Digital Diploma Mills
Book review by Ralph Maud

On-line distance education, which seems benign when you listen to its proponents, is from David Noble’s perspective the gravest danger this century to the real work of the university.

I happened once to be at an editing studio where they were working on a training film for Keg and Cleaver, as it was called in its early expansive phase. The film showed how the receptionist should greet customers, how the waiter should squat at the table and say "Hi, I’m Kevin" and how the bill should be presented and so on and so on. The idea was that managers of new locations would show the film to staff as they hired them. The impressive founder of the Keg chain was there that evening and he revealed an unexpected secret about the film: that it wasn’t for the staff. Their jobs didn’t require much in the way of training. No, the new managers would show the film over and over and it was really for them. A sense of the desired rhythm and atmosphere of a Keg would be thereby drilled into them without their being aware of the intention.

This revelation stuck in my mind and helped me to understand how in the 1970s (the early Keg era) the powers-that-be decided, as Noble puts it on page 27 of Digital Diploma Mills, that from their point of view "the universities had become too important to be left to the universities." The military/business complex would take over, but without our knowing. For instance, a little law like the 1980 reform of patents allowed universities to patent research done under government grants. A "favour," of course, but from then on knowledge became a marketable commodity without anyone realizing something momentous had happened. For one thing, taxes were thereby converted into private wealth and, more importantly, a culture of secrecy and ownership for eventual profit began to usurp traditional open scientific research.

The latest phase of commodification of higher education is the on-line packaging of courses for sale, which David Noble brilliantly exposes as a cash grab at the expense of the humanistic classroom instructor. I always considered the lecture as a unique moment in the lives of the teacher and listeners both. Now they want us to design a course so that we do it just once in front of a camera and we are not needed again. They want a quantified unit of learning, whereas anybody knows that real learning usually occurs when the talk and the thinking have gone beyond the normal bounds of safety. Learning is in the outrageous.

I should have known what was happening when student appeals were instituted so easily in the 1980s. You’d think the administration would resist the bother of students challenging grades all the time, but they didn’t. And I don’t think it was because of a love of democracy and justice. Let me tell you, students have very rarely found satisfaction in this openness. What was effected under the guise of fairness to students was the first wholesale entry of administrations into course content and conduct of classes. How, it was asked, could review committees see if fair play had occurred unless they could investigate everything about the situation? Further, it meant that courses must be designed now as objective entities so that student complaints could be judged against the implicit contract of the course description. How can students have grounds for complaints if a semester is allowed to be improvisation or impulsive journeys into knowledge? And if the grade is a personal assessment by the teacher not an accumulation of points for work explained fully in advance?

I should have known that we were being hoodwinked by the forces that wanted universities to offer a product rather than an experience. Student appeals, so politically correct, were the first secret step toward weakening the professor and sapping the professor’s strength to resist further inroads into academic vitality.

David Noble is one whose strength shows no signs of diminishing. An accomplished historian by anyone’s standards, he is also an organizer of renown. Digital Diploma Mills is a book to have at the Strand Hall barricades. It takes its place in my affection alongside the earlier Progress Without People, which surveyed the historical Luddite program and its successes, and showed how people have always claimed the right to manage their workplace and introduce technology in their own way. The on-line commodification, which is the subject of the present book, is one further example of a historical movement, a threat that is peculiarly ours to understand and act upon.

Historian David Noble, co-founder of the National Coalition for Universities in the Public Interest, teaches at York University. Digital Diploma Mills is published by Between the Lines www.btlbooks.com
Ralph Maud is emeritus professor of English at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC.


Nothing But Miracles
Book review by Catherine Chapman

Susan Roth’s collages beautifully illustrate this picture book, whose simple text is excerpted from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Roth has put a child-friendly face on the poem by introducing a family of cats that do the things that families do together: eating, talking, sleeping, going to the beach, loving each other. Throughout the book, the cats stop to realize the miracles that are everywhere in their daily lives, from the "wonderfulness of the sundown," or the city streets, or to simply be able to talk to the people they love. In choosing to use animals instead of human figures, Roth has left the family identity open, so children can see their own family diversity represented, making this an ideal book for non-traditional families. The colourful paper collages have a passion and vivacity that echoes Whitman’s inspirational words. This book helps us all, no matter how old we are. Remember that when you celebrate even the simplest of things, there is joy!
By Walt Whitman, illustrated by Susan L. Roth. National Geographic, 2003, ages 3 to 6.

The Rabbits
Book review by Catherine Chapman

The Rabbits is a stark allegory of colonization and human impact on the environment. The rabbits move in and take over a land that is lived on and loved by the native creatures. They come by boat, speak a different language, bring different animals and eat different food. Their population multiplies quickly and they strip the land of its resources, without thought to the balance of the environment. The creatures that have lived there for generations are made sick, oppressed and have their children stolen from them. The barren landscape of the rabbit’s might-equals-right world contrasts sharply with the rich, fertile, animal-filled landscape of the beginning. Is there hope for the future in such a world?

Marsden’s sparse text, combined with Shaun Tan’s exquisitely rich illustrations, makes for an emotionally charged look at colonization and how the environment has suffered from industrialization and unchecked population growth. This is a great book to introduce these topics to children and as a discussion starter about human rights, politics and environmental issues. This book is a must for every school, library and socially-conscious home.
By John Marsden and Shaun Tan. Simply Red, 2003, ages 6 plus.