Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education

By David F. Noble Monthly Review Press, 2002 110 pp. Few issues in the contemporary academy generate the rhetoric, debate, evaluation, and study as the virtues and vices of technologically mediated higher education (aka online learning, elearning). In the halls of Congress and the nation's legislatures, corporate boardrooms, classrooms, and dorm rooms, people at all levels of involvement in the higher education enterprise are struggling to unpack the implications and consequences of innovations that are less than a decade old. After the initial wave of euphoria that accompanies any new development, policymakers, higher education leaders, and others are just beginning to confront the hard questions-How to maintain an authentic learning experience in cyberspace? How to finance an enterprise more expensive than the expectations of many? How to fairly resolve the vexing questions of copyright and intellectual property? Some, however, have already drawn their conclusions and pronounced sentence on this embryonic movement. Technophiles and technophobes alike have staked out their territory in the debate and any subsequent facts will not deter them. Digital Diploma Mills reads like a manifesto for the technophobe, whether that was author David Noble's intention or not. For online learning, the trial was mercifully (or unmercifully) brief in Noble's court. The verdict? Guilty on all charges-the "proletarianization" of the faculty, the commodification of the curriculum, the bastardization of learning, the corruption of university administration by corporate avarice-and the list goes on (and on reading the book's appendices, one quickly realizes that the jury for this trial was rigged about 20 years ago). The tragedy of this book lies in the fact that it offers important cautions and "lessons learned" for the current elearning debate, but obscures these insights with a heavy dose of anti-corporate, anti-administration spleen. In the end, the strident tone of Noble's analysis severely limits the book's effectiveness and weakens the position of those he is trying to help. The book starts off helpfully enough, citing Santyana's admonition about the fate of those foolish enough to ignore the lessons of history to introduce an analysis of the parallels between online education and the correspondence school movement of the last century. In this portion of the book, Noble draws essential lessons from American higher education's initial foray into distance education-the demand to provide education to a large number of students while turning a profit; the placement of instruction and assessment in the hands of low-paid, lowskilled paraprofessionals; student assessment so loose it bordered on non-existence; university officials anxious to be on the leading edge of education while generating revenue for the institution-all of which can attributed to a number of current university forays into cyberspace. At the same time, however, Noble alerts the reader to very real differences between correspondence schools and the current rush to embrace "the next big thing" that should give educators and policymakers pause. One is the cost of technological infrastructure, which exceeds that of its correspondence predecessors by factors of ten, if not one hundred. Another is the increasing permeability of institutional boundaries, which refers to the university's relationships with affiliated entities such as extension services. Here, Noble powerfully reminds the reader that the stakes are now much higher for those who pursue online education without the benefit of hindsight. Noble devotes the remainder of the book to a prospective look at the academy in an online world, primarily through the case study of ucLAnS experience with The Home Education Network (THEN). The picture that Noble paints of that world is a grim one, indeed. It is a world in which the bottom line trumps intellectual pursuit and academic freedom, as the university's extension system played "fast and loose" in working with faculty and the regents in order to seal what was hoped would be a lucrative deal with politically connected media mavens. …