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Can the Humanities survive
distance learning?
1. Introduction |
2. Distance learning and Humanities | 3.
A question of prestige
3. A question of prestige
My second worry is related to this picture, in which the prestige of the humanities plummets as universities meet their funding shortfalls by developing revenue-generating distance-learning units that privilege “basic” skills and information-based, typically professional subjects. As we all know, NYU has just launched such a venture in the School of Continuing Education. NYUonline is a for-profit educational subsidiary that initially offers non-credit courses, marketed primarily to “corporate universities,” other corporate training programs, and individuals who are seeking specific credentials. Beginning in spring 2000 (that’s now), NYUonline is offering courses that can lead to a Certificate in Management Training. The offerings are expected to expand in the near future, to include courses in nursing, accounting, finance, marketing, real estate, and an array of advanced courses in information technology, e-commerce, and internet security.
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| Presential class |
In the short term, as I have already suggested, and if an administration decides to redistribute profits, a university like NYU can use the revenues generated by such units to underwrite cash-poor educational divisions, like the humanities. For this reason, and because the kind of block budgeting and overhead cost agreements typical of government support for higher education are things of the past, we should be happy about our for-profit distance units. As a student of the history of administration and bookkeeping, however, I am worried that, in the long run, the tail of distance learning will wag the dog of liberal education. Even if administrators are willing to redistribute profits to units that cannot generate revenue, I worry that university officials will generalize the cost-basis mode of analysis typically used to evaluate productivity in distance learning units to other units of the university, where scholarly productivity and teaching have traditionally provided the measures of achievement. I worry that, because of the distance-learning unit’s ability to generate revenue, universities will have to direct more resources to developing and distributing courses appropriate for the distance learning format. I worry that, as these programs proliferate, it will be tempting to conceptualize education tout court as a series of administrable components, which can be provided by separate, specialized, and most-often part-time laborers. Outsourcing components of the educational “product,” like grading or answering student questions, is not far behind breaking the educational process into discrete components. In fact, CUNY is already toying with the idea of outsourcing its remedial (or “basic”) writing work; and distance learning ventures like NextU.com depend on subcontracting facets of the educational process in order to turn a profit.
I don’t want to stray too far into this dystopic vision of the virtual university, because my topic is more narrowly the impact such transformations might have on the humanities. Nor do I want to give the impressions that I am a technological Luddite or that I am blind to the implications of decreasing federal and state funding for higher education. I simply want to register the fears that developments within institutions like this one have their own inertia, and that technology-based innovations (like distance learning), as well as administrative procedures (like management and assessment), have their own logics too. It is certainly possible to resist the logic that would convert every facet of educational work into activities amenable to subdivision and cost-basis analysis, just as it is possible to resist the bifurcation of the humanities into “basic” and “advanced” skills. To resist these developments, however, we must be critical; we must conserve what is valuable about our heritage, interpret the implications of the technologies we deploy, and be self-conscious about the values we want a university education to promote. The thought I want to leave you with is that the mode of inquiry associated with the humanities may be the only practice capable of cultivating this critical attentiveness to the implications of the bases of our own technological and financial success. The question we might want to ask now, as this university enters its for-profit distance learning future, is not whether the humanities can survive distance learning, but whether the university can survive the demise of the humanities, which an uncritical embrace of distance learning might inadvertently hasten. 