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David Noble's Battle to Defend the 'Sacred Space' of the Classroom



We'll be reading Nobel's essays during the week of April 10 -14, but
here's an introduction to him as a character. I think you'll find him
colorful and engaging even as you disagree with him--if you do.

This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education 
  From the issue dated March 31, 2000

  David Noble's Battle to Defend the 'Sacred Space' of the Classroom

  By JEFFREY R. YOUNG
  
   David F. Noble says distance education is fool's gold, and
  he's eager to point out who the fools are. In speeches,
  essays, and countless sound bites, the professor argues that
  the primary motive behind the craze for online education is
  profit rather than pedagogy, and that the glimmer of dot-com
  riches is tempting some administrators to put the core values
  of their institutions at risk.  
  
  "It's been leading to a dangerous relaxation of sound
  financial-management practices and legal safeguards of the
  public interest, a bending of the rules of established
  procedure, and quite possibly even a breaking of the law," he
  said in a speech last month at a conference on the future of
  higher education. 
  
  Mr. Noble's speech stood in marked contrast to others at the
  conference, held at the University of California at Riverside.
  He offered not a theoretical argument, but a juicy description
  of what he sees as shady dealings between the extension
  program at University of California at Los Angeles and a
  company called OnlineLearning.net. (The university and the
  company deny his allegations.) 
  
  Given Mr. Noble's remarks, you half-expect him to be wearing
  an armband of protest on the sleeve of his tweed jacket. 
  
  Mr. Noble is not about to sit by and let distance education
  happen without a fight. The history professor at York
  University, in Toronto, is on a crusade that mixes
  scholarship, journalism, activism, and stubborn persistence.
  In his view, distance education is the latest episode in a
  troubling saga of the corporatization of American higher
  education. 
  
  To some faculty members, he is something of a cult hero for
  passionately speaking out to protect the rights of professors
  in cyberspace. Some say his extreme views make it easier for
  those with more-moderate concerns about distance education to
  voice their opinions. But his critics say Mr. Noble's attacks
  are so narrow-minded and emotional that they are
  counterproductive. And some say he has an abrasive personal
  style that makes it difficult to engage him in debate.
  
  Any way you cut it, Mr. Noble is colorful, provocative, and
  uncompromising. He has frequently investigated and criticized
  the institutions that have employed him. He says he is often
  discriminated against for being critical of technology.  He
  says he is searching for the truth. 
  
  During his 30 years of prolific scholarship on the history of
  technology, Mr. Noble has repeatedly challenged the assumption
  that technological advances inevitably result in progress. And
  he has repeatedly asked why criticizing technology is so often
  taboo.
  
  To Mr. Noble, being called a Luddite is no insult. In fact,
  "the Luddites were certainly people to be emulated," he says,
  referring to the group of British weavers who fought against
  the automation of their profession in the 1800's, sometimes
  with violence. "They were not at all the mindless, hapless
  victims that people portray them as. They were essentially
  demanding a policy on technology." 
  
  A photograph of Mr. Noble taken in the 1980's shows him
  holding one of the sledgehammers used by the Luddites to smash
  looms. But he has no plans to destroy computers, he says.
  "It's more important to smash the mental machinery than the
  physical machinery." 
  
  "My scholarly work has really been focused on trying to
  demystify technology in our culture," he says. 
  
  His strategy is to treat any high-tech tool like a political
  document that needs decoding. "Technology is itself
  political," he argues. "You should look at it and say, Who's
  sponsoring it? What are their interests? Who do they
  represent? What are they trying to do?" 
  
  For instance, in Forces of Production: A Social History of
  Industrial Automation (Knopf, 1984), he shows how the values
  and interests of engineers and managers -- rather than simple
  efforts to improve efficiency -- have influenced factory
  design. In his most recent book, The Religion of Technology:
  The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (Knopf, 1997),
  he traces the many ways in which technology and faith are
  intertwined in Western culture. 
  
  In the latter book, Mr. Noble argues that religious
  motivations and a desire for transcendence have been the
  driving forces behind such large-scale technological quests as
  the space program, artificial intelligence, and genetic
  engineering. A "politics of perfection," rather than a desire
  to meet social needs, he writes, has motivated technical
  innovation. "The expectation of ultimate salvation through
  technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has
  become the unspoken orthodoxy." 
  
  Mr. Noble's books and articles are widely cited by historians
  of science, says Thomas P. Hughes, a visiting professor of
  history at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute
  of Technology.  He adds that Mr. Noble has been a "pioneer"
  among historians in strongly criticizing technology. "He
  greatly influenced a number of graduate students to be more
  critical of their evaluation of technological developments." 
  
  Mr. Noble's scholarly research has always been shaped by his
  political agenda. He's been an activist since he was a college
  student himself, and he seems more comfortable at a rowdy
  protest than a somber faculty meeting.  
  
  As an undergraduate at the University of Florida in the
  1960's, he founded a group called the Student Board of
  Investigation to fight for free speech and civil rights. More
  recently, he was one of the leaders of a 1997 faculty strike
  at York in which distance education was an issue. In what may
  have been a first, faculty members won language in their
  contract stating that professors cannot be forced to teach
  courses online or to use technology in the classroom.
  
  Mr. Noble also regularly gives speeches to faculty unions
  elsewhere, urging them to fight for the intellectual-property
  rights to professors' online materials. Susan Meisenhelder,
  president of the California Faculty Association, says "people
  are always very moved and very inspired" when he speaks before
  her group. "What he does wonderfully well is get people to
  think beyond the perimeters of their own campus and their own
  department and to think in larger social terms." 
  
  Mr. Noble's example proves that a professor can succeed
  without relying on the latest technologies. He refuses to use
  e-mail, despite prodding by friends and colleagues. He says he
  often writes drafts of his books by hand. He certainly doesn't
  have World Wide Web pages for his courses, and he even
  encourages students to write out their assignments by hand. As
  he sees it, he is more productive without the distractions of
  e-mail or HTML coding. 
  
  Even so, it was the Internet that sent Mr. Noble's first
  assault on distance education racing around the globe. Three
  years ago, in the first essay in his "Digital Diploma Mills"
  series, he warned of what he saw as the dangers of distance
  education. At first it was distributed informally, on an
  electronic mailing list, but soon it was published in several
  online publications.
  
  Part of the essay's power lay in its combination of detailed
  reporting and sweeping analysis. It singled out U.C.L.A.,
  among others, for striking deals with for-profit companies to
  "peddle online education."
  
  The essay also argued that an ambitious project by U.C.L.A.'s
  College of Letters and Science to build a World Wide Web page
  for every one of its courses was a related effort. Mr. Noble
  suggested that once courses were online, the administration
  could assert greater control and ownership of the course
  materials.
  
  "Once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their
  services are in the long run no longer required," he wrote.
  "They become redundant, and when they leave, their work
  remains behind." 
  
  In another controversial argument, he said that there was no
  student demand for course Web sites or for distance education,
  and that administrators were creating a market "by fiat." 
  
  "In ten years, we will look upon the wired remains of our once
  great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let
  it happen," he concluded.
  
  U.C.L.A. officials dismissed the essay as amounting to a
  conspiracy theory, saying that Mr. Noble had distorted the
  facts to promote his own agenda. "That article was factually
  incorrect on some important points," says David C. Menninger,
  associate dean of continuing education and extension. "He came
  at it from a perspective that was critical at the outset, even
  before he really had all the facts." 
  
  Others, too, disagreed with Mr. Noble's approach. "His
  fear-filled rhetoric and whipping of the boogie-monster of
  entrepreneurial corruption of education is misleading, shallow
  and even counterproductive," wrote Ben Shneiderman, director
  of the human-computer interaction laboratory at the University
  of Maryland at College Park, in the journal Educom Review.
  
  By many accounts, however, Mr. Noble's essay sparked a
  worldwide debate about intellectual-property issues for online
  courses. Debates raged in mailing lists and on Web-based
  discussion boards. Talk of the essay spilled over into
  technology conferences and faculty lounges. 
  
  "What David did was burst a dam of frustration," says Edward
  J. Valauskas, chief editor of First Monday, one of the online
  journals that published the essay. "No one really had the
  courage before he brought out that paper to be incredibly
  critical of some of these ideas for using the Internet for
  distance education." 
  
  Some distance-education leaders downplay Mr. Noble's role in
  the debate. "I don't know anybody who takes him very
  seriously," says Sally Johnstone, director of the Western
  Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications, at the Western
  Interstate Commission for Higher Education. "There aren't too
  many people you can point to that are as extreme as he is.
  He's off in another world." 
  
  When she was on a radio program with Mr. Noble about a year
  ago to discuss distance education, Ms. Johnstone says, he
  dismissed any argment she made out of hand. "He would just go
  off on his own paranoid tangent," she says. 
  
  Since the splash made by his first distance-education essay,
  Mr. Noble has published three online sequels expanding the
  argument. In the latest, published late last year, he provides
  a history of correspondence schools in the late 1800's and
  early 1900's. In the essay, which Mr. Noble hopes to expand
  into a book, he traces several parallels between such efforts
  and today's distance-education ventures.
  
  Early education-by-mail efforts, he says, were marketed with
  the same enthusiasm as today's Internet courses. "The chief
  selling point of education by means of correspondence, the
  firms maintained, was personalized instruction for busy
  people," he writes.  
  
  By 1926, Mr. Noble writes, more than 300 private
  correspondence schools had sprung up. Around the same time,
  about 73 traditional colleges and universities were running
  correspondence programs, too.  
  
  But, Mr. Noble argues, such individualized instruction turned
  out to be more expensive than the institutions had
  anticipated. To cut costs, he says, institutions soon lowered
  standards for correspondence teachers and expanded their
  workloads, diminishing the quality of instruction and
  prompting many students to drop out. The number of such
  programs eventually fell.
  
  "Like their now forgotten forebears, today's proponents of
  distance education believe they are leading a revolution which
  will transform the educational landscape," he writes. "So here
  we go again." 
  
  But this time, Mr. Noble fears, the damage done to higher
  education will be more profound, because universities are
  making greater investments in infrastructure and thus will
  fight harder to make the programs work. He calls such
  investments "a technological tapeworm in the guts of higher
  education." 
  
  Mr. Noble isn't opposed to all uses of distance education. He
  says it can be beneficial for military training and in
  instances where there simply are no in-person educational
  options. But students in truly remote places are not the
  target market of colleges and companies starting ambitious
  distance-education programs, he argues. "Come on, do you think
  these vendors give a shit about aboriginal people in the
  outback? That's not enough of a market." 
  
  This battle against the commercialization of instruction is by
  no means Mr. Noble's first large-scale campaign. In the
  1980's, he took to the field to criticize the
  commercialization of scientific research. 
  
  In 1983, he worked with Ralph Nader to organize the National
  Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, a group
  that monitors industry's ties with academe. 
  
  He was also one of the most vocal critics of a partnership
  between M.I.T. and a private entity called the Whitehead
  Institute for Biomedical Research. Mr. Noble was then an
  associate professor at M.I.T., and he says his views were the
  reason he was denied tenure in 1984. "The whole thing was
  rigged start to finish," he says. "It's a joke that I wouldn't
  get tenure at M.I.T." 
  
  In fact, Mr. Noble sued the university, claiming he had been
  denied tenure because he had criticized the university's
  collaboration with industry.	The case was settled after
  M.I.T. agreed to release all of the documentation on his
  tenure review. The American Historical Association reviewed
  the documents and wrote a letter to Mr. Noble calling M.I.T.'s
  decision "badly flawed."
  
  Mr. Noble says it is his duty to expose any institution that
  is acting contrary to the public interest. "I have a
  responsibility," says the professor, whose parents did not
  attend college. "I have an obligation to return to society
  something for what I've gotten." He adds that he is no
  "muckraker," however, and says he's not trying to make a name
  for himself. 
  
  In 1998, he won the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage
  from the Shafeek Nader Trust for the Community Interest, named
  for the sister of Ralph Nader. The group praised Mr. Noble's
  "fight to affirm and preserve the primacy of the university's
  educational and research missions, unfettered by marketplace
  interests." 
  
  Mr. Noble is as passionate about his teaching as about his
  politics, and waxes eloquent about how the old-fashioned,
  low-tech classroom is a "sacred space." 
  
  "In person, you get a sense of me you can't get online. I'm
  convinced of that," he says. "We have five senses. Why
  artificially narrow the bandwidth?"
  
  At Harvey Mudd College, where he was a visiting professor from
  1997 to 1999, he made such an impression on students that the
  senior class voted to invite him to speak at commencement. But
  the college's president, Jon C. Strauss, nixed that idea, and
  invited the students' second choice -- Bill Nye, "the Science
  Guy" of children's-television fame. 
  
  Mr. Strauss says the decision was easy: He was not going to
  risk giving Mr. Noble a soapbox to criticize the college, as
  the historian had done the previous year when he was asked to
  introduce a public lecture by Mr. Nader. During that
  introduction, Mr. Noble blasted a "clinic program" at the
  college that lets students work with businesses to develop
  projects. He complained about the college's policy of claiming
  intellectual-property rights over any discoveries made by
  students in the program. Mr. Strauss called that introduction
  a "cheap shot" and says it was an inappropriate venue for
  lodging such a complaint, because university officials did not
  have a chance to respond.
  
  "The commencement's a celebration," says Mr. Strauss. "We were
  concerned about the potential negative impact of having him be
  critical of Harvey Mudd College in front of the parents who'd
  just paid $120,000 to send their students here." 
  
  Mr. Noble sees the situation as proof that administrators
  wanted to silence his ideas about the college. "Any criticism
  of that institution is out of bounds," he says. In fact, Mr.
  Noble says, after he gave the introduction to Mr. Nader's
  speech, he was praised by students but "completely ostracized
  by everyone else" on the faculty and in the administration. 
  
  No wonder, says Richard G. Olson, a history professor at
  Harvey Mudd who worked two doors down from Mr. Noble. Many
  professors felt that Mr. Noble had been "fundamentally unfair"
  in his remarks, especially for what Mr. Olson saw as personal
  attacks on the founder of the college's clinic program. "His
  personal style of interaction was very abrasive, and he
  clearly irritated a number of colleagues," Mr. Olson said.
  
  Mr. Olson was on the search committee that brought Mr. Noble
  to campus, and he says he had been predisposed to like the
  visiting scholar. But he grew tired of Mr. Noble after a
  number of what he calls "petty" irritations. The most
  egregious: "He tended to use my personal library quite a bit,
  and I would get books back all marked up. Professors are
  likely to be a little touchy about their books." 
  
  Mr. Noble denies even using Mr. Olson's library, and calls the
  comment a "character assasination."
  
  He gets impatient with a reporter's questions about whether he
  is "abrasive," saying that he hopes this article will focus on
  the issues raised by his scholarship. 
  
  "There's a tendency to personalize everything in this society
  -- Noble is a pain in the ass; Noble is a troublemaker; Noble
  is a gadfly -- rather than deal with the issues."
  
  David Noble on the Dangers of Distance Education
   Following are selections from each of the four essays in
  David F. Noble's "Digital Diploma Mills" series. The essays
  warn against what they describe as the dangers of distance
  education and call on professors to assert ownership of their
  course materials. The essays appeared originally on the
  Internet -- on mailing lists and personal Web pages -- and
  some have been published in online journals as well. All of
  the essays are available at
  http://www.communication.ucsd.edu/dl/
  
  The Automation of Higher Education
  October 1997
  
  What is driving this headlong rush to implement new technology
  with so little regard for deliberation of the pedagogical and
  economic costs and at the risk of student and faculty
  alienation and opposition? A short answer might be the fear of
  getting left behind, the incessant pressures of "progress."
  
  But there is more to it. For the universities are not simply
  undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that
  change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the
  commercialization of higher education. For here as elsewhere
  technology is but a vehicle and a disarming disguise.
  
  The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction
  March 1998
  
  During the last few years several universities have entered
  into formal agreements with private firms which give some
  indication of where they are headed. ...
  
  The implications of these agreements therefore must be
  considered seriously by anyone who is using or plans to use
  electronic means to enhance or deliver their courses. Who owns
  the material you have placed on the Web site or e-mail?
  Without a clear and definitive assertion of copyright claims
  by faculty, the universities will usurp such rights by
  default.
  
  This is a matter of some urgency and it is especially pressing
  for those faculty who work in a non-union workplace. Unionized
  faculty have at least an organization and collective
  bargaining rights through which they might fight for their
  rightful claims. But non-unionized faculty must invent other
  means. ...
  
  But by whatever means, collective bargaining, litigation, or
  direct action, faculty must act, and act now, to preserve
  their rights.
  
  The Bloom Is Off the Rose
  November 1998
  
  Increasingly, and everywhere, faculty and students alike are
  waking up to the realization that it is High Noon for Higher
  Education. They are overcoming their traditional timidity and
  parochialism to make common cause with like-minded people
  across the continent, to fight for their own and the larger
  public interest against the plans and pronouncements of
  peddlers and politicians who in general know little about
  education.
  
  Having learned that they are not alone, faculty are displaying
  a new-found confidence in their own experience and expertise,
  and thus in their rightful capacity to decide what is a good
  education. Socrates, they have reminded themselves, was not a
  content provider.
  
  Rehearsal for the Revolution
  November 1999
  
  The current mania for distance education ... [bears a]
  striking resemblance to a past today's enthusiasts barely know
  about or care to acknowledge, an earlier episode in the
  commodification of higher education known as correspondence
  instruction or, more quaintly, home study.
  
  Then as now, distance education has always been not so much
  technology-driven as profit-driven, whatever the mode of
  delivery. The common denominator linking the two episodes is
  not technology but the pursuit of profit in the guise and name
  of higher education.
  
  
  

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