrafted dooms itself to oblivion. As long as university professors assert that the only form of teaching must be the in-person lecture they are hastening the development of non-university alternatives that prove otherwise.

B. Marketization

Marketization is, in my understanding, the treatment of education and learning as a commodity, to be displayed and selected for consumption by a paying public. Marketization (and not online learning per se) is the major objection David Noble offers in his critiques of distance and online learning.

Defenders of the university may then be surprised to hear me defend marketization. I have even written (half-written) a paper called "The Learning Marketplace." Why would I do so, if marketization is so contrary to the university culture?

The fact that it is contrary to the university culture is why the paper had to be written, but I have no intention, subconscious or otherwise, of thereby dismantling the university system. Quite the contrary, in my view, marketization may be the salvation of much of the university as we know it today.

Private enterprise theorists often argue that the market is the most efficient way to distribute a resource. Universities have steadfastly resisted that doctrine, maintaining instead a monopoly and control over the distribution of knowledge, reserving it either for their peers or for the select few who attend university classes. But clearly there is some evidence, is there not, that markets do provide an effective means of distribution? Otherwise we would not have grocery stores; we would have government food outlets. Otherwise we would not have restaurants, we would have government eating stations.

Markets work on the principle that the exercise of choice is more efficient than the exercise of control. The reason for this should be obvious: people are much more willing to decide for themselves what they want than to have it decided for them. Moreover, when someone must decide for them, there is an increased likelihood that they will make incorrect decisions. As John Stuart Mill famously observed, the best indication in a society that something is valued is that people value it. The best indication that something is good for people is that people desire it as a good.

Where market theorists err is in their slavish adherence to the principles of the marketplace in all times and in all contexts. But marketplaces are known to fail, as anybody buying lumber in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Andrew can attest. Markets work only if there is a sufficient supply of a commodity. Choice is only efficient where choice may be effectively practiced. Where choices are forced, where commodities are in short supply, the marketplace collapses in on itself, spiraling out of control, rewarding the rich and powerful and leaving the mass without.

When something is in short supply, a call for the marketplace to distribute that good can (and should) be seen as folly: for the advantage rests entirely with the distributors, and none with the consumers. Thus it may seem that having the market distribute education may be called a folly, because education is, as anyone can see, in short supply. People today spend the equivalent of a price of a modest house for a university education. I saw recently five-day courses offered by Queens at a price that would buy a small car. Putting education into the marketplace in such conditions would be folly: it would be licensing the owners of knowledge to print money, and condemning the vast majority of humanity to doing without.

But there is no reason why learning must be a scarce commodity. Indeed, it is arguable that it is a scarce commodity only because universities and university professors have created a false scarcity. It is as though the news media of the world decided that the only way people could really understand the Balkan conflict would be to hear about it in person from a professional journalist. The result of such folly would be evident: people would pay thousands of dollars to listen to average journalists (not everyone can afford a Cronkite) while the vast majority would have no access to this information at all.

There is no reason why education must be scarce, and every reason why it can be produced in mass quantities for mass consumption. And in such an environment, there is no reason why learning cannot be distributed via a marketplace, and every reason why it should. For the best indication that something needs to be learned, as Mill would say, is that people want to learn it.

C. Managerialization

Managerialization is, to my understanding, the process whereby an academic relinquishes some control over the production and distribution of knowledge to a team and where that team is run, not by the academic, but by a manager. The manager, of course, knowing nothing about the subject in question, can be relied on to make poor decisions.

As a sometime software designer, I am certainly sympathetic to this line of reasoning. Indeed, an entire culture - the Dilbert Culture - has developed in the software community to make fun of the pointy-haired bosses who think they have some understanding of software design. I have no doubt that the same is true in other areas of endeavor, and were I promoted to coordinate the design of, say, a learning project in the field of microbiology, my academic interference would be as welcome as a focus-group expert at a hacking convention.

The problem, of course, is not the practice of employing teams to develop learning material: the problem is pointy-haired bosses. In the software industry, almost nothing is created outside a team. Even some of the most heralded individual achievements - Unix, say, or Linux - have over time become the project of dozens, even hundreds, of dedicated individuals - each person working on his or her own area of expertise, suffering the indignities of more or less coordination by a manager. Indeed, looking at the wider world, only professors, it seems, have the wherewithal to resist working as part of a team, so much so that the term 'Lone Wolf' has been coined to characterize much of academic endeavor.

And, of course, no professor (or very few, at any rate, since I obviously count myself as one of the exceptions) has the expertise to professionally provide all aspects of educational delivery. It is no wonder professors say that the best and only means of teaching is in-class and in-person: no professor has the skills or the time to do anything else! But by their own dogmatic adherence to individualistic 'lone wolf' production methods, they make their own prediction a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A prophecy, moreover, which is demonstrably false. Teams of people working in unison in other fields have managed educational attainment far beyond that of any individual professor. Look at what the advertising and entertainment industries have accomplished. Hundreds of millions of people could reliably create a Big Mac (two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese and a pickle on a sesame seed bun). Millions more could state with conviction why a 2-5-5 defense is ineffective in a football game, analyze the comparative merits of Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan, comment knowledgeably on the weather, sing a Beatles song and play a round of golf (correctly, within the rules, though perhaps not well).

And: so long as professors refuse to work as part of top-flight educational teams, more or less competently managed, their achievements will be eclipsed, over time, by teams of skilled professionals producing top-flight educational materials. And when professors, teaching alone in a classroom, are widely recognized as an inferior (not to mention expensive) form of education, the call for privatized education will take full flight.

Massification, Marketization, Managerialization - to the degree professors resist these, rather than embrace them, they are hastening their own demise. It seems to me that the best minds in society could find ways to make the 3Ms work for all of society - but instead they sit in their little offices, careless of society, wondering how their pleas of 'quality' can be possibly relevant to the many millions of people who never shadow their hallowed walls.

Language, Truth and Logic

The second part of the "Privatization Scenario" focuses on the changing rhetoric of education. It points to, and laments, the description of students as "customers". It criticizes the description of college as a trading company or enterprise, importing and exporting, seeking overseas "markets". It rails against colleges using "standards" that can be "measured," course "brokers" and "productivity," "efficiency" and "accountability." And worst of all, "quality control."

As any linguist knows, the words we use are used to reflect reality, either as it is or as we would like it to be. Thus, words such as 'phlogiston' fell into disuse as our concept of reality came to encompass oxygen, and our use of the word 'girl' declined, with much encouragement, as a reflection of our desire to minimize the diminution of women. A vocabulary is like a mirror into a person's world view. Words express meaning; meaning expresses reality, either shared or solipsistic, faithful or fancied.

The words listed below fall mostly into the category of representing the world as we wish it to be, a fact that proponents of the "Privatization Scenario" seize upon to assert that their use reflects a hidden agenda. For any person without effort can find instances which prove that the university system is not, as he suggests, customer (or learner) centered, efficient, effective, or productive. The typical university lecture does not adhere to any standards (at least none that I can detect), learning is measured only in the crudest of fashions, and professors - the bearers of ultimate job security - are certainly not accountable. 

In an email to DEOS, Steve Eskow points to John Chambers of Cisco who popularized the notion that "education is the next 'killer app'." One doesn't have to be Freud or Jung, says Eskow, to see the implications of both "killer" and "app," or to sense the possibility that one of the things that has to be killed by the app is the university.

When Eskow quotes John Chambers as describing online learning as the next 'killer app', he implies that university education is what will be killed by some new technology. Perhaps so. It is worth noting that the term 'killer app' was devised, not merely because it was fatal to some preceding category of products, but because it was widely used, wildly popular, and became a paradigm for the applications that followed.

Mosaic - later Netscape - became a killer app, popularizing the World Wide Web and the Internet in general because it bucked conventional (and I might add, professorial) wisdom, by allowing people to view graphics. People familiar with the history of the Internet are familiar with its academic origin: and such people say (sometimes cynically) that only university professors would think that pictures and graphics would not be needed for online communication.

Email flourished as a killer app because it replaced an outmoded and inefficient organization: the post office. Today the flow of messages by email far exceeds the capacity of the post office. The writing of messages on paper, the placing of paper in envelopes, the procurement of tariff stickers (called stamps), the trek to the post office box, the wait while the physical package is collected, sorted and distributed (by foot, no less) - all this was a technology waiting to be superseded by a more efficient, productive (and dare I say, standards-based) replacement.

I have heard the lament, more often than I care, that the web has produced a wealth of poor graphical design and that email has produced an endless supply of drivel. Perhaps it has, from people who never engaged in graphic design before the advent of the web, and from people who never set pen to paper when mail was a cumbersome task. And the same critics overlook the awkward design of most publications in print (not everything is National Geographic or the National Post) and the steady deluge of junk mail that flows, even today, into our mailboxes. Much less the time and cost of producing pens, paper, envelopes, stamps and a worldwide pedestrian delivery system.

The fact is, killer apps become killer apps because they're better, and when John Chambers suggests that online learning will become the next killer app, it is because he thinks it will be better - much better - than the contemporary pedestrian product.

And how might it be better? The new vocabulary - used not only by potential privateers but also by people genuinely interested in education - tells the story.

A. Choice

Students as 'customers' - or in the more common parlance of educators, 'student-centered learning' or even 'learner-centered learning' - a reflection of the desire to create a system where universities exist to serve students' needs, and not professors' needs. This does not (necessarily) reflect a 'customer-is-always-right' attitude - as any patron of McDonalds will tell you, the customer is often perceived as wrong (you get a pickle whether you like it or not). But it does reflect an understanding and even an ethos that the purpose of the institution is to provide students - the customer - with what they want (not to mention, paid for).

A lot flows from that assumption, but I will key in on one thing that encapsulates the difficulty contemporary universities have with the student-centered approach: choice.

Aside from some very broad choices (will I study engineering or philosophy?) students have very few choices in a university. Having selected a program, they are routed to a faculty, given a small selection of options and a bevy of required courses, and are assigned professors (if they are lucky, they will learn about and manage to avoid the particularly bad professors). Inside the classroom, they have very little choice about the course content, nature and number of assignments, criteria for passing, time and place of course offerings, labs, workshops or seminars. They have no choice at all regarding their classmates, limited choice in assigned texts and readings, and are unified in their quest for a single (obligatory) goal, the university degree.

No doubt all of these decisions are made for the benefit of students. Sometimes - often, actually - these decisions will in fact be correct decisions. It is a nice healthy line-up of educational nutrition. But imagine a grocery store where, once you have selected your food type (Italian, Chinese, Indian), you are routed through a certain set of aisles. You are given one or two of each product item to choose from, and you have a set of required products you must purchase. You are required to show that you are able to prepare the food correctly before you leave, but you must prepare it in a certain way depending on the whims of the cashier. You will buy - and only buy - a full year's worth of food. No doubt many of these decisions regarding food and nutrition are correct decisions, but the experience is entirely unsatisfying and, to a diabetic, fatal.

It's a simple thing, choice. Yet if John Chambers can develop an online learning application that provides educational choice, the killing fields will be littered with ivy-covered rubble.

B. Standards

Standards - of course university professors are notorious for resisting standards, at least so far as the practice of their profession is concerned. This has the result of creating frantic student consultations in the halls and campus pubs in a determined effort to avoid the notoriously bad professors (my own experience cannot be that unique, can it?). It is difficult even within a single institution to determine what constitutes a first year logic class, let alone to determine this across a nation (much less world-wide).

In no other field is such a crass disregard for the nature and quality of the component parts of a product or service so brazenly displayed. Those very academics who rail against standards would be appalled were they to learn that the airplane they are flying was assembled, ad hoc (no doubt by a team of skilled craftsmen) without regard to wiring, fuel or aviation standards. They would not dare drive were they to learn that the reliability of their tires was not proven. They would not eat food that may or may not contain arsenic (much less peanuts), would not drink water, which could not meet certain criteria of safety. They expect that the wiring in their home will not only be up to standard, but also that it will be inspected by a third party to make sure. Yet in this, one of the most important investments of time and money a person can make, they expect to fly without standards.

I personally see no reason why there cannot be a 'standard' Logic 101 in use world wide, or at the very least, a common vocabulary and curriculum. The principles are fairly well understood and have been accepted without a significant change for the last two thousand years. A common base of examples exists and makes the rounds in any case. Tried and true techniques for teaching reasoning - from Venn diagrams to truth tables - exist. Yet there is no such thing, and no concept of what would constitute quality teaching of logic, and successful learning of logic. Except, I should add, for the innovation of a private standards-based test in logic, which is used only grudgingly (if at all) by academics (but most enthusiastically by people who teach logic online - what a surprise).

C. Efficiency

Efficiency - it makes no sense to have a highly skilled teacher spend half his or her time producing mediocre research so that he or she can get tenure or promotions. It makes no sense having a highly skilled researcher teach a class in order for him or her to keep his or her job. It makes no sense for either teacher or researcher to sit in front of a class while a test is being conducted, languish in the back of the room while a video is being shown, spends hours debating parking policies at a faculty staff meeting, and more. And when you have a hundred million graduate students to teach, then it makes no sense having eight students in a graduate class, no matter how good the exercise, because it means that most of those students will receive no graduate education at all. I'm surprised they haven't taken to the streets.

I have only picked up on a few examples here, but it seems clear and obvious: if Cisco could produce an online learning system that was learner-centered, standards based, efficient, productive, and accountable, then people would abandon universities in droves, and more to the point, governments would be very hard pressed to justify spending a lot of money on the public system when the private system is doing the same job for more people and for less money. And even more to the point: we are already beginning to see signs of this today.

Recently, DeVries was given accreditation in Alberta. This means that this private institution is now competing on a level playing field with the publicly funded colleges in our province. Should they prove more popular and more effective, our government will not be able to justify spending money on demonstrably inferior and more expensive alternatives. In Pennsylvania recently, a charter school offered classes online - thereby drawing the ire of proponents of the traditional public system but the praise of parents who found this particular alternative a giant leap forward in ease of use and efficiency.

To the degree that universities and university professors drag their feet in becoming student-centered, efficient, standards-based, accountable, and the like, that is the degree they are cutting the slender branch on which they all rest.

Quality and Control

This leads to the third component of the "Privatization Scenario," the changing structures of quality and control.

Critics point to a drift away from the traditional practice of peer review and toward "quality control" in the tradition of the factory system. They point to references to ISO 9000, Dunn and Bradstreet, business organizations, and industrial organizations as models for the university to emulate.

Much of this criticism trades on distaste for factories, accountants and perhaps industry as a whole. But it disregards some of the more important features of a quality control system. As I suggested above, I sincerely doubt that anyone would fly in an airplane evaluated solely by peer review, but that points not so much to the silliness of his argument as it does to a misunderstanding of evaluation and review.

Let me talk briefly about ISO and the 'quality' movement in general. What we have here is actually several things combined and sold as a package (as such it is a deeply flawed package, but it contains enough that is good to be marketable):

• First, it embodies the idea that quality can be measured, and
• Second, it embodies a business ethos which asserts that quality can always be improved
• Third, it establishes a team-based structure of quality circles in order to impel and enforce these quality improvements

Second, it embodies a business ethos which asserts that quality can always be improved, and

When I think about 'quality', my mind always to a picture printed about a decade ago in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business magazine (a nice, glossy, short-lived tribute to the corporate way) of a group of young and earnest looking Japanese workers, seated around a table, called the 'Paddington Bears,' whose sole objective in life (so the caption went) was to reduce the number of scratches in TV monitors from 8 per million to 1.

Now: reducing the number of scratches in TV monitors is good. We would complain if we bought a scratched TV, and we would complain if the cost of TVs were doubled because every second monitor must be discarded. But: spending all day reducing the number from 8 to 1 per million is foolish; and making it the basis of society is ridiculous.

What we want to do here is separate the concept of quality from the corporate ethos in which it has been packaged and marketed as 'total quality'. We want to keep the good: airplanes that fly reliably, food that is safe, water that is potable, education that is effective. And we want to discard the bad: individual subsumation to the wants and needs of the corporate entity, to the exclusion of all else.

Critics, in deliberately conflating those three components of the quality movement, do their readers - and education in general - a disservice.

Focusing on quality only, we need to distinguish two types of quality. I have in previous emails referred to these as 'semantic' and 'syntactic' quality. One might think of them as 'qualitative' and 'quantitative' quality respectively. But I prefer 'semantic' and 'syntactic' to get away from the idea that the former consist only in touchy-feely emotions and that the latter consists only in cold-hearted mathematical calculations.

Now in the evaluation of student work, professors employ both forms of assessment on a regular basis. In the syntactic mode, they assess whether the student has his dates right, her facts straight, has correctly parsed a sentence, correctly applied a proof, use appropriate symbols in an engineering diagram, written a program that compiles, quoted Mill correctly, or successfully identified Shakespeare as English. In the semantic mode, they assess whether a historical description captures the mood of the times, whether a recitation of facts is relevant, whether a sentence flows, whether a proof is elegant, whether a diagram is neat and illustrative, whether a program is easy to use, whether Mill makes sense and whether Shakespeare's English is understood in context.

Obviously, no assessment of student work is complete without both the semantic and the syntactic mode of evaluation (though teachers are often criticized for ignoring grammar and spelling, even accuracy, in student essays, searching for that soft and fuzzy 'meaning' underlying the garbled scribble they see before them). So also it is with university instruction. Ignoring the syntactic misses the question of whether they are learning at all; ignoring the semantic ignores the question of how well they are learning. Ignoring the syntactic misses the question of whether a journal article follows correct procedure; ignoring the semantic ignores the question of whether it says anything worth reading. Two forms of assessment: and necessarily, two forms of evaluation.

Now the kicker: academics' evaluation of themselves, insofar as it occurs at all, is almost entirely semantic. Or to put the same point another way, there is almost no standards-based measurement of an academic's performance except, perhaps, for adherence to the all-powerful (and misapplied) bell curve.

'Peer review' is argued to be the traditional mode of academic evaluation. No doubt it is traditional, and widely practiced. But it is only half of a reasonable evaluation, and not even a very good half at that.

In my country, and no doubt in many others, we have a polite fiction called 'trial by your peers.' The idea is that in a jury trial, guilt or innocence will be determined by a panel of citizens similar to yourself. As I say, it's a polite fiction. I recently discovered that in Alberta (perhaps elsewhere), potential juries are selected from the set of people who have driver's licenses. This explains why I have never been selected for jury duty: I don't drive. But it also de-selects a certain, lower, stratum of society (one, oddly, corresponding with the set of 'peers' of many a convict, but I digress). Similar selection practices in other countries demonstrate a similar bias: selecting juries from the list of registered voters, for example, de-selects those people who, for one reason or another, are not registered to vote. Again, the weighting here is toward the upper stratum of society.

But there's more. When a particular individual is brought before the court, both the prosecution and the defense have the right to veto a certain number of jurors. Any number of criteria come into play: people are disqualified because of their race, gender, occupation, residence, and more. Often, they are disqualified because of their opinions. Because I am an opponent of the death penalty, for example, I would never be selected as a juror in a capital case in the United States (so I understand). Naturally, this predisposes the jury toward a panel that will opt for the death penalty in such cases.

I have long wondered why gang members, homeless people, and other social outcasts never seem to be selected for juries. Of course, it's because the concept of 'trial by your peers' is a fiction. It really means, 'trial by your betters'. Or at the very least, 'trial by people who think in the right sort of way.'

In popular opinion at least - and I am of the same view - the reliability of jury trials is questionable. Since the not so recent OJ trial, or the less vividly remembered Claus von Bulow trial, people have come to see jury trials as not so much of an exercise in justice as in manipulation. Social activists will reel off a list of people wrongly convicted by juries on the scantiest of evidence. Jury trials, at least some of the time, are much less an exercise in justice than of prejudice.

Now imagine the same system, but without any standards at all: without rule of law, to guide guilty and innocent verdicts and appropriate penalties; without rules of evidence to distinguish fact from fiction from hearsay; with no limits whatsoever on the biases, prejudices or qualifications of jurors. In essence, mob rule, with none of the standards that today (sort of) protect the innocent from wrongful incarceration, the guilty from dangerous liberty.

Such is the essence of peer review. Is it any wonder it draws a society-wide roll of the eyes?

'Peer review' in academia is no such thing. Otherwise, we would see graduate students and even interested lay people on academic review committees. No, journal review boards especially are populated with the academic elite, those whose publications and scholarly presentations have established their authority in the field. Nor is their selection random: constructivist journals do not select rabid anti-constructivists to review articles; Marxist journals do not recruit people from the Fraser Institute to edit their publications.

The actual review is secretive and closed-door. Nobody knows what process of reasoning, if any, occurs when professors are evaluating a colleague's work. The results, at least from the eyes of the lay person, are less than impressive: reams of dime-a-dozen articles in unread academic journals, arcane dissertation topics suitable especially for ridicule by the national newspaper, forgotten theses read by an audience of three (and here I think of my own unlamented "Models and Modality"). Authors do not even know who their reviewers are, much less whether they are peers in any meaningful sense of the word. And woe betides the author who is not willing to acknowledge duly established Authority. 'Trial by people who think in the right sort of way' indeed.

In the case of journal articles and publications, peer reviewers at least (we think) read the works they are reviewing. No such exposure to the actual product being reviewed occurs in the case of teaching. It is folly - and rightfully recognized as such - to dub the review of a professor by peers who have never seen him teach as some sort of assessment. Such a review has everything to do with how the itinerant behaves in the Faculty Club and nothing to do with the sort of education he or she has left behind in the mind of his or her students.

Peer review has its place, as does any sort of qualitative assessment, but to make it the sole - even the primary - determinant of academic merit is beyond foolishness. It creates, quite rightly, in the minds of the public the image of a self-serving cadre of Old Boys who all think they are wonderful and who collectively exhibit wisdom so great that the word 'genius' is an insult and a slur. Closed-door self-evaluation is as reliable in academia as it is in the airline industry or the food processing industry, which is to say, not effective at all.

Academia would do well to open its system of assessment and review to (a) quantifiable standards, and (b) an open review process. Something like a system of standards - call them learning objectives, performance outcomes, whatever you will - should apply to graduates of a given class. Society should be able to know, without having to take Jo Blogg's word, that an A in logic 101 means that the student can recognize some basic logical fallacies and can string together a simple argument. That's not so hard: and there's even a standardized test for critical thinking.

And there is no reason why academic performance cannot be the subject of open and public review. There is no reason to restrict readers to a panel of three mysterious experts: works up for review should be publicly viewable and reviewed by anybody who cares to read them. Journals may even rely on those very reviewers, but the publication of a poor article by even a good journal will be widely recognized as such. And there is no reason why students cannot evaluate professors, and if the results cannot be posted on a website, then students should at least have the option of expressing their views by taking the same course from another professor or even another institution.

None of this infringes on the professor's ability to do as he or she sees fit: however, when a review process exposes poor and shoddy work, as it inevitably will, such perpetrators will invariably be held to account. Which is as it should be: in academia as much as in airplanes.

The Implications of Reform

Let's revisit the "Privatization Scenario" as a whole before we conclude.

The privatizers, runs the argument, want to massify, marketize and managerialize education. They want to change its vocabulary. This new vocabulary brings with it the practices of industry, not the practices of the new information economy, but older factory based notions of production, Total Quality Management and ISO 9000.

Academics are being asked to choose sides. They are being asked to determine whether ultimate privatization is the intent of the new rhetoric and the new directions in learning, especially online and distance learning. And they are being asked to decide whether they support or oppose the drive to reform education, to reform it, as they say, in the image of business and industry. They see those people who are advocates of reform as being, wittingly or not, allies of the drive toward privatization. And they - and I - believe that the future of education hinges on this decision.

It would be better, I submit, if academics such as Steve Eskow and David Noble would avoid framing the argument in such a false dilemma.  It would be better not to use such loaded terminology, calculated as much to inflame as to argue. This seems close to the tactics of southern lawyers arguing toward a carefully preselected and predisposed jury. They want to paint all advocates with the same brush, and they are not above quoting some carefully selected Freudian mythology in order to drive their points home. They would have you believe that if you support any part of the reforms described above then you are the same as the Great Satan, the corporate sellout, the soulless butcher who would cut the throat of a fair institution in a minute if only given the chance.

But: those people who are persuaded by this crusade are hastening that very act of homicide, sure as the sun rises in the east. By perpetuating the idea that any change in academia is a knife in its back, they are freezing the university system into an unsustainable stasis, ensuring that even the slightest attempt at an improved system from the corporate side of the house will be successful.

It is interesting - ironic, even - that the opponents of reform paint two divides: on the one hand, the collegial university system; on the other hand, the cold, calculating world of business and industry. But there are not two solitudes here, there is only one. Were they to look about society around them, they would find that all manner of enterprises follow the dicta of client service, accountability, efficiency and reliance on standards. Not only industry, but also sports, recreational travel, home repair, cooking, amateur astronomy... absolutely, utterly everything but education (and perhaps some handmade wooden crafts shops).

It turns out, in the wider world, that people do not want to spend their time and money (a) meeting someone else's needs, (b) paying for work that doesn't need to be done, (c) not knowing the results, (d) not knowing what is being produced, and (e) more than they can afford. If this is the picture of academia that the traditionalists are defending, then it is doomed, and if by falling it must fall into corporate hands, then their own logic has as its inevitable consequence the privatization of education.

And that would be a bad thing: but not simply because some academics don't like it (and not simply because it doesn't meet their arbitrary standards of quality - whatever that is) but because, remember, they are opposed to standards.

Intellectual Wealth and Society

At the beginning of this treatise I spoke of the privatization of knowledge. I would like to say here that if the university system (and the public education system in general) fails, then this will result in the privatization of knowledge. Even that is in itself not a bad thing - I have already acknowledged that there ought to be latitude for ownership of knowledge, whether it be by virtue of copyright on an essay, ownership of a patent on an invention, or some similar claim to intellectual or emotional property.

But the market economy, as I also suggested, works only if there is an adequate supply of the commodity in question. Once a scarcity is achieved, the market breaks down: We move into a monopoly (or duopoly, etc) mode in which prices rise all out of proportion to the value of the commodity and in which a substantial portion of the population is forced to do without.

With the rise of the information economy we have seen not only a concerted attempt to privatize knowledge but, concordantly, an effort to create artificial shortages in knowledge. Where once books circulated freely, were shared and loaned, read by the thousands in libraries, sometimes photocopied, sometimes transcribed by hand, there is today a movement afoot to create the single-use book, an entity that may be viewed but never reproduced nor shared nor copied in any form. Where once academics freely circulated copies of their article abstracts, exchanged ideas at conferences and conventions, today we see sponsored research, per-user subscriptions to e-journals, non-disclosure agreements, and more.

Clearly this is damaging to the intellectual wealth of society as a whole, because not everybody can afford to pay $24.95 for each knowledge-product per annum, much less amass a permanent and useful library of e-readings. Where once we could at least alleviate some of the strife in developing nations by sending them books and magazines, today we are told that such action constitutes a violation of copyright - it is not even legal to load our used copy of Windows 3.1 on used computers to send to East Timor, as some Australians found out.

But it is damaging also because it limits the voices we can hear. Just as top 40 radio streams consumers into a megastar mentality, so also dissenting voices disappear when knowledge is controlled by corporations and dispensed in pre-approved (and costly) allotments. We are all too aware of the Russian programmer, recently arrested in the United States for writing forbidden software, or the professor in (as I recall) Princeton who was ordered not to publish a decryption algorithm. But it is much more pernicious and much deeper than that. It is the expulsion of a boy who wore a Pepsi shirt to 'Coke Day' at his school. A privatized system of education will not allow students to express, or even hear, a dissenting voice.

The World Championships in Athletics are being held here in Edmonton as I write. The championships are sponsored (in part), and thereby essentially owned (in part) by Nike. As a columnist in the Edmonton Journal observed, Nike's influence is pervasive. At a press conference in which a renowned anti-doping athlete was asked to comment on the reinstatement of a competitor, the Nike spokesman intervened to assert that athletes would not be answering questions about doping. Bad for the image, you see.

We tend to think that the corporate control of information is about big things, like freedom of speech and the right to protest: and it is. But it is manifest in a deluge of little things, and bit-by-bit, our knowledge and our freedom are slowly eroded. And we're back to being the Paddington Bears, not merely because we cannot utter any opposition to this ethos, but because we cannot conceive of one.

The fall of public education in this country and in this world would be a disaster of the greatest magnitude, resulting in the descent of a corporate curtain of ignorance. Failing to move, failing to respond to the need for a greater, more vigorous system of public knowledge than ever, is to silently, stupidly, acquiesce.

I am astonished that educators today are not knowledge guerillas, silently and stealthily subverting the corporate agenda through the covert education of as many people by whatever means possible. I cannot believe that academics today steadfastly defend their bastions of privilege, ignorant of the fact that the castles they so rigorously fortify will defend a totalitarian regime that will upset their tottering rule. Academics must, in order to survive at all, obtain the support of the people, but they will not do this if they withhold from people the one thing they value.

I know that there are many open-source and open-content academics in the community working hard to stem the advance. It is a race against time, creating public domain knowledge management systems, public domain encyclopedias, courseware, almanacs, maps and illustrations, literacy guides, media readers, free textbooks, trying like townspeople in the face of the invading army to hide as much of the community chest as possible before the hordes descend to lay claim to everything they see. Hide, hide the knowledge where they'll never think to look for it - among the people.

Academics who defend their privilege in such a short sighted and misguided manner are like those who, citing the long-standing tradition of ownership and privilege, sit on their treasure, thereby safeguarding it for the arrival of the invaders.

I really think that universities best protect themselves by doing the one thing they can do better than corporations: producing and distributing knowledge. But they must do it in such a way that it remains better than the corporate alternative. This means mass education. This means a marketplace of educational opportunities. This means top-flight educational resources produced by teams of experts. This means a student focus. This means efficiency, accountability and productivity. This means open standards and open evaluations. This means, above all, reform.

Academics are at the crossroads. They could, collectively, use new technology and new techniques to produce a flowering of human intellect the like of which has never been imagined. Or they can hunker down, cling to their privilege, and usher in the twenty-first century equivalent of wage labor and cutthroat knowledge capitalism.

Remember, the chains you most fear are the chains you forge yourselves.

My thanks to Steve Eskow, John Hibbs, Guy Bensusan and Tom Abeles for contributing to the discussion that led to this essay. My thanks to Andrew Thompson for editing and revisions.

Bibliography

Downes, Stephen. 2001. Spotlight Site: XanEdu. The Technology Source, July/August, 2001. http://www.horizon.unc.edu/TS/default.asp?show=article&id=887

Eskow, Steve. 2001. Cutting the Throat of the University. Post to DEOS-L: 5 August. http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0108&L=deos-l&O=A&P=6287

Lynch, Clifford. 2001. The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World. First Monday, Volume 6, Number 6. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue6_6/lynch/index.html

Noble, David. 1998. Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education. First Monday, Volume 3, Number 1. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_1/noble/

Young, Jeffrey. 1997. Rethinking the Role of the Professor in an Age of High-Tech Tools. The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/colloquy/97/unbundle/background.htm

About the Author

Stephen Downes is an information architect employed by the Faculty of Extension at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He is also employed on a contract position to design and build a major Internet resource called MuniMall, a one-stop site for all components of the municipal affairs sector and municipalities in Alberta.

Previous to this position, Downes was employed as a distance education and new instructional media design specialist with Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Prior to that, he taught philosophy by distance for Athabasca University. Downes holds a BA and an MA, both in philosophy, from the University of Calgary. Stephen Downes may be reached via email: stephen.downes@ualberta.ca

His many interests and websites are listed below.

• Stephen Downes: http://www.downes.ca ~ sdownes@ualberta.ca
• Publisher, OLDaily: http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm
• CTO, NewsTrolls: http://www.newstrolls.com ~ downes@newstrolls.com
• Section Editor, The Technology Source: http://horizon.unc.edu/TS/

Information Architect, University of Alberta: http://www.munimall.net