Higher education and the gospel of innovation

Jill Lepore, who is a professor of history at Harvard, takes on one of the buzzwords of recent times--"disruptive innovation"--in her essay in the New Yorker:

Disruptive innovation as an explanation for how change happens is everywhere. Ideas that come from business schools are exceptionally well marketed. Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries.

Whether or not disruptive innovation is a law of nature that can even explain change in the economic/business world is immaterial to me.  What worries me more is this: an unholy alliance of half-baked consultants, educational administrators, and politicians who think they are smarter than everybody else, latching on to soundbites like "disruptive innovation" and beginning to go after the good in higher education while completely overlooking the godawful aspects of it.

Lepore writes:

In “The Innovative University,” written with Henry J. Eyring, who used to work at the Monitor Group, a consulting firm co-founded by Michael Porter, Christensen subjected Harvard, a college founded by seventeenth-century theocrats, to his case-study analysis. “Studying the university’s history,” Christensen and Eyring wrote, “will allow us to move beyond the forlorn language of crisis to hopeful and practical strategies for success.” On the basis of this research, Christensen and Eyring’s recommendations for the disruption of the modern university include a “mix of face-to-face and online learning.” The publication of “The Innovative University,” in 2011, contributed to a frenzy for Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, at colleges and universities across the country, including a collaboration between Harvard and M.I.T., which was announced in May of 2012. Shortly afterward, the University of Virginia’s panicked board of trustees attempted to fire the president, charging her with jeopardizing the institution’s future by failing to disruptively innovate with sufficient speed; the vice-chair of the board forwarded to the chair a Times column written by David Brooks, “The Campus Tsunami,” in which he cited Christensen.

What happens at Harvard does not stay at Harvard, but trickles down to universities like the one where I teach.  But, by the time it reaches us, the message and the idea get horribly warped.  With a faculty body that typically does not pay attention to discussions outside, no wonder then that even a bureaucratic administrator can bamboozle a faculty committee about how we need to worry about costs because of disruptive innovations like MOOC.  Yes, this really happened in fall 2012.  At the meeting, even as I was mentally phrasing my objection before articulating the question to him, the neck-buried-in-the-sand faculty who felt their head yanked out meekly asked "what is MOOC?"  Game over when playing with the ill-informed!

As much as I am forever criticizing higher education, and as much as I have been teaching online for years now, I am not a huge fan of MOOC.  Fundamentally because "learning" is not a business. My criticism of higher education is primarily because opportunists have made it into a third-rate business that has tragically figured out how to screw a captive customer base.

Thus, I cringed when I saw this cover on the Economist:

The Economist, to its credit, does acknowledge this much:

For all their potential, MOOCs have yet to unleash a Schumpetarian gale of disruption. Most universities and employers still see online education as an addition to traditional degree courses, rather than a replacement. Many prestigious institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge, have declined to use the new platforms.

Disruption is a long way off because learning is not a widget that can be replaced by a better widget or one that can be manufactured elsewhere less expensively.  As Lepore noted, " people aren’t disk drives."  Learning is not merely about faster processing or larger memory capacity or about the cost of labor in China.

The Economist concludes on an even tone after weighing the issue:

In “The Idea of a University”, published in 1858, John Henry Newman, an English Catholic cardinal, summarised the post-Enlightenment university as “a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country”. This ideal still inspires in the era when the options for personal intercourse via the internet are virtually limitless. But the Cardinal had a warning: without the personal touch, higher education could become “an icebound, petrified, cast-iron university”. That is what the new wave of high-tech online courses should not become. But as an alternative to an overstretched, expensive model of higher education, they are more likely to prosper than fade.

Unfortunately, the higher education ideal long ago lost "the personal touch" and even now a typical institution that has classes of anything from 300 to 1,000 students meeting not in classrooms but in auditoriums (auditoria?) is already nothing but “an icebound, petrified, cast-iron university.”  Which is why, perhaps, to most students and their sponsors MOOC is not any worse.

I would cheer on the MOOC disruption if it can bankrupt the NCAA millionaires who have grossly profited by horribly distorting "the idea of a university."