The development of information and communication technologies certainly contains unprecedented opportunities for scholarly communities, such as the development of cooperative and decentralized research, or the instant access to vast repositories of data. Of course, everybody, these days, is warned against technological determinism and knows that the social use of these technologies is not built into their hardware. But nor is the rise of cooperative and decentralized research an unequivocal notion, and there are many ways in which it can be construed and implemented. The wiring of universities and the networking of science can be the triumph of autonomous social cooperation, and indeed the prelude to considerable intellectual progress – or it can be the introduction of new forms of discipline, associated with the rapid impoverishment of scientific practices and the depreciation of the professional status of researchers and educators. Or both.

What the precentors of the “knowledge economy” fail to see is that the emergence of this economy is built upon a paradox. It is allegedly characterized by the creative mobilization of all human faculties in the work process, and this is indeed a complete break with the Taylorist organization of labor. It is a commonplace in the organizational literature to point out that, while the subjectivity of the worker was suppressed in the assembly line model (Taylor famously said that a “trained gorilla” was the ideal worker), it is now at the center of the work process: interpretation, creativity, autonomy, flexibility and decision capacity are the qualities required from workers, even in the most industrial or menial settings. Every single bit of subjective cognitive and socializing capacity must be brought into the work-process. Life itself must become productive (and the blurring of work/life distinction in high-tech firms is a perfect example of that).

And yet, this trend conceals another one: the core activities of knowledge production and transmission – research and teaching – are subjected to an inverse trend, as the pervasive use of ICTs allows for the rapid Taylorization of these activities. Where teaching and research were still, until recently, “crafts” indissolubly attached to the person performing them, scholars are now regarded as a “bundle” of functions that can and should be “unbundled,” desubjectivized, and broken down into as many discrete tasks that can be fulfilled more efficiently, and on demand, by interchangeable operators – a development made possible by the pervasive introduction of ICTs as instruments of coordination. This is indeed what an important World Bank report on the development of “knowledge societies” posits very clearly: “The introduction of multimedia and computer-based teaching is indeed leading toward the unbundling of the traditional functions of professors: course design, selection of textbooks and readings, course delivery, and assessment.” The teachers, actually, will no longer teach: they will be “facilitators of learning” confined to the margins of education as “alternative delivery mechanisms” will allow for “more active and interactive learning experiences, such as peer tutoring and self-directed learning, experiential and real-world learning, resource-based and problem-based learning.”

In this context, ICTs are used not so much to expand the capacities and empower the work of existing scholarly communities, as to transform the learning process and the nature of academic work by introducing a greater degree of flexibility and, in doing so, reshaping these communities beyond recognition. For they cannot be proper “knowledge economies” without the concrete existence of a liquid “marketplace of ideas,” and the construction of such a market requires the removal of any rigidities. With their tenure system, universities are increasingly regarded as obstacles to its smooth and flexible operation:

“The need for tertiary education institutions to be able to respond rapidly to changing labor market signals and to adjust swiftly to technological change may also require more flexible arrangements for the deployment of academic staff and evaluation of its performance. Under a more radical scenario, the multiplication of online programs and courses could induce tertiary education institutions to contact independent professors not affiliated to any specific college or university to prepare tailor-made courses.”

As teaching will be increasingly less mediated by academic institutions, it should not come as a surprise either that course-teaching will slowly develop the attributes of a contractual relation between a provider and a client, the first sign of which is the creeping juridicization of course syllabi already underway.

While the report makes the somewhat surprising claim that these changes are moving tertiary education “from elite systems to mass systems” when tuition fees have sky-rocketed, it does not fail to justify the extensive restructuring of academe by reference to a beneficiary public. As the focus shifts “from an emphasis on teaching to a focus on learning, the students become more important actors as primary clients, consumers and learners” (note the vocabulary and the gradation). The wired campus would thus reinvent paideia, but in a 2.0 version that would place the student at the center of a process of autonomous self-development assisted by a vast range of services made available to her/him and delivered through flexible market mechanisms.

The puzzling thing is that, when they have a chance to have a say in these matters, students have very few good things to say about this. In fact, in most countries where a primarily public higher education system is being restructured according to these principles, students don’t want more loans that will be used to pay for expensive Masters selling mostly a brand name and to mortgage an already uncertain future income. They usually want more teachers who have more time to engage with them, and extended library hours rather than a more expensive version of Courseworks or WebCT. As for those of us who believe that teaching should remain primarily a meaningful and enriching form of socialization, we should ask ourselves what we can do to meet their demands and to avoid becoming the tamed simians of the Taylorized academic factory.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Academic life, Information technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.