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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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