Bitcoin University

It’s syllabus time again and this had me thinking about one of the recent initiatives in higher education, OER or Open Educational Resources, which is an initiative to replace expensive textbooks with free alternatives. As with so many such initiatives, they’re cloaked in compassionate rhetoric (OER helps cash-strapped students) but this veneer also hides the underlying dismantling of our universities. It’s an interesting example of how the attacks on our universities (or on other institutions) often appear as their exact opposite; how your enemy approaches in the guise of a friend.

It’s no surprise that OER exist. The textbook industry is a big racket, and the cost of books are a significant portion of a college education. And the OER initiative seeks to replace expensive books with free, or “open,” educational resources. And there are a wide variety of such resources, including many OER textbooks written by well-qualified faculty who have chosen to make their textbooks free to students rather than licensing them to publishers. So, at face value, this seems like an excellent idea: with students evermore struggling with the financial burdens of college, OER can make a significant difference in reducing the costs.

However, the OER initiative also leads to another problem. It’s not easy to design a class using OER, because it requires a lot of work tracking down the material as well as determining its quality. For one, I can’t simply go to a publishers website (or Amazon) to see what books exist, but I have to search the great world wide web to do so, and sometimes, these free resources are not easy to find. Second, if I was designing a new course in political theory, I could assign texts from trustworthy publishers and know that the texts and translations are reliable. This doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes find fault with the texts, swapping one version of a text for another, but with trustworthy publishers, the issues I find are typically minor. But with online resources, I have to be much more careful, because there isn’t a publisher standing behind them.

Consequently, the pedagogical issue pertaining to the quality of OER becomes a labor issue, because ascertaining quality is no longer the responsibility of a publisher, because there aren’t any for OER. Instead, this job becomes the responsibility of faculty members. More simply, it takes a lot of work to switch to OER, because they can be hard to find and because it takes time to vet their quality, and for faculty who are already stretched thin, the extra work can be burdensome.

To combat this, even though public universities are increasingly stretched for cash, places like CUNY often manage to find funding for these kinds of initiatives. It’s usually not very much, but if faculty members at CUNY want to incorporate OER into their courses, they’ll typically find staff members who are paid to help them do so as well as stipends (or course release) to reimburse them for their time.

So, to reiterate: public universities and their students are increasingly under the crunch, the move towards OER is meant to alleviate some of this pressure, and universities have found the resources to help faculty make this move. Granted, this initiative doesn’t address any of the underlying causes of this problem, such as shrinking educational budgets and rampant inequality, but as a salve to offer a little help to students who have to juggle too much, it doesn’t seem so bad. You might even go so far as to say that it seems good.

However, looked at more broadly, I’m not so sure. At least in the humanities and social sciences, there seems to be three essential ingredients to a university: a campus, professors, and books. For all the extras that go into the “college experience,” college really requires books that contain the knowledge that is to be learnt, the professors who are there to help guide students in learning how to acquire this knowledge and how to think about it, as well as a place to do so. And over the past few decades, the overwhelming thrust of new educational initiatives have been to attack these necessary educational ingredients.

For instance, in place of tenured and tenure-track faculty members, the major educational trend has been to replace these stable full-time employees with the insecure and part-time labor of adjunct professors. When I was a student, not so many years ago, my university boasted that something like 99% of all classes were taught by tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Granted, this was in Canada, but in almost all matters, Canada is always just a few steps behind the United States. And currently, well over a majority of all college instruction in the United States is conducted by adjunct faculty. And this number is only growing—in Canada too.

As for campuses, this has been trickier, but more than a few colleges have taken to selling off real estate in order to raise money and decrease costs. So, as real estate prices have exploded in recent years, many schools have seen their campus property holdings as a source of revenue to replace budget shortfalls. And with the turn towards online education during the pandemic years, I wouldn’t be surprised if COVID is the shock that helps transform the campus from a physical space to an online one. They tried it once before with the push for MOOC’s, or Massively Open Online Courses, but COVID might just be the shock to make this succeed.

And lastly, we come to books. For all the talk about students, OER is also a way to undermine this third necessity of college education. Rather than asking students to buy the books that they need (or rather than providing students with them), students are increasingly provided with free OER. And at face value, this seems like a great thing. However, on deeper look, rather than addressing the underlying problems—dwindling educational budgets and the rampant inequality that ensures students are poorer and poorer—the response actually enables these problems because OER are a way to provide students with less and less.

Therefore, in place of the tools that students might use to fight for an education that contains the basic necessities of a university—faculty, a campus, and books (let alone, and god forbid!, anything more than the basics)—the response has instead been to provide students with a simulacrum of these necessities. In place of real, full-time faculty members, we give them facsimiles of professors who are only paid to play a “professor” for a few hours a week; we provide them with a shrinking campus that will eventually become a digital one; and in place of the books that have been a staple of education for the past 2500 years, we give them OER.

And what’s perhaps most striking is that when it comes to the initiatives designed to undermine the college experience, there always seems to be money. That is, if you’re trying to figure out how to give students less, there’s lots of money around. Otherwise, it can be like squeezing water from a stone. Worse yet, on their face, many of these initiatives promise to save the University while actively working to undermine it. Consequently, faculty can sign onto these initiatives, give their time and effort to the cause of helping their students, all while they’re also working to transform the university from a real place of education into a house of cards.

And yes, of course, this house of cards is better than the alternative of no university. But as with so many other choices these days, we’re not given a choice between a good and a bad alternative, but between a bad and a worse one. That is, unless you’re rich, because I’m pretty sure they still buy books at Harvard.