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On memory, profitability, disruption and socialised alternatives


Posted by hallymk1

On memory: In scoping the policy space inside which Australian Higher Education is being restructured, Kate Bowles argues for recognising the complexity of higher education in all its forms, and for finding spaces to contest the neoliberal mantra of efficiency. She argues that:

[academics] now need to speak up in precise and evidence-based ways about the opportunity cost of applying the Efficiency Dividend to something as complex and socially diverse as Australian higher education.

This is an important point that asks us to recognise and articulate the complexity of our socialised memory. How might we describe the pedagogic projects that form and are formed by our lives? What is needed is a historical analysis of the socialised nature of higher education and the socialised nature of the kinds of learning and knowing that take place inside its forms, as they are defined spatially and temporally. This socialisation is deliberately set against the individuated, commodified, entrepreneurial and venture capital-driven responses that currently infect our discussion of possible, alternative forms of higher education. David Kernohan exemplifies this need for a historical analysis when he argues against the simplistic reduction of the discussion of (massive and open) on-line education to its co-option by elites in the present. He recognises the relationships between historical memory, socialised value, and institutions as social spaces for generating and sharing knowing or knowledge:

Work needs to be done. But I am unable to agree that the answer lies in trying to subvert what already exists, because there is already an entire industry that has been trying to do that for 20 years, and they have already succeeded in destroying a lot of what was great about the old system. When we see academic conditions fall again and again, when we see new PhDs earning less than they would tending bar, when we see learners treated like numbers, we know that it could be better because in living memory it has been better. Maybe it is our memories we need to share with you.

On profitability: In defining and sharing the value of remembering, the mechanisms through which MOOCs or whatever-disruptive-innovations have been subsumed under or erased by “the missions of the elite colleges and universities [that t]hey were designed to undermine” (as Stephen Downes has argued), is less important than recognising that they represent one mechanism through which capital is seeking to restore its systemic profitability. Their relationship to universities as competing, global capitals, and inside the systemic drive to release new masses of surplus value that can underpin new forms of accumulation from new markets needs to be understood.

To argue for or against “the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs” is a secondary issue facing higher education. The deeper set of questions revolves around the real subsumption of the forms of higher education by transnational finance capital, in order to restore profitability in the face of global, structural crisis. Michael Roberts notes that “investment depends on profit – and profit depends on the exploitation of labour power and its appropriation by capital”. Thus, the relationships between venture capitalists, universities and colleges, and on-line providers, need to be seen systemically in terms of capital’s overcoming of the barriers to profitability. This is especially the case inside the current historical crisis of capital where new barriers to accumulation have been reached. In order to set the processes for capital accumulation in-train once more, a new mass of surplus value needs to be released and there is an increasingly desperate search for new markets. Much of the current discussion about MOOCs and the relationships between formal and informal educational providers are enclosed by the reality of overcoming disruptions to established, systemic patterns of accumulation and profitability. These disruptions are forcing the value incorporated inside previously socialised spaces like higher education into the open, where it can be re-enclosed and commodified.

Thus, in order to generate a meaningful response to the pleas of Bowles and Kernohan for pushing back against the drive for efficiency and for generating alternatives, it is no use framing those alternatives inside-and-against a view of the elite University vs allegedly disruptive, on-line innovations. As Dumenil and Levy, quoted in Basu and Vasudevan, note the point is to understand the place of public higher education inside the systemic realities of capitalism’s drive to re-establish profitability and accumulation using a variety of mechanisms, like indentured study, defining universities as business, outsourcing, efficiency dividends, MOOCs etc.:

the rate of expansion of a capitalist economy is limited by the general rate of profit that it can generate. The intuition is straightforward. Expansion of a capitalist economy is the accumulation of capital; accumulation, in its turn, rests on capitalizing surplus value, i.e., generating and realizing surplus value. Since profit is a form of expression of surplus value, it follows that the rate of profit governs the rate of expansion of the system. On the demand side it has an impact on the inducement to investment; on the supply side, it determines the financing of investment. There is also in addition a link between profitability and stability.

In dishing the Keynesian analysis of austerity and spending Roberts has some salient context for this discussion. He argues that the key in responding to the current crisis of capitalism is to understand the relationships between: government activity; socialisation in the form of spending on public works, education or health; and production/consumption processes that underpin profitability. Roberts states that spending

on education and health (human capital)… may help to raise the productivity of labour over time, but it won’t help profitability. If it goes mainly into government investment in infrastructure, it may boost profitability for those capitalist sectors getting the contracts, but if it is paid for by higher taxes on profits, there is no gain overall. And even if it is financed by taxes on wages or cuts in other spending it will only raise overall profitability if it goes into sectors with a lower ratio of capital to labour.

In terms of the UK economy he notes that “Productivity in productive sectors of the economy is stagnant and investment has collapsed. Holders of capital are accumulating cash, sending it abroad or buying financial assets.” Those financial assets include student debts and institutional bond issues, and he might also add that Capital is looking at ways of cracking open the value contained in public education through labour arbitrage, outsourcing and privatisation, for private accumulation.

On disruption: The disruptive nature of MOOCs or whatever on-line innovation has to be seen inside-and-against the current crisis of capitalism, and the ways in which they exemplify the tensions between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation inside the system. As highlighted by Marx in the Grundrisse, these innovations are ways in which capital restructures production to overcome the barriers imposed by the working class:

[Capital] by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier… the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. [pp. 524-5]

Thus, the current discussion about MOOCs or the meaning of higher education or the idea of the University or whatever needs to be framed inside-and-against higher education as a revolutionary means for releasing surplus value and for restoring profitability to the broader system, by overcoming barriers to production and consumption. As Marx and Engels note in the Communist Manifesto, this demands revolutionary practice by the bourgeoisie as a global hegemon.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. [p. 13.]

It is, therefore, critical that we see the debate about higher education, efficiency drives, disruptive innovations or whatever, in terms of systemic profitability. As Roberts notes:

A Marxist analysis, in my opinion, recognises that the underlying cause of the crisis in the first place is to be found in the failure of capitalist production to generate enough profit. Then, until capitalism can destroy enough old or “dead” capital (employees, old technology and unprofitable weaker capitalist enterprises) to restore profitability and start the whole thing again, it will languish. In this long depression I reckon this may well require another big slump.

On socialised alternatives: Roberts believes that the alternative is “to end the capitalist mode of production and replace it with democratically controlled, planned social production.” Thus, in responding to Bowles and Kernohan it is no use decrying the subsumption of disruptive innovation inside institutional realities. This is simply a form of false consciousness. At issue are the ways in which knowledge and forms of knowing that are created inside the University, MOOC, disruptive-wherever can be liberated or repatriated for global knowing, and against enclosure and commodification. What forms of knowledge, what skills and practices, what ways of knowing, what mechanisms for analysing global problems, can be emancipated and used to define alternative, socialised value forms? To where can they be liberated or repatriated so that they can be used against-and-beyond their private accumulation for profit? How and where do we ignite critical, political pedagogic practices that enable the democratic production and consumption of knowledge and knowing? These are the questions that ought to frame the idea of (disruptions to) higher education, and its contributions to our collective responses to global crises.


On Globalisation and the University


Posted by hallymk1

I: on globalisation

In his Globalization: nine theses on our epoch, William Robinson argues that “activists and scholars have tended to underestimate the systemic nature of the changes involved in globalisation, which is redefining all the fundamental reference points of human society and social analysis, and requires a modification of all existing paradigms.” In the systemic changes that are driven by and which drive globalisation, we are increasingly witnessing a transnational conflict between capital and both an impoverished labour force in the global South, and a labour force that is being increasingly proletarianised in the global North. Robinson argues that this conflict is incubated through and exacerbated by technologically-mediated innovations in capitalist production processes that increasingly discipline labour. Disciplinary practices include: threats of outsourcing; using technology and efficiencies in production to drive down wages; enforcing changes to terms of employment; attrition or privatisation of social welfare; the use of technology to monitor work; and increasingly deflationary economic policies which attack standards of living for all-bar social elites. The ability of capital to discipline labour is critical because, as Simon Clarke has noted, as capitalism restructures itself, the conditions for the renewed production of surplus value is set by dominating and restructuring labour power and means of production, rather than by stimulating consumption.

For Robinson the mechanisms through which transnational capital is hatched out of national capitals in the global North is a central theme of globalisation. He sees a corollary in the capture by transnational elites of the state apparatus for control in the global North and the attempt to do so in the global South. He then argues in a discussion paper that in understanding the mechanics of capitalism in its neoliberal stage, and in shaping responses to it, it is critical to analyse how globalisation is “a qualitatively new transnational stage in the on-going evolution of world capitalism”. This echoes Ellen Meiksins Wood’s argument that

we’re living in a moment when, for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system…. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic – the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximisation, competition – has penetrated almost every aspect of human life and nature itself.

Here capital needs other economic systems, including public sector spaces, as soil and medium for accumulation, with new roles for nation states under the logic of competition, in policing order and law, and in setting a clear economic direction.

II: defining a new epoch

For Robinson, globalisation as a new epoch in the history of capitalism is made up of four key strands. These strands need to be applied to specific contexts, like the terrain of higher education and the impact of technology on it, in order that a meaningful critique can be generated.

  1. The first strand is the rise of truly transnational capital, pivoting around an integrated global production and financial system. Thus, we witness the growth of transnational, educational corporations like Pearson, and the involvement of the investment banking arms of Goldman Sachs, or of consultants like McKinsey, or of outsourcing corporations like Capita, in opening-up education, and the use of technologically-driven services to commoditise the space further. Through these integrated systems, education providers are tied into networks of defence, security, finance and policing activity, and processes of outsourcing and change management that are driven by the need to extract surplus value.
  2. The second strand is the coalescence of a new class group which Robinson describes as “the hegemonic fraction at a world level of global class structure”. This transnational capitalist class is grounded in global markets and circuits of accumulation. This differentiates it from the hegemonic fraction of the previous epoch of capitalism, which focused upon national markets and circuits of capital. Inside higher education we witness a cadre of public administrators, for example in the UK Department for Education, actively courting and working with global corporations and management consultants to implement social education policy.
  3. The third strand is the rise of “a transnational state apparatus”, which forms a loose coalition of institutions which is comprised of all super-national, transnational and international institutions, for example the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the North American Free Trade Association and so on. In those nation-states that are in crisis, like Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland, the structures of the nation state are being transnationalised so that they relate to and underpin an emerging transnational structure. Education cannot escape this locus of control.
  4. The fourth strand is the appearance of “new forms of global inequality that cut across the old north-south and nation state lines that group new types of transnational social inequality”. In this, technologies are being used to help reconfigure institutions and capitalist relations of production, in order to generate new configurations of global power that operate transnationally, and access to technologies reinforces these systemic inequalities.

As Robinson argues, “[w]e need to understand these things”, if we are to analyse how our work inside the University is co-opted for the extraction of value by transnational elites, which operate inside-and-against national politico-jurisdictional boundaries through networks of corporations, think tanks, administrative institutions, private equity firms etc.. Simply thinking in terms of learner’s rights, or personalisation, or digital literacy, or critical pedagogy is meaningless without situating that [whatever] in the context of globalised capitalist relations of production.

This process of understanding might take our use of technology inside the University and relate it to the offensive undertaken by capital in its post-Fordist, neoliberal phase, where it breaks free of nation state constraints on accumulation, and especially the relationship between capital and labour that generated a social welfare and social democratic model of the second-half of the Twentieth Century. This model included the idea of the University as a public good, or as a publically/charitably-funded, governed and regulated good, which could respond to local or national need. However, it restricted the ability of capital to drive the rate of accumulation and profit at an appropriate level, and as such capital sought to restructure global production and consumption processes, in-part through technological innovation. As George Lambie has noted:

It is important to understand that it is not so much the geographical distribution of labour that is the problem for workers, but the global restructuring of the relationship between capital and labour… Labour is [now] a factor of production that, like all others, must be utilised in a manner that maximises profits.

Thus, we see a global break with the need to be responsive to any social democratic framework, in the face of a new, transnational model of accumulation that is dominated by finance capital.

Robinson argues that this new model has four critical outcomes.

First, “new capital-labor relations… based on a cheapening of labor, on the notion of flexible labor or deregulated and de-unionized labor, becomes now the general, worldwide model.” Thus, we witness hyper-exploitation inside factories in the global South that support the economies of the global North, alongside the disciplining of technologised and service-sector labour in the global North through threatened outsourcing or the commodification and leverage of core or developmental skills. Lambie has argued that:

If the post-war Keynesian consensus produced the Fordist worker, globalisation has resulted in a ‘Walmart-isation’ of labour, typified by part-time, non-unionised, depoliticised, disempowered and quiescent employees with few benefits, rights or opportunities to influence the conditions dictated by capital.

At issue here is the extent to which higher education in the global North underpins that on-going commodification process, either in new forms as it promotes innovations around personalisation and accreditation, like badges, digital literacy etc., or through its standard structures carried in distance learning, internationalisation strategies etc.. One might ask how such practices form a means of further restructuring a flexible, globalised regime of labour relations.

Second, there is “a dramatic round of extensive and intensive expansion of capitalism itself”, so that there is no outside of the system of value-extraction, enclosure and accumulation. This includes states that held out against full integration in the circuits of capital, like China, and pressure on revolutionary states such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Angola. Thus, we see the current vogue for universities in the global North to commodity-dump cheap educational products through MOOCs or distance learning, or to extract high-level skills through internationalisation strategies, or to enable capital to reproduce its structures through educational “outreach” in the global South. A recent Bain Consulting report on A world awash with money noted:

By using distance-learning technologies to “export” higher education, leading universities in the advanced economies can accelerate the training of the home-grown specialists the emerging-market economies will need. And by “importing” the talent of engineers, managers, physicians and other highly skilled professionals from companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging markets will not need to wait a generation before their own education systems can produce the skilled workforce they require.

However, we also see the intensive expansion of capitalism through aggressive privatisation of the previously public spheres like education. This also means that we are increasingly witnessing the conversion of the cognitive capital produced inside the University, like the human genome or services based on learning analytics or drone research, into accumulation and the commodity-form, driven by intellectual property rights. Thus, the University is used to enable the geographic spread of transnational capitalism, but it also enables capital’s circuits to be deepened through the commodification of intellectual life inside new terrains.

Third, a global legal and regulatory structure is created in order to facilitate the emerging global circuits of accumulation. Thus, not only does the World Trade Organization catalyse multilateral, bilateral, and global free trade agreements, but the IMF and the World Bank are recast in order to underwrite and catalyse structural adjustment on a global stage. This is critical because under austerity policies, the global market has a declining ability to absorb global economic output, which then stresses the system through under-consumption/over-accumulation. With no massive public works and limited focus on war as a means for the State to absorb surplus value, we witness a focus on redistributing wealth through quantitative easing and privatisation from the poor to the wealthy. One might also view the underwriting of student loans as a new, derivative-driven bubble, the role of universities in on-line strategies that include MOOCs, and the engagement of private providers in the global educational space, as mechanisms for meeting the production/consumption gap in output.

Fourth is the “neo-liberal structural adjustment programs which seek to create the conditions for the free operations of the emerging transnational capital across borders and within each country, so that capital, particularly emerging transnational capital, is unhindered by both state borders and by regulations within states.” As I argue elsewhere

Beyond their capitalisation by transnational networks to attempt either the restructuring of the University or the release of the surplus intellectual value contained inside it for entrepreneurialism, technological innovations are also aimed at maintaining an increase in the rate of profit. Hence the role of transnational educational corporations like Pearson, or of transantional finance capital, like Goldman Sachs, in the privatisation of higher education, with technology as a crack in that idea that the University might be publically-financed, governed and regulated.

Thus, in the range of global educational initiatives, that encompass MOOCs, global digital literacy, cloud-based innovations and outsourcing, internationalisation strategies, data mining, mobile learning etc., the key is to understand how technology-driven innovations relate to the globally-hegemonic fraction of transnational, finance capital. This is critical because these innovations are not outside the circuits or cycles of globally mobile capital. Thus, these innovations further reduce the technical constraints or barriers to the reproduction of capital and its valorisation/accumulation processes, just as they revolutionise the transportation, interaction, production and consumption of individuals with (intellectual or cognitive) commodities/products.

III: a new epoch as crisis

These outcomes are clearly linked to the on-going crisis of capitalism in its neoliberal phase, and are connected to over-production and the falling rate of profit, which in-turn catalyses a desperate rush for new markets. Simon Clarke has argued that over-production occurs because capital drives beyond its natural limits, leading to a crisis of disproportionality in the production process made worse by credit bubbles and commerce, so that it becomes a general crisis of overproduction. Thus, the greater the mass of surplus value to be released as commodities, the more frantic is the search for new markets, and the more vulnerable is accumulation to disruption when it confronts the limits of profitability, for instance in falling demand. We might also witness this in the production/consumption of higher education as credit-fuelled study and in the recalibration of universities as businesses that underwrite a Government’s Industrial Strategy. This in-turn risks a crisis of disproportionality/profits in the circuits of educational provision.

In these processes of transnational valorisation/accumulation, Robinson argues that:

the network nature and structure of the global economy, organized as subcontracting and outsourcing chains which are quite endless, which cross national borders and so forth and also as a network structure in the sense that a network is where a segment can attach to a network, and by that attachment, it is connected to all kinds of other elements and other forms of organizations it would not be networked to literally and then it can detach and reattach itself to other networks. It’s more like a global spider web, except again that you have power being centralized, exercised through decentralized networks but concentrated.

This is again important in assessing both the role of the University in structuring those networks, but also in revealing how technologies are used to amplify the mechanisms through which the University can be further enmeshed in the circuits of capital. A corollary of this is seen in the recalibration of the relationships between academic management and academic labour through financialisation, debt and indentured study, the idea of student-as-global-consumer, and the use of technology to discipline working practices. It is impossible to assess this process properly without thinking through the relationships between the University and transnational finance capital, and the idea that the University is being increasingly subjected to pressure for structural adjustment. This, in turn, includes the ways in which what Robinson calls “the transnational state” sets primary and secondary policy that creates the conditions for globalised capital accumulation. In the UK this includes the Coalition’s restructuring of secondary education curricula, the momentum for performance management of teachers, the removal of VAT exemption for shared services, raising the cap on student fees, using student number controls and core/marginal provision to drive change, and co-hosting educational technology symposia with corporations like Goldman Sachs.

Thus, the State is now a key instrument of the global capitalist system in creating an environment in which capital can reproduce itself and in widening and deepening the interests of global capital over national capital and national labour forces or the unemployed. Education and the place of the University has to be seen in light of this globalised social polarisation and social reproduction, and the increasing levels of global inequality that follow in its wake, which includes falling living standards and the extension of precarious working and living conditions in the face of austerity in the global North. As Robinson cautions us

[This is]not a crisis for the capitalist system unless those that are starving to death or those that don’t quite know how they will be able to survive actually resist those conditions… If half or two-thirds of humanity just quietly starved to death, there wouldn’t be a crisis of the system, only for those people starving. But since they are resisting, it is a systemic crisis.

Thus, Robinson notes that we increasingly face “a crisis of legitimacy in the sense that states are facing legitimization crises everywhere–that’s the famous crisis of governability.” The view that market mechanisms are the sole arbiter of social relationships and that efficiency in the name of the accumulation of capital are our only ways of constructing a meaningful life-world, is increasingly under attack. Witness the students in Occupation at Sussex University stating that:

Perhaps most importantly the decision to bring private providers into the education sector reflects a larger ideological push by this and previous governments to marketise education as a consumer good. For management at Sussex this is certainly a continuation of departmental teaching and university-wide job cuts over the past 5 years under the guise of “deficit-cutting”. We stand firmly against the segregation of our campuses along producer/consumer lines and reject this false dichotomy. Moreover, we reject the way in which outsourcing further segregates different members of the campus community, whose job statuses, though necessarily complementary in practice, become suddenly dissociated financially and institutionally, leading to a complete breakdown of the social cohesion intrinsic to any healthy and normally functioning organisation. We wholly reject the undemocratic and unaccountable structures and procedures which this management has procured in order to force its agenda on members of the Sussex campus community. We reassert that Education is a public good that is and should remain free of perverse market incentives in every aspect of its provision.

IV: capital’s response to the crisis and Robinson’s Nine Theses

It is useful to state Robinson’s Nine Theses, as an analytical tool for framing what might be done to resist transnational capital.

First, the essence of the process is the replacement for the first time in the history of the modern world system, of all residual pre (or non) –capitalist production relations with capitalist ones in every part of the globe.

Second, a new ‘social structure of accumulation’ is emerging which, for the first time in History, is global.

Third, this transnational agenda has germinated in every country of the world under the guidance of hegemonic fractions of national bourgeoisies.

Fourth, observers search for a new global hegemon and posit a tri-polar world of European, American, and Asian economic blocs. But the old nation-state phase of capitalism has been superseded by the transnational phase of capitalism.

Fifth, the ‘brave new world’ of global capitalism is profoundly anti-democratic.

Sixth, ‘poverty amidst plenty’, the dramatic growth under globalisation of socioeconomic inequalities and of human misery, a consequence of the unbridled operation of transnational capital, is worldwide and generalised.

Seventh, there are deep and interwoven gender, ethnic and racial dimensions to this escalating global poverty and inequality.

Eighth, there are deep contradictions in emergent world society that make uncertain the very survival of our species – much less mid- to long-tem stabilisation and viability of global capitalism – and portend prolonged global social conflict.

Ninth, stated in highly simplified terms, much of the left world-wide is split between two camps.

Thus, the globalised terrain upon which universities now exist as competing capitals, forces them to:

  • become efficient in service-provision, for example through outsourcing, privatisation or cloud-based services;
  • respond to indentured/debt-fuelled student life and expectations, linked to personalisation, employability, bring your own device;
  • compete internationally either through traditional mechanisms like overseas campus provision, or through virtual, technocratic innovation;
  • drive mobility and flexibility as a means of leveraging surplus value from employees;
  • engage with high-risk, financialised growth strategies, for example medium/high yield bonds;
  • connect to the research and development imperatives of globalised capital for securing new terrains for accumulation, including data mining and learning analytics, or drone-based/makerspace-type research;
  • drive the reskilling of global labour as a commodified workforce through employability strategies that are underwritten by concepts like badges and digital literacy; and
  • connect to the politico-jurisdictional imperatives of globalised capital by suppressing academic dissent, or investing in security/policing functions.

This is important because as Robinson’s analysis enables us to see, the University is enclosed by the realities of transnational capital, through which we witness the complete commodification of social life based around segmented structures and hierarchies. Here, the relations of the capitalist economy structure all spheres of life, and a set of mutually-reinforcing social, economic and political institutions and cultural and ideological norms fuse with and facilitate a new period of capitalist accumulation. The cultural/ideological component here is set in-part through education and technology, and is based upon consumerism and cut-throat individualism rather than collective well-being. Through the focus on mobility, flexibility and employability, and the recalibration of student life through debt, collective action is confronted and marginalised by a focus on personal aspiration. As a result, the University becomes a node in a global productive structure with a concentration of services, knowledge, finance and technology in the global North and of productive labour in the global South. As Robinson notes, “The dominant global culture penetrates, perverts and reshapes cultural institutions, group identities and mass consciousness.”

As I noted elsewhere in discussing academic exodus, pace John Holloway, the ideological, political drive towards, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing means that the University has little room for manoeuvre in resisting the enclosing logic of competition and in arguing for a socialised role for higher education. This means that the internal logic of the University is prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships:

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

Thus, we need to see the University as a business recalibrated inside the structural power of fully mobile transnational capital. This is disciplinary and based upon dense networks of supranational institutions and relationships, alongside the co-option of national jurisdictions for: fiscal and monetary policies that enable macro-economic stability; creating an infrastructure for global economic activity; and social control. For Robinson, capital needs state power rather than the nation state, which acting as the neoliberal state becomes an agent for wringing concessions from global labour.

V: what is to be done?

Critiquing the role of transnational corporations in controlling assets and trade, and in driving speculation and speculative bubbles that threaten livelihoods and lives, is critical in understanding how economic power drives political action. Witness this report from Bain Consulting on A world awash in money. 

As fluid as the movement of capital has become thanks to information technology and high-speed communications, the barriers that impede its flow to and among the capital-hungry developing markets will remain formidable. Investors will continue to favor the advanced markets, which are well endowed with the “trust architecture”—strong property rights protections, reliable legal systems and institutional depth—that owners of capital value.

Under the conditions outlined above the content of university life is driven by the realities of globalisation that form a socio-cultural space that reinforces disempowerment, in spite of rhetoric about learner’s rights, social justice or mobility, or economic equality. What is worse is that the University risks becoming a node in the permanent structural violence that is visited against the majority of the world’s poor, ostensibly in the global South. Internationalisation strategies, MOOCs, intellectual property and patent law, structural adjustment, exporting mobile learning, all become circuits through which capital is accumulated from the South. This is continually restructured through corporate management, the store of capital in spaces that service tax havens for the North, and the location of centres of technology and finance in the North. However, the threat of a new international division of labour is also realised as the immiseration of the middle classes in the North as they are indentured or threatened with outsourcing, and as their futures are asset-stripped and accumulated by transnational elites.

Robinson argues that the left has two responses. These are: first, the neo-Keynesian approach that seeks rapprochement with capital, based on social democracy and redistributive justice, in order to make it work ethically; second, those who see capitalism as inherently wicked and to be rejected/resisted without working through a coherent socialist alternative to the transnational phase of capitalism. In developing a set of possible alternatives that move beyond these positions, he argues that:

we should harbour no illusions that global capitalism can be tamed or democritised. This does not mean that we should not struggle for reform within capitalism, but that all such struggle should be encapsulated in a broader strategy and programme for revolution against capitalism. Globalisation places enormous constraints on popular struggles and social change in any one country or region. The most urgent task is to develop solutions to the plight of humanity under a savage capitalism liberated from the constraints that could earlier be imposed on it through the nation state. An alternative to global capitalism must therefore be a transnational popular project… The popular mass of humanity must develop a transnational class consciousness and a concomitant political protagonism and strategies that link the local to the national and the national to the global.

Thus, it is possible to see cracks in the contradictions of global capitalism, and to develop popular alternatives, like the range of social centres, or co-operative alternatives, or occupations that form oppositional moments to specific issues, but these need viable socio-economic alternatives to sustain them. This is a form of Gramscian mass intellectuality, whereby counter-hegemonic positions are developed and nurtured through solidarity actions. These counter-hegemonic positions need to be grounded in a political economy that reflects a socialised, rather than privatised globalisation; a globalisation from below that both demands global solidarity actions and is based on participatory practices, like general assemblies or associational democracy.

Robinson offers the possibility that alternatives might include: “some type of global Keynesianism, a global redistributive project, a global reform capitalism”; “global fascism” as a reactionary political project focused on coercion, and the militarisation and the masculinisation of popular culture and of social relations; or “a global collapse of civilization, a degeneration of civilization. And again, we’ve seen such outcomes throughout history when no social force can stabilize a particular system, when a civilization cannot resolve its internal contradictions”. More hopefully, he argues for “a global 21st century socialism” infused democratically, with examples that emerge from the co-operative movement in South America, in Venezuela and Cuba.

Critical in the development of a viable alternative is Robinson’s idea that “we always make our own collective history and so the future is never predetermined.” Thus, Ellen Meiksins Wood states:

We really can begin to look the world not as a relationship between what’s inside and what’s outside capitalism, but as the working out of capitalism’s own internal laws of motion. And that might make it easier to see the universalization of capitalism not just as a measure of success but as a source of weakness… It can only universalize its contradictions, its polarizations between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Its successes are also its failures.’

Crucially then, there is a role for those who labour inside the University in revealing the systemic nature of globalised capital in co-opting all of human existence for profit-maximisation, growth strategies, and accumulation. Moreover, there is an imperative for connecting critique to the mechanisms through which capitalism in its neoliberal phase increasingly consumes and destroys humanity and nature. As Lambie argues, revealing these mechanisms highlights how the family, community and workplace are eroded, and how social welfare is damaged, leading to precarious or vulnerable futures. Thus, the connection of academic critique to the mechanisms through which austerity reproduces and extends the power of transnational elites may reveal the true class position of global labour, including those who regard themselves as the educated middle class. In this, the development of solidarity actions grounded in mass intellectuality is critical.

From inside the University, those solidarity actions might be focused upon developing critiques of the following.

  1. The global processes of labour arbitrage, whereby technology is used to deskill and discipline global labour, including inside the academy. This stands against the ideal of many educators for the democratic agendas of digital literacy or learner’s rights.
  2. How transnational capital uses the global processes of competition and free trade agreements to discipline transnational labour, through the use of cloud technologies and outsourced services, through workplace monitoring, and increasingly friable labour conditions.
  3. How globalised, neoliberal cultural norms emerge from the objective conditions of capitalist work, and the everyday reality of those objective conditions for those who work in the global South and whose work in the global North is proletarianised. This includes the ways in which universities reinforce those objective conditions and act as institutions of the state in underpinning the agency of transnational finance capital, like investment banks, management consultancies, technology firms, private equity etc..
  4. How universities focus their research and development on social need that is defined locally rather than amplifying global transnational value extraction.
  5. Shining a light on models of accumulation that are riven with new forms of imperialism, and capital flows from the global South to the securitised, debt-driven global North.
  6. Developing mechanisms for understanding how the tensions that are revealed in the high levels of debt-to-GDP on both national and global scales might be resolved, or how alternative value forms and social relationships beyond a currency that is underpinned by oil might be developed.

Key is describing and deliberating the relationships between the University and specific social forces that might be used to catalyse a new political consciousness. At issue is how the University and academic labour might resist co-option on a global scale, in order to support those social forces that might fight for a different form of valorisation and for policies that are based on social need as the central development strategy of the State.


Making the Cloud work for you: institutional risk and governance


Posted by hallymk1

On Thursday I am presenting at BETT13 on “Making the Cloud work for you”, with a subtitle of “institutional risk and governance”.

My presentation is here: http://slidesha.re/11OHwoK

These are my notes for those slides, which are a mix of a case study of learning and teaching a De Montfort University and an approach to personal/institutional risk.

SLIDE 3: thinking about the pedagogic development of cloud-based technologies has amplified issues around the following [risks].

  1. How does the use of cloud-based technologies affect how an institution maintains a level of curriculum control or control of curriculum change-management processes? Control might be required for quality assurance, curriculum transparency or accountability. Where academic autonomy and the use of technologies in the curriculum is devolved, how do cloud-based technologies affect ad hoc curriculum design/delivery, as opposed to strategic control. How do staff digital/technical literacies affect this approach? What are the implications where staff are operating beyond a hosted/in-house LMS?
  2. How do institutions support/nurture in-house skills development? Do they focus on what is of quality or is distinctive or is interesting, and then outsource or migrate that which is deemed boring (depending on risks to data etc.)?
  3. How do institutions analyse and prepare for elasticity of demand and new service-provision, where technologies or techniques are in the cloud? How d they focus on developing technologies that will enable emerging and future web applications?

SLIDE 4: this is DMU’s Core/Arranged/Recommended/Recognised technology model. This is defined as follows:

Core: integrated corporate systems, including the Blackboard VLE, the staff/student portal, library management systems, MS Lync, streaming media (the DMU video server), dropbox facilities like Zend, and the DMU Commons (our.dmu), are available to students/staff to use with the devices and services of their choosing, and extended through tools that the institution arranges, recommends or recognises.

Arranged: accounts are created on key plug-ins or extensions beyond the core, like plagiarism detection tools (Turnitin), external blogs and wikis, like Campus Pack, and synchronous classrooms (WizIQ, WebEx).

Recommended: recommendations are made with supporting training materials, for connecting key, web-based tools into the core/arranged mix. This might include using RSS to bring in content from Twitter, SlideShare, iTunes or YouTube, or supporting SKYPE.

Recognised: the institution is aware that students and staff are experimenting with other technologies and maintains a horizon-scanning brief, until and unless a critical mass of users require the recommendation of specific tools.

SLIDES 6-11: whether or not one buys into the critiques of how neoliberal policy is opening-up higher education, it is clear that HE is seen as a marketised space into which services can be sold. Lipman defined this as a $2.5 trillion market in education that is restructuring the reality of education and training. This has ramifications for those who work in institutions that are, at least in-part, publically/charitably-funded, governed and regulated. How value is defined in that restructured space, beyond the rule of money, needs to be assessed, including which services will be outsourced to the cloud and why. This is more important because, as Macquarie Capital Equities Research House argues, the market for cloud-based solutions is growing and becoming more aggressively competitive. Witness Google’s Knowledge Graph and the application of big data/semantic web to web-based service development. The rate of profit is critical here in how it affects the restructuring of businesses that operate “the cloud” and which will be looking for new markets, and for those universities which are being recalibrated through HE policy as businesses and which need to extract value from their operations. UK Government policy, the pronouncements of UK Vice-Chancellors like Malcolm Gilles, and reports from think-tanks like Educause create a cultural space inside civic society that helps to reframe educational policy around deterministic uses of technology.

SLIDE 12: Stakeholders inside universities might reflect on how technology is deployed inside hegemonic, fiscal “realities”. These include the following.

  • The drive for public-private partnerships, or private finance initiatives that drive efficiencies, value-for-money etc.. This underpins ideas of service re-engineering, outsourcing of services to lower-wage/cost spaces, and consultancy for new services. This is about disciplining labour and extracting surplus value from outsourced services.
  • The generation of discourses of efficiency/productivity that are rooted though analytics, big data, the reduced circulation time of information-based commodities, changes in production through outsourcing, and workload/workforce monitoring.
  • The legitimation of further innovation and R&D, through discourses of value-for-money, commercial efficiency, business process re-engineering (c.f. European Vision 2020; HEFCE 2012).
  • The need to maintain technological innovation, in order to stay one step ahead of competitors. This connects to Marx’s idea of the moral depreciation of technologies/machines, and the need for constant innovation/value-creation.

Each of these pressures act on universities, and catalyse the need to consider cloud-based migration.

SLIDES 14-17: the second big risk is to users and institutions of placing data in the Cloud, especially where that data is stored on services hosted by a corporation based in the USA, or where hardware is physically located in the USA. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology have both raised concerns over the Justice Department’s use of courts in the USA to subpoena access to data that has left a user’s device and is stored in “the cloud”.

SLIDE 18: universities might wish to consider the following cases, which affect the storage of corporate assets (research data, personal information, communications, assessments and evaluations etc.) in the cloud.

  • Twitter: the EFF/American Civil Liberties Union reported on the U.S. Department of Justice’s subpoena to Twitter for Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir’s tweets regarding Wikileaks. The Salon reported:

The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the “means and source of payment,” including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present.

  • LinkedIn: opens-up attempts to crack a service, and to enable hackers to aggregate data for future cracking of other services, for instance by confirming guesses about passwords. This enables the comparison of hacked data against pre-computed versions and broadens “guessable” data. How does this affect the recommended technologies that staff/students use? In June 2012, ComputerWorld noted:

More than 60% of the unique hashed passwords that were accessed by hackers from a LinkedIn password database and posted online this week have already been cracked, according to security firm Sophos.

  • Facebook, Google and Twitter: there is now an obligation to identify “trolls”, and internet companies will have to surrender the details of those posting libellous messages. How does this affect staff and student professional development/identities?
  • Leveson: Jeremy Hunt’s private Gmail account, which was used to conduct official business was subject to Freedom of Information, according to the Information Commissioner.

This raises issues of: cloud-based service availability and resilience; confidentiality/privacy and personal/institutional data; copyright/copyleft/content distribution; data security/back-ups control/deletion.

SLIDES 19 and 20 demonstrate how important it is to protect critical assets or data from providers and to think about service resilience, even when dealing with a behemoth like Amazon Web Services which has suffered outages.

SLIDE 21: demonstrates just how ubiquitous cloud services are, and how deeply interconnected they are to broader geographies of transnational finance capital and corporate governance. Thinking through what transnational corporate governance means for your institutional data/services/technologies is critical.

SLIDES 22-23: some final governance issues for institutions and their staff.

  • Risk-management operates at a range of scales: does it matter if someone accesses your stuff? [c.f. Dropbox; subject to FoI] If so, canyou build Chinese walls or local alternatives?
  • What about corporate governance, including access to services that are marketised? [e.g. the recent Google-Verizon issue, which flagged the possibility of a two-speed internet, especially for multimedia distribution/consumption. See also the potential costs of accessing data in a marketised HE space.]
  • Does it matter if the academic who is responsible for the curriculum/assessment that is managed in the Cloud, in non-institutional services gets hit by a bus? [What should be managed in-house or hosted via a contract?]
  • Do we understand that data is being transferred into a service and that we have responsibilities? [T&Cs; Intellectual Property; protected characteristics; indemnities for libel].
  • How do we work-up the digital literacies of our staff/students in these spaces?

On the structural adjustment of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

I

I’ve been trying to develop an argument that the development of innovations like MOOCs, learning analytics, personal learning networks etc. are a form of structural adjustment of higher education. In previous posts I have argued that MOOCs and other specific technologically-driven innovations need to be critiqued in terms of their impact on the historic forms of the University and the idea of academic labour. Thus:

The political economic background against which the University’s mission and role is played out is one of indenture, collapsing real wages, unemployment and depression. It is against this background that the political economics of MOOCs might be addressed, as one form of the negation of the historic role of the University, and as a mechanism through which capital can extract rents (through access rights or accreditation) or release (social or human capital as) surplus value for the market. One important strand that emerges from any such analysis surrounds the meaning of academic labour and the role of academics as organic intellectuals.

Beyond their capitalisation by transnational networks to attempt either the restructuring of the University or the release of the surplus intellectual value contained inside it for entrepreneurialism, technological innovations are also aimed at maintaining an increase in the rate of profit. Hence the role of transnational educational corporations like Pearson, or of transantional finance capital, like Goldman Sachs, in the privatisation of higher education, with technology as a crack in that idea that the University might be publically-financed, governed and regulated.

Structural adjustment across the globe has taken very specific forms, promoted by transnational organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There has been some pushing back against the imposition of structural adjustment, for example in Malawi where subsidies for grain fertilizers were re-introduced in 2005 to alleviate famine in the face of global pressures.

The important lesson for policy-makers in other African countries, which continue to battle with chronic hunger and food insecurity, from the Malawi turnaround, is the fact that it has been triggered solely by a government policy intervention- a reintroduction of deep fertilizer subsidies as part of the 2005 Fertilizer Subsidy Policy. This policy was implemented at the cost of inviting the wrath of the donor community, particularly the IMF, World Bank and the USAID.

However, the story of structural adjustments ties into Naomi Klein’s precepts that underpin the shock doctrine and the impact of austerity politics.

  • The relentless law of competition and coercion [the rush to internationalise].
  • The impact of crisis to justify a tightening and a quickening of the dominant ideology [student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity].
  • The transfer of state/public assets to the private sector under the belief that it will produce a more efficient [smaller, less regulatory] government and improve economic outputs [outsourcing; service-driven innovation].
  • Lock-down of state subsidies for “inefficient” work [Arts and Humanities subjects].
  • The privatisation of state enterprises in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability [creating a political and socio-cultural space that encourages the privatisation of HE].
  • A refusal to run deficits [pejorative cuts to state services].
  • Extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt [increased fees; the use of bonds].
  • Controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology.

This focus on structural adjustment and shock is important in the unfolding crisis of higher education, and it relates directly to MOOCs/technological innovation and change, precisely because we are witnessing the policy space being recalibrated to marginalise the idea of the University as a public good. Within UK HE, the move by the last Labour administration to place higher education within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and their introduction of a fee regime, the Browne Report and the Coalition Government’s subsequent response to it, have turned the global economic crisis into a means to quicken the privatisation of the state, and to attempt the strangulation of possibilities to energise transformative, co-operative relations. This places previously socialised goods like healthcare and higher education in the vanguard of austerity-driven shock, which designs “to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy”. The extraction of value, or the state-subsidized privatisation of higher education (in Christopher Newfield’s terms) is what follows.

II

This line of thinking is important because of two recent statements that further shape the policy/practice space of higher education. The first is the latest statement released by Moody’s, the credit rating agency, about higher education, and the second is the funding letter from DBIS to the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Each of these documents is critical in recalibrating the ways in which we are allowed to think about higher education and what higher education is for.

Inside Higher Education reports that:

Moody’s analysts caution that revenue streams will never flow as robustly as they did before 2008. The change will require a fundamental shift in how colleges and universities operate, they say, one that will require more strategic thinking. “The U.S. higher education sector had hit a critical juncture in the evolution of its business model,” wrote Eva Bogarty, the report’s author. “Most universities will have to lower their cost structures to achieve long-term financial sustainability and to fund future initiatives.”

Moreover:

The report notes that colleges will have to rely on more strategic leaders who address these challenges through better use of technology to cut costs, create efficiency in their operations, demonstrate value, reach new markets, and prioritize programs. Many of those efforts could be grounds for disputes with faculty members or other institutional constituents unless leaders can get the collective buy-in that has long been the staple of higher education governance.

Thus, in terms of the mechanisms through which profit might be generated, in particular given the attrition on enrolment being reported in global North due to rising costs (see this report on families being priced out in the USA and hand-wringing over falling admissions in particular in the Russell Group universities in the UK):

The ratings agency argues that they are an opportunity for market leaders — those institutions that already have diverse revenue streams and brand recognition — to further improve their position. Such institutions could find ways to monetize MOOCs by potentially granting credit for a fee, licensing their courses to other institutions and advertising. Moody’s also notes the possibility of technology to increase faculty productivity by increasing the number of students one faculty member can serve, potentially creating efficiencies in the long term.

Whilst Moody’s is reflecting on HE in the USA, it has clear ramifications for UK HE, as institutions are seeking credit ratings for bond issues, and because transnational organisations like credit ratings agencies are integral to the geographies of neoliberalism that underpin transnational activist networks (TANs) that are in-turn adjusting the space inside which the University operates. Thus there is a space being opened up by the inter-relationships between ratings agencies like Moody’s, global finance capital, like Goldman Sachs, global private education providers like Pearson and Blackboard Inc., think-tanks like Pearson Education, and policy makers or administrators.

Whilst the report highlights the impact and risk profiles of both the growing issues of a student debt bubble and ensuring that the degrees awarded are of sufficient quality, a third issue is developed in the report and that is labour relations. Structural adjustment demands a restructuring of labour costs and practices, as is witnessed by the Troika’s actions in Greece. This is also hinted at in the Moody’s report which Inside Higher Education notes:

The report notes that any efforts to prioritize programs will likely run into opposition from various campus stakeholders. The governance model of universities vests varying authority in boards, managers, and faculty members. Even when faculty members are cut out of decision-making, the institution of tenure gives them leverage.

At issue then is the role of organised labour in the University sector, and its ability to push back against the restructuring of individual institutions or the sector as a public good. This is more important in the UK given the DBIS letter to HEFCE about funding. The letter highlights:

  • the pace of change through the clear link between HEFCE and ensuring that the Coalition’s “reforms are delivered in a timely and efficient way” [para 5];
  • the focus on competition through enabling alternative providers to enter the emergent HE market [para 6];
  • the focus on generating a culture of philanthropy or what has been called “philanthrocapitalism” [para 7];
  • the co-option of organisations like the Higher Education Academy, which have a vision to support the student experience, teaching excellence and innovation, to the service of the Government’s readjustment strategy and entrepreneurial/industrial agenda [para 11];
  • the imperative to develop information and learning/institutional analytics as a central disciplinary tool for managing higher education agendas [para 14];
  • the generation of universities as sites of service-driven change and marketisation [para 15];
  • the co-option of publically-funded “university research infrastructure”, in order to underpin “strategic research partnerships between universities, businesses and charities” that enables economic growth through state-subsidised privatisation [para 16];
  • the use of science and research by “selectively funding on the basis of only internationally excellent research,” to drive further competition between universities [para 18];
  • the explicit shackling of HE to the Coalition’s industrial strategy, so that the idea of the university is driven by economic growth [para 20];
  • the use of the term “legitimate students” playing into an agenda that continues to demonise “the other” inside and across UK society [para 21];
  • the use of a risk-based approach to HE, which Andrew Haldane has critiqued for its lack of respect for non-linearities and its inability to model contagion [para 23];
  • the use of financial incentives to model social mobility as a disciplinary function [para 25]
  • the imperative to seek efficiencies through outsourcing [para 26];
  • the demand that the pay and conditions of academic labour are managed with “restraint” [para 26];
  • the use of core and margin student numbers as a policy lever, now through custom and usage rather than primary policy the everyday reality of higher education, that creates the objective conditions for a competitive market to be structured [paras 30-35].

Some University leaders, notably DMU’s VC, have reacted to this letter by outlining how it impacts the relationship between staff and students, with a focus on student charters, admissions policies, and the development of a “Darwinian approach to enrolment” that prefigures an increasingly competitive higher education policy. Quite how this Darwinian approach plays out in terms of: University missions and diversity; the idea of the university as a public good; the use of financial mechanisms like bonds; the impact of a differential approach to implementing fees; a new regulatory approach for cross-sector organisations like HEFCE and the QAA; and the relationships between management, unions, academic labour and students; needs more meaningful critique across the sector.

III

The pace of change demands that alternatives or spaces for critique and action are developed, in particular because those TANs are restructuring the idea and the reality of higher education. In terms of how innovations are presented inside civil society in terms of social mobility, or reducing the rights of academic labour, or in terms of economic efficiencies, or in terms of access and student rights, or more brutally in terms of socio-economics in terms of the rate of profit and addressing issues of under-consumption, a critical emergent issue is about the place now of organised academic labour inside the University, and the role of, for example, UNISON and UCU. In this I am reminded of Paul Mason’s argument after the March 26 2011 anti-cuts demonstration in London, when he argued that

The big takeaway from today is that the trade union movement – though dominated by the public sector – is certainly a force to be reckoned with: what it chooses to do now will be interesting because Miliband’s strategists certainly want nothing to do with the mass, co-ordinated strike movement advocated by Serwotka, Len McCluskey etc.

We tend to forget, because we obsess about political parties, that in organisational terms the unions are much bigger than the Labour Party itself. Indeed the Labour Party branch banners I saw were often carried by a few, oldish, colourfully dressed people, whereas unionists tended to be younger and very “branded” by their professions or unions, as with the Unison Filipino Nurses, the FBU etc.

Another note: we tend to think of the public sector unions as white collar or from the service industries but this was not true of today: there were many tens of thousands of manual workers in their bibs, hi-vis uniforms etc. I met binmen from Southhampton furious that they pay is being cut; and of course the Firefighters, designated “stewards” in order to deter the anarchists from coming anywhere near the demo.

In terms of higher education there are clearly issues of labour relations and solidarity within the sector between different unions, and across sectors that now matter. Thus, there is a second emergent issue, related to this issue of solidarity, namely the relationship between formal higher education and the academic labour located therein, and those alternative educational projects that still survive two or three years after they originally coalesced. These alternatives might be MOOCs, where they have not been co-opted for capital, rent, profit or restructuring, but more importantly they include ideas like the Social Science Centre in Lincoln or the Workers Education Association or adult education providers, or the educational spaces opened up by, for example, the transitions movement. How we connect across the range of spaces that exist so that they can co-exist, energised by organised academic labour in the face of structural adjustment is our emerging challenge.


On student debt, big data and academic alienation


Posted by hallymk1

 I

 Mike Neary, in a recent article on Teaching Politically, quotes the Joint Declaration of the Knowledge Liberation Front that emerged from a meeting in Paris in 2011. The Declaration points out the struggle against the financialisation and corporatisation of the University and of academic labour, and then points towards exodus from the restructuring of higher education that is taking place globally.

Since the state and private interests collaborate in the corporatisation process of the university, our struggles don’t have the aim of defending the status quo. Governments bail out banks and cut education. We want to make our own university. A university that lives in our experiences of autonomous education, alternative research and free schools. It is a free university, run by students, precarious workers and migrants, a university without borders.

This weekend we have shared and discussed our different languages and common practices of conflict: demonstrations, occupations and metropolitan strikes. We have created and improved our common claims: free access to the university against increasing fees and costs of education, new welfare and common rights against debt and the financialisation of our lives, and for an education based on co-operation against competition and hierarchies.

 In an earlier posting on exodus and the process of struggle I argued for “way(s) of re-framing the relationships between academics and the public in an age of crisis.” This seems more relevant after the publishing of FBI documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) relating to the Occupy movement. These documents bear analysis in the context of higher education for three reasons.

ONE. They reveal the Occupy movement being seen as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the FBI acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.

TWO. They link law enforcement, and governmental agencies to corporate strategy and demands, clearly articulating the kinds of geographies of neoliberalism that Stephen Ball has described in Global Education Inc., and which form hierarchies of power inside global capitalism. Thus, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF argued that “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

THIRD. They tie the University, academic labour and student-life clearly into this discourse. “Documents show the spying abuses of the FBI’s “Campus Liaison Program” in which the FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to “sixteen (16) different campus police officials,” and then “six (6) additional campus police officials.” Campus officials were in contact with the FBI for information on OWS. A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

One outcome of this process is that forms of protest against, for example, the marketisation of higher education need to be viewed in light of how they threaten global corporate identities and strategies for profit that are being opened-up by the State. In this, the mechanisms by which established hierarchies maintain their power through financialisation and information-sharing need to be described, and alternative positions developed.

II

Developing alternative narratives is critical because the hegemonic description of what higher education is for is being destabilised. In particular we are witnessing a polarisation of higher education around universities as competing capitals. Thus, in a recent Novara discussion on Finance, Financialisation and English Higher Education, Andrew McGettigan made a series of points that illuminate this argument.

ONE. The formal, higher education system will become increasingly polarised and stratified over time. This will then increasingly make higher education a positional good for individual students-as-entrepreneurs as a differential market develops, with certain HEI brands having more social capital for individual students as they compete in a job/wage market that is increasingly squeezed.

TWO. As the fee cap is lifted, the student debt loan book becomes increasingly important. The new polarity across the sector, with top-tier universities agitating for an unrestricted market, will have the most profound effect. In particular, as the data around the loan book develops this will impact fee structures as some universities will be able to articulate their present value (by demonstrating how students are able to repay outstanding loan balances) and their relationship to future graduate earnings. The £9,000 fee cap is important in securing the State’s overall liabilities but the use of data related to earnings and efficiencies in repayments will be stressed by certain universities to enable them to agitate for an exemption from a fee cap. The importance of this as a strategy can already be seen in the expansion of Russell Group (see the expansion of the Russell Group reported in the THE). Thus we have a diminishing sense of higher education as a publicly-funded, regulated and governed good, with it instead forming a space inside which universities become competing capitals inside a market.

THIRD. We are witnessing the secular transformation of universities into new kinds of corporation that are commercial and financial, rather than having charitable status that provides tuition or research. Where generating revenue is the fundamental corporate strategy, and as public funds dry up in face of private finance, at root the internal functions of the University are changed.

FOUR. Data around the state-backed student loan company/book becomes critical. Loans unlike grants generate information via HRMC. Pattern-matching that links UCAS tariffs to retention data to loans and loan repayments will enable actuarial tables to be produced that in-turn differentiate HEIs and courses and entry grades. This will form the performance metric par excellence because it will have a present and future pound sign attached. Such information means that Government can monitor the spend of public money and possibly remove access to the loan book for certain HEIs or courses. The use of data linked to profitability is therefore disciplinary. As the PCJF analysis of linked FBI files showed, federal agencies were functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America. There is reason, therefore, to suspect that data about student repayment and university performance will be shared across geographies-of-neoliberalism in the same way to discipline behaviour.

FIVE. These data are increasingly problematic because modelling on graduate salaries uses historic data, and we lack complete datasets. Modelling suggests that there is no uniform premium but a polarisation/hierarchy of graduate classes based on social capital accrued. Moreover, our basic assumptions about employability and wages are under threat, and predictability of repayments is a problem.

SIX. The involvement of global private finance is key to the expansion of the sector and the competitiveness of individual universities as competing capitals. Thus, we see Goldman Sachs and the Ontario Teachers Pension scheme lobbying for investment with universities in for-profit joint ventures in foreign markets, funded by bonds or equity. Investment is not for efficiencies in-country (e.g. the UK), but to take the established UK HE model abroad and to monetise degree-awarding powers.

Whether we like it or not private finance and the disciplinary nature of both the student loan book and big data are restructuring academic labour and the idea of the university as a public or socialised good. 

III

Zerohedge’s 75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe, focuses on what the author calls “bubble(s) of debt-fueled [sic.] false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce.” Just a handful of the 75 illuminate the argument made above that student debt is an insidious and inflationary attempt to use higher education reform to discipline our behaviours as consumers inside capitalism. They therefore demonstrate how education forms a single mechanism through which capital can continue to extract value from previously socialised goods. These numbers highlight the attrition of the myth of the growing middle class, empowered through a university education, that can maintain growth and accepted standards of living. They highlight the increasing immiseration of vast tranches of society in the face of debt.

17: According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.

18: The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago. 

19: 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

20: Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.

21: Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

37: Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

43: 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.

44: The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

56: Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.

We might also want to view Lisa Scherzer’s piece on student debt and the bubble that is affecting older generations who are taking on debt to support family member’s in college, escalating college tuition costs, poor job prospects, and a collapse in real wages. However, the role of big data in maintaining this process is also critical.

IV

I want to quote at length, Steve Lohr in the New York Times, writing about big data, precisely because it highlights how this corporatised technique becomes a mechanism for control. This is important for higher education because using data or information is likely to be used to discipline both universities who need to provide returns to private equity or bond markets, and to students with outstanding, individual tuition debts. Witness McGettigan’s point about the production of usable actuarial tables for repayments related to courses and HEIs. 

Lohr writes:

 These drumroll claims rest on the premise that data like Web-browsing trails, sensor signals, GPS tracking, and social network messages will open the door to measuring and monitoring people and machines as never before. And by setting clever computer algorithms loose on the data troves, you can predict behavior of all kinds: shopping, dating and voting, for example.

The results, according to technologists and business executives, will be a smarter world, with more efficient companies, better-served consumers and superior decisions guided by data and analysis.

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

Here we might wish to focus on Zerohedge’s analyses of Wall Street’s use of high frequency trading, and Karl Marx’s discussion, in Volume 2 of Capital, on Capital’s systemic need to reduce the circulation time of commodities. 

Lohr continues:

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

Models can create what data scientists call a behavioral loop. A person feeds in data, which is collected by an algorithm that then presents the user with choices, thus steering behavior.

We are thus returned to the use by the State and corporations of data to control and shape behaviour, including threats of protest and exodus.

V

Student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education. In a separate posting on Goldman Sachs and the privatisation of the University I drew attention to how Goldman Sachs’ investment banking arm works to develop Higher Education and Nonprofit Institutions teams, by working

with public and private universities and nonprofit issuers nationwide to structure and execute tailored debt capital markets financings. The firm has a dedicated group of credit specialists whose primary responsibility is to assist the investment banking team and issuers or clients in evaluating and achieving their rating potential. They take an active role on the credit analysis, rating strategy and investor sales process. In addition, with specialty expertise in areas such as athletics risk management, royalty monetization, public-private partnerships and online learning technology implementation, our experts can provide advice and financing solutions tailored to the needs of our issuers or clients.

As a result, the internal logic of the University is increasingly prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships as against fetishised products and processes of valorisation.

In the HEA research and policy seminar series reported in the Guardian, Roger Brown has argued that in analysing the impact of debt on the student experience:

We also need an agency that is independent of the government that will take responsibility for addressing these issues on a continuing basis, he added, and “that will be prepared to raise its head above the parapet when necessary, rather than simply being an agency of an agency of the government. We must have some credible, authoritative means of monitoring what happens to the quality of student learning as marketisation proceeds.

However, the risk is that such monitoring merely becomes another form of evidence-based practice that seeks to tweak the internal functioning of a system that is alienating.

This idea of alienation in the face of indentured service and financialisation is highlighted by Gajo Petrović’s essay on Marx’s Theory of alienation. “According to Marx, the essence of self-alienation is that man at the same time alienates something from himself and himself from something; that he alienates himself from himself.” This breaks down into four aspects or characteristics of alienation. The first is the alienation of the results of human labour (the objects produced by human labour constitute a separate world of objects which is alien to us, which dominates us, and which enslaves. The second is the alienation of production itself through alienated labour activity, because our own activity does not affirm but denies and subjugates us. Third, by alienating our own activity from ourselves, we alienate ourselves from our very essence as creative, practical beings. Crucially, Petrović argues that “Transforming his generic essence into a means for the maintenance of his individual existence, man alienates himself from his humanity, he ceases to be man.” Fourth, as an immediate consequence of the alienation of humans from themselves in the face of the market, individuals are alienated from each other. For Petrović “As the worker alienates the products of his labor, his own activity and his generic essence from himself, so he alienates another man as his master from himself. The producer himself produces the power of those who do not produce over production.” So we are left with an element of a totalising system inside which humans are alienated from their humanity.

Our standard refrain in the face of debt is to seek our research opportunities to monitor outcomes and impact, which are themselves alienating. As Neary argues, this is not enough:

In this new financialised world foreign providers can intervene in domestic markets undermining regulatory national frameworks, with devastating consequences for academic labour in terms of insecure employment, increasing precariousness, as well a contravening academic, ethical and value aspirations. The outcome is that academic culture is replaced by an enterprise business culture so that universities come more and more to resemble multinational corporations, with student compliance enforced by a pedagogy of debt.

Thus, what is needed is to understand how we might intensify “the processes of militant/co-research and self-education in praxis”. One way might be to understand how the geographies-of-neoliberalism described by the PCJF’s FBI documents, are allied to the interrelationships between both the techniques of big data and finacialised commodities of higher education, and how they contribute to our alienation from ourselves and each other (as potential entrepreneurial threat or terrorists or whatever). We might then need to ask whether, by describing and analysing the ways in which the State and corporations use such techniques to discipline academic labour and student behaviour and thereby increase alienation, alternatives might be developed.


For a critique of MOOCs/whatever and the restructuring of the University


Posted by hallymk1

I

In analyses of the circuits and cycles of capitalism, interpretations of crises underpin our individual and collective responses to them. In classical interpretations, overproduction/under-consumption or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall have dominated discussions of what might be done to move beyond crises. Critical here is recognising that the discourse of crisis is framed by how capital can overcome the barriers to the production and accumulation of surplus value. Typical mechanisms have been: the implementation of new technologies that revolutionise the production process; new working patterns that increase the productivity of labour; or the destruction of unproductive capitals or institutions, so that the surplus value that is tied up inside them can be released and further accumulated. Inside such analyses, the relationships between civil and political society and the mechanisms through which the battle of ideas can be waged is critical. It is here that the historic idea of the University, and the responses inside capitalism to declining profitability, might be developed.

In the UK we are witnessing the restructuring of higher education as one response to the financial crisis of 2008. Thus, the discourse is of individual student choice, new public management, value-for-money, impact etc.. The reality of this approach is that it tends to work towards individuation and the market as the touchstones of effective and efficient higher education. This then acts as one negation of the perceived historic role of the University. In reflecting on the aspirational and social democratic role of the University post-the 1963 Robbins Review, John Holmwood has recently argued for the university’s “wider social and political value in contributing to culture and an inclusive democracy”. Martin Weller has also argued for the incremental and developmental change emerging inside education, rather than buying into a (generally techno-determinist) view that education is broken.

Such public, developmental arguments for the University and the institutions of education, sit uneasily against the market mechanisms now being foist upon higher education, from consumerisation and student fees, to pay-to-publish, to impact metrics and research excellence frameworks. Each of these mechanisms negates the perceived public, democratic role of the university in the face of the discipline of the market. This is important because, as Karl Polyani argued, “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment… would result in the demolition of society” because through that mechanism the economic system lays down the law to society, and the capitalist economic system takes primacy over the system. In the face of the neoliberal incantation that there is no alternative, higher education is being torn by the mechanisms that Wolfgang Streeck describes for democratic capitalism, namely

…a political economy ruled by two conflicting principles, or regimes, of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or what is revealed as merit by a ‘free play of market forces’, and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. Under democratic capitalism, governments are theoretically required to honour both principles simultaneously, although substantively the two almost never align.

At issue is how these conflicting principles are affecting higher education, and how the idea of the University as a historic structure is being negated by the primacy of market principles. The arguments over Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are important here because their logic points towards the revolutionary potential of capitalism to overcome barriers and release surplus value for reinvestment and accumulation.

II

Inside the logic of MOOCs is emerging a technology-enabled business model that, for example: enables the student or facilitator to become entrepreneurial or enterprising at lower cost than in traditional educational forms; separates out the structures of the university, like teaching, assessment, student support, careers-matching etc., in order that they are commodified for profit; enables teaching assistants to be used to drive down the costs of academic labour, which are traditionally high inside the University; disciplines the social, co-operative and time-consuming nature of the accumulation process inside universities; and enables capital to release social capital previously accumulated inside the university for its own accumulation and profit. Thus, for instance, we witness how Coursera is “officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs.”

Critical in analysing how and why MOOCs form one attempt by capital to negate the institution of the University, as a function of its internal, market-driven dynamics, is a political economic analysis of their impact. Thus, Anna Fazackerley in the Guardian clearly connects the relationship between investment banking and higher education for profit.

Financiers are hearing stories about a global revolution in online learning in the US, and they are eager for that revolution to catch on over here. But so far they have been disappointed. “UK higher education is extremely good, but the scale of ambition is low,” says Robb. “I was talking to an investor the other day who said: ‘At the moment no university is looking at anything big enough for us to write a cheque’.”

Peter Scott, also writing in the Guardian, argued that market discipline and the power of finance capital in particular is opening-up higher education and corporatising its management, thus disciplining the traditional academic behaviours in the face of hegemonic narratives of what the University as a corporate body should be.

Against this background of investment banking and market discipline, it is interesting to reflect on Clay Shirky’s argument that:

the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it… The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system.

We might ask, for whom and for what is this unbundling taking place? Shirky goes on to make the crucial point that:

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.

Yet, across the global North we are witnessing the weight of negative prospects that are equally acting as disciplinary mechanisms on the form and function of the University as anything other than a vehicle for entrepreneurial activity.

  • The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane has stated that debt and an indentured future, in which our labour is securitised, now dominates our foreseeable future: “If we are fortunate, the cost of the crisis will be paid for by our children. More likely it will still be being paid for by our grandchildren.”
  • Zerohedge has reported on The Social Depression Within Europe’s Recession, in particular looking at the rates of suicide, crime, homelessness and poverty in the Eurozone as austerity bites, and destroys the social capital upon which middle class lives were built.
  • RT reports that “The number of American youth who are out of school and unemployed has hit a half-century record high, with 6.5 million teens and young adults staying at home without the skills required to find employment.”
  • Zerohedge highlights the rise in student loan repayment delinquency rates, and Mike Shedlock’s analysis of student loan debt versus graduate earnings reveals that “as student debt piles up, wage growth for college grads certainly doesn’t”. This reinforces the view that a squeeze on profits has been replaced by a squeeze on wages (see the graph on page 6 of this link which takes wages as a proportion of GDP between 1955-2008). This has been accelerated after the financial collapse, as Zerohedge has again shown in its analysis of how labour’s share on national income has collapsed in the USA.

The political economic background against which the University’s mission and role is played out is one of indenture, collapsing real wages, unemployment and depression. It is against this background that the political economics of MOOCs might be addressed, as one form of the negation of the historic role of the University, and as a mechanism through which capital can extract rents (through access rights or accreditation) or release (social or human capital as) surplus value for the market. One important strand that emerges from any such analysis surrounds the meaning of academic labour and the role of academics as organic intellectuals.

III

In The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism,David Harvey argues that the sustainability of modern capitalism is beholden to rising effective demand and consumerism. In particular, he notes that the creation of new spaces inside and against which surpluses can be invested and returns taken out is critical. Thus, he notes:

The production of space in general and of urbanisation in particular has become big business under capitalism. It is one of the key ways in which the capital surplus is absorbed… The connections between urbanisation, capital accumulation and crisis formation deserve careful scrutiny.

Whilst Harvey is thinking about physical space as a motive for consumption and production, this might also be applied to the mixed physical/virtual spaces inside which higher education is folded. This is important for analysing technologically-driven innovations as one possible negation of the idea of the University, because higher education in whatever form is inscribed inside the totality of capitalism. Thus, the idea of the neoliberal University needs to be addressed against the circulation of capital, and in response to potential blockages that might induce a crisis by constricting capital flows. I want to hint at these as ways in which innovations like MOOCs might be analysed, in order to reflect on higher education and the idea of the University inside neoliberalism. The issue then will be what is to be done?

ONE. How do we understand the historic university as a potential blockage to (human, social, financial etc.) capital flow, and MOOCs as one response to overcome it? For Harvey, overcoming blockages involves analysing the following seven factors, which I have edited in the current context.

  1. Assemblage of the Initial Capital: e.g. universities as congealed intellectual and social capital/value that is socialised in form and needs to be commodified, marketised and privatised.
  2. The Labor Market: e.g. how a global market impacts a commodified higher education
  3. The Availability of the Means of Production and Scarcities in Nature: e.g. the impact of open access and service-driven rents.
  4. Technological and Organization Forms: e.g. the impact of new forms of higher learning or higher education like MOOCs or autonomous social science centres on universities.
  5. The Labor Process: e.g. the impact on academic labour’s historic autonomy of automisation, lean management etc..
  6. Demand and effective demand: e.g. the place of informal education, and the relationship between student debt, time and profitability.
  7. Capital Circulation as a Whole: e.g. the impact of the idea that there is no alternative to an entrepreneurial higher education that serves the market.

TWO. What is the relationship between the University and crises of under-consumption fuelled by a lack of credit? Under-consumptionist arguments have focused on the recessionary impact of falling wages, and labour’s lack of access to a surplus through which effective monetary demand for the commodities that are produced across the economy can be maintained. Crucially, this also includes the services and commodities produced or represented by education. Inside the market, as is witnessed by governmental economic strategy/fiscal stimulus, the key is that entrepreneurs are persuaded to invest. Mechanisms for doing this include lowering costs to re-start demand, or opening-up credit, or persuading people to take out loans or to stop hoarding money as savings. The marketisation of higher education, the role of investment banks and publishing houses in developing alternative services using technology, and the nature of the MOOC as an alternative (set of) business model(s), sits inside-and-against this background of demand for and consumption of commodities/services, in order to maintain the rate of profit.

THREE. What is the relationship between the University and the productive extraction of surplus value? Simon Clarke has argued that capital needs to create the conditions for the renewed production of surplus value through the control of labour power and the means of production in appropriate proportions. It does not do this by stimulating appropriate levels of consumption. This is important in terms of higher education because the University is a large store of human, social and finance capital, which might be commodified and released into new, gobalised markets. At present the UK Government is manufacturing this process by opening-up the sector through financialisation and indenture so that previously socialised surplus value can be accumulated by corporations or entrepreneurs. The key here is to overcome the limits of profitability inside capitalism as a whole, with higher education as one department or tentacle of the system of capitals. Innovations in the provision of higher education as a service or commodity need to be related to this point about surplus value.

Isaak Rubin, in his classic Theories of Surplus Value, argued that to understand the mechanics that underwrite the totality of capitalism a critique of value was central. He argued that value is a social relation among people, which assumes a material form and is related to the process of production. The theory of value is related to the working activity of people. In this, ‘The subject matter of the theory of value is the interrelations of various forms of labor in the process of their distribution, which is established through the relation of exchange among things, i.e. products of labor.’ Thus

‘The social form of the product of labor, being the result of innumerable transactions among commodity producers, becomes a powerful means of exerting pressure on the motivation of individual commodity producers, forcing them to adapt their behaviour to the dominant types of production types among people in the given society.’

Where educational relationships form one strand of a production relation that is framed by commodities, then those relationships tend to take the appearance of relationships between the things for which and through which people relate. Hence, in the current moment we see the ‘reification’ of MOOCs as the seat of productive relations between people. This process underpins the creation of social capital and subsumes people under the capital-relation, just in a different space. Whilst the University as a public good might act as a barrier to the reification of educational goods or services, where that barrier is torn down through marketization or securitisation or massification, the social form of things appears as a condition for the process of production. Thus, the MOOC is declared to be revolutionising education.

As a result, we need to analyse the MOOC as a reified, entrepreneurial space inside which education as commodity is produced and consumed, and through which surplus value in a range of forms can be extracted and accumulated more easily. Value is crucial because as Rubin highlights it connects commodities and the relations of production that create them, to technological and labour-driven productivity, alongside the social nature of that productivity.

FOUR. What is the relationship between the University and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? Basu and Vasudevan have written about Technology, Distribution and the Rate of Profit in the US Economy: Understanding the Current Crisis. They highlight that we need to understand the role of technology in maintaining the rate of profit:

Marx’s discussion of technological change, accumulation and profitability gives a primacy to technology in driving profitability. Capitalist competition compels a process of technical change that deploys increasing capital intensity and mechanization as a means of extracting a larger surplus from labor. This pattern of labor-saving technological change is critical to Marx’s formulation of the law of tendency of the falling rate of profit.

Thus, in the current crisis of capitalism we witness a persistent decline in capital productivity that exerts an inexorable downward pull on profitability. For these authors there is a mix of productivity, labour market discipline, and the imperative to reduce circulation time, that catalyses innovation in the forces of production, in-part through technology.

[T]he pervasive adoption and growth of information technology would have almost certainly played an important role in shaping the particular evolution in the nineties when capital productivity showed an upward trend. New forms of managerial control and organization, including just-in-time and lean production systems have been deployed to enforce increases in labor productivity since the 1980’s. The phenomena of “speed-up‟ and stretching of work has enabled the extraction of larger productivity gains per worker hour as evidenced the faster growth of labor productivity after 1982. People have been working harder and faster. Information technology has facilitated the process. It enables greater surveillance and control of the worker, and also rationalization of production to “computerize” and automate certain tasks.

Critically, much of the research and development that underpins privatisation or marketization, or the creation of new services and products, is driven by state-subsidies, including those from inside the University, and with ready access to global markets and off-shoring certain elements of production such state-subsidised privatisation allows a further cheapening of investment capital alongside making labour more intensive. The interrealtionships between MOOCs, finance capital and the University need to be addressed in the face of the global relocation of production of certain services, the need to overcome declining rates of capital accumulation, and the need to increase capital intensity, as barriers to the maintenance of the rate of profit.

FIVE. What is the relationship between the University and the hegemony of Transnational Activist Networks? See my previous on MOOCs and hegemony/hierarchy and the rate of profit. As Heinrich has argued ‘Capital has become totally vendible, within and across borders. There are no crown jewels any more. With the exception of “national-security” companies and other such oddities, every asset is now fair game. During the recent crisis, the U.S. authorities all but begged sovereign wealth funds to buy U.S. assets.’ The negation of the historic University and academic labour inside it has to be seen against the hegemonic power of neoliberal networks that form geographies of accumulation.

SIX. What is the relationship between the University and capital’s desire to annihilate circulation time? The time for capital to complete one circuit is given as Production time + circulation time = Labour-process time + idle time (pauses in production, time in which means of production are held in stock) + circulation time. Critical then in the turnover of each capital and in the extraction of surpluses is the ability of capitalists to minimise the idle part of production time by enforcing just-in-time processes, innovating technologically, and in enforcing labour productivity patterns like shift work. Circulation time is also decreased through the use of high technology, by ensuring that the means of production are supplied in a reliable manner, by extracting rapid payments and by delaying their own payments to suppliers. Thus, in education we see the equivalent of theHigh Frequency Trades or algorithms and ghost exchanges that exist in high finance, in the use of data-mining and learning analytics, in the use of technologies to monitor working practices, in squeezes on academic labour through productivity drives, in work-based learning strategies, in the drive to quicken the accreditation process (why take a degree in three-years if you can do it in two?), and in describing cultures that prioritise being “always-on”. The key is to drive down idle time and to maximise the speed at which capital can be turned-over. In this space slowing down is a revolutionary act.

Crucially, as Marx points out in Volume 2 of Capital, capitals seek to reduce the circulation time in order to reduce the period for which their capital is unproductive, and thereby increase the rate of profit (since the same capital can now produce more surplus value). Economic sectors with a long total circulation time i.e. those requiring large fixed-capital investments which pay back only slowly, appropriate some of the surplus-value produced by those sectors lighter on their feet. In The Grundrisse, Marx argues that the circulation and accumulation of capital cannot abide limits. When it encounters limits it works assiduously to convert them into barriers that can be transcended or by-passed. This focuses our attention upon those points in the circulation of capital where potential limits, blockages and barriers might arise, since these can produce crises of one sort or another. A longer circuit-time has a negative effect on the expansion of capital, and it is against this dynamic of agility, flexibility and speed that the business models of MOOCs, and the reaction of universities to them, might be analysed.

IV

One might argue that MOOCs are one form of capital’s attempt to overcome barriers to the creation and extraction of surplus value and profitability. In this way they are seen to be revolutionary but only on capital’s terms, and certainly not on those of academic labour or of students. However, it might also be useful to see them in terms of a negation of the historic idea of the University, in its social democratic form. In such an analysis, we might reveal marketised imperatives that are driving higher education inside the totality of capitalism. Neither MOOCs nor the University mean much outside such a systemic analysis, and any understandings developed without such work will tend to degenerate into platitudes about student participation, agency or marginalisation inside the traditional classroom, or assertions that education is somehow broken.

At issue then are Shirky’s questions: what is higher education and who is it actually for? How is higher education delivered and who might be involved in delivery? One of the interesting points that the MOOC debate raises is then around academic exodus from the marketised University. In addressing this previously I argued that the University/MOOC/whatever, cannot be separated from its social environment because the University does not have an autonomy of action. In reality, what the University/MOOC/whatever does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the University/MOOC/whatever does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any University/MOOC/whatever that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from it. Our forms of education and the social relationships revealed inside them are situated and alienated inside capitalism.

The implication of this is to question how academic labour might take an activist stance where it is politicised inside whichever space it finds itself. Thus I argued

the interstices between academic and public, and between accreditation and informal learning, and between the private and the co-operative are surrounded by political tensions, and culturally replicated structures of power. Any process of academic activism demands academic reflexivity in understanding how academic power impacts the processes of assembly and association and historical critique.

We might bring this to bear on the idea of the MOOC as one negation of the University, in order to attempt to argue for what higher learning inside a system that promotes alternative value-forms might be. This is not to fetishise or celebrate the University/MOOC/whatever. Rather it is an attempt to critique the participatory traditions and positions of academics as organic intellectuals, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction in whichever spaces are comfortable for them? These spaces might include networks of free universities or co-operative universities, but they need to be deeply politicised critiques of the ways in which the historic university and historic ideas of higher education are being co-opted for the market. Only in so-dong might the negative prospects outlined above, of indenture, collapsing real wages, unemployment and depression, themselves be negated.


A note on Goldman Sachs and the privatisation of the university


Posted by hallymk1

In a posting on Pearson and the privatisation of academic labour I noted that the acceleration of privatisation inside and against the higher education sector was re-structuring universities as:

an architecture is opened-up that threatens the public funding, regulation and governance of HE. The profitability of HE partnerships for companies like Pearson Education highlights how educational technology is developed as a way-in both to the extraction of value from universities, and to the recalibration of the purpose of universities to catalyse such extraction further. Partnerships and leverage are enforced, in-part, because academic labour is shackled inside the demands of performativity revealed in the research evaluations or student satisfaction scores. Engaging with external partners like Pearson for service-driven efficiencies make sense for universities that are being recalibrated as businesses.

In June 2012 the universities and science minister, David Willetts, was reported in the Times Higher Education to have ‘appealed to private investors to support overseas expansion for UK universities and stated that investment bank Goldman Sachs is “keen to investigate this possibility”.’ For Willetts the key was the extraction of value from external markets, with technology as a central plank in opening-up the sector for ‘a wider range of providers with a particular focus on teaching, or concentrating on the efficient delivery of licences to practise, or focusing on distance learning.’ This is underpinned by the recalibration of universities for economic growth as their primary goal/aim/purpose, alongside the real subsumption of the idea of the university as a public good inside the logic of the market. One outcome of this subsumption is the disciplining of academic labour in the name of valorisation and profit. A knock-on is that the relationship between academics and students is disciplined by money.

It is unsurprising therefore that Willetts is co-sponsoring a Higher Education and Technology Symposium hosted by Goldman Sachs, with a theme of Innovation in Higher Education: Technology, Online Learning and the Future of Higher Education. The symposium ‘will focus on the evolving role of technology, the growth in online education and the emergence of a group of venture-funded companies bringing innovative business models to the market.’ This amplifies the risks I wrote about previously in response to Pearson College, where I argued that privatisation

signals the possibility that a surfeit of new, for-profit providers will cheapen the costs of academic labour that does not develop proprietary knowledge or skills. This risks driving down labour costs and increasing precarious academic work based on post-graduate rather than tenured staff. Flexibility, redundancy, productivity, privatisation, restructuring, value-for-money, all underpinned by technology, risk becoming the new normal for academics involved in teaching and research. As the discipline of the market enters HE in the guise of for-profit, technologically-rich operations like Pearson College, the spaces that are available to develop critiques of the recalibration of the University are reduced. There is no alternative. The point, then, is whether academics can develop new forms of labour in new, collectivised spaces, in order that the complexity of their labour as a process inside HE might be unravelled and re-stitched against technologically-enabled, new public management.

There has been substantial criticism of Goldman Sachs, for example in its client-relationships based on claims of profiteering, via claims based on settlements related to collateralized debt obligations, subprime mortgages, the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index that was implicated by some in the 2007–2008 world food price crisis and commodity trading (detailed here), and the corporation’s alleged role in masking the debts of the Greek economy. Critical here are connections between the contested histories of Goldman Sachs’ global performance, the treadmill dynamics of a corporation based around the rate of profit and financialisation, and the logics of debt-based restructuring of higher education, in-part using technology as a lever. Witness Goldman Sachs’ investment banking arms development of Higher Education and Nonprofit Institutions teams, which will

work with public and private universities and nonprofit issuers nationwide to structure and execute tailored debt capital markets financings. The firm has a dedicated group of credit specialists whose primary responsibility is to assist the investment banking team and issuers or clients in evaluating and achieving their rating potential. They take an active role on the credit analysis, rating strategy and investor sales process. In addition, with specialty expertise in areas such as athletics risk management, royalty monetization, public-private partnerships and online learning technology implementation, our experts can provide advice and financing solutions tailored to the needs of our issuers or clients.

This is of interest because the higher education sector has seen a crack opened for bond issues, which has been analysed by Andrew McGettigan, and has been realised at De Montfort University, and Cambridge, and which has been mooted at University College London. The latter such issue has received criticism because it is linked to the gentrification of local housing in Newham. Alongside recent criticism for higher education’s leadership by the Council for the Defence of British Universities (although some of us have been doing so for a while, see point 8 here), the engagement of HE leaders with private finance and corporate power (witness further criticism by the Stop the War coalition about UCL’s engagement with Tony Blair), and the co-option of higher education for profit, raises serious questions for staff and students about the idea of the University and the ways in which their practices inside it are co-opted for profit.

As Chris Kirkham notes in his piece With Goldman’s Foray Into Higher Education, A Predatory Pursuit Of Students And Revenues

a recent complaint from the U.S. Justice Department detailed a business bent on recruiting students at all costs, a description supported by the accounts of the employees interviewed by the Huffington Post. Hidden behind the upbeat earnings calls and bullish quarterly reports was a cutthroat sales culture that rewarded employees who regularly bent the truth and took advantage of underprivileged and unsuspecting consumers, employees said.

Goldman Sachs and Providence Equity Partners, the other major private equity player in the deal, declined to comment for this article.

But employees recounted a distinct culture shift once the company went private under Goldman Sachs and the other private equity investors, as day-to-day operations warped from a commitment to students and their success into an environment laser-focused on hitting mandated enrollment targets. New recruits were viewed simply as a conduit for federal student assistance dollars, the employees said, and pressure mounted from management to enroll anyone at any cost.

It should also be noted, as I covered in point 7 here, that Providence Equity Partners now owns Blackboard Inc., and was advised by Goldman Sachs on that deal. This should matter to academics precisely because everyday scholarly activities are becoming increasingly folded into the logic of capital through, for instance, indentured study and debt re-structuring of the practices and means of producing learning, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing. As a result, the internal logic of the University is increasingly prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships as against fetishised products and processes of valorisation.

We might ask, then, what is to be done?


Do Universities Care Enough About Students?


Posted by hallymk1

I am speaking on a panel at the London Festival of Education on Saturday 17 November, 2012. The panel is covering the question Do Universities Care Enough About Students? I take care to mean a positive perception of assistance that enables the person who is cared about to cope with emotional issues and to perform mental or cognitive activities.

My argument will cover the four points that follow and which have all been made elsewhere on this blog over time.

FIRST. On spaces for caring about students.

The British Child Psychologist Donald Winnicott argued that care was predicated on the value to the individual of an enabling environment where s/he can be held whilst making sense of the world. This act of holding is based on trust and engagement within a secure space that is engaging and not so fragmented as to overwhelm the individual. Both the environment and the relationships have to be good-enough to enable the individual to make sense of themselves and what they feel and want to achieve.

There are connections here to Vygotsky’s social constructivism, and it is important to note Vygotsky’s Marxism. This was captured by Mike Neary as “A key issue for Student as Producer” where it highlights that “social learning is more than the individual learning in a social context, and includes the way in which the social context itself is transformed through progressive pedagogic practice.” Vygotsky argued for a understanding of a progressive environment that might be described as caring in that it enables the individual to make sense of her/his world and act in it.

The environment is the source of development of these specifically human traits and attributes, most importantly because these historically evolved traits of human personality, which are latent in every human being due to the organic makeup of heredity, exist in the environment, but the only way they can be found in each individual human being is on the strength of his being a member of a certain social group, and that he represents a certain historical unit living at a certain historical period and in certain historical circumstances. Consequently, these specifically human characteristics and attributes manifest themselves in slightly different ways in child development than do other traits and attributes which are more or less directly conditioned by the course of prior historical human development. These ideal forms which have been refined and perfected by humanity and which should appear at the end of the development process, prevail in the environment. These ideal forms influence children from their very early beginnings as part of the process of mastering of the rudimentary form. And during the course of their development children acquire, as their personal property, that which originally represented only a form of their external interaction with the environment.

The interplay between cultures and norms, practices, environments or contexts, scarce or abundant resources, relationships and technologies, unfolds as issues of power, identity, coercion and consent inside the University, as the student attempts to emerge more fully into the world. It is in this emergence that the idea of care is negotiated and situated.

SECOND. On the relationship between the University and students, and the idea of the student-as-entrepreneur.

Higher education is part of a regime of capitalist power that directs the consumption and production of our lives, both as we labour and as we relax. As Ellen Meiksins-Wood argued in 1997: “we’re living in a moment when, for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system…. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic – the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximisation, competition – has penetrated almost every aspect of human life and nature itself”. Debt and forms of indentured education that can be driven by information and data flows, and accelerated through the transfer of risk to the individual, are central to this logic. Even where it is shown that educational subsidies like EMA are efficient in recouping their costs they are scrapped because they are beyond the logic of debt. For, as Michael Gove argues debt is now a way of life, and a way of marketising humanity: “Anyone put off… university by fear of… debt doesn’t deserve to be at university in the first place”.

This is amplified in David Willetts’ speech to the spring 2011 conference of Universities UK, in which he made plain a view of: privatisation; cost reduction; consumption as pedagogy; closing-off teaching in “undesirable” subjects; and anti-humanism.

Let me start this morning with our broader vision for HE – it is a simpler, more flexible system which gives students better value and greater choice. That means a more diverse range of providers should be able to play a role. It means funding for teaching should follow the choices that students make. And it means empowering students to make their own choices based on better, more transparent information.

It is from within this space that debt becomes a pedagogic tool, focused upon the consumption of knowledge and lifestyles, of uncriticality, of employability and skills, of business and not economics, of STEM and not humanities. It is about recalibrating the University as a site where, rather than coming to understand the objective conditions that exist inside capitalism, students pay to develop the individuated skills of the entrepreneur. The risk in the separation and individuation of students-as-entrepreneurs is that the responsibility for failure is handed to the individual rather than being collectively/socially negotiated and owned. Thus, future roles/status or the very idea of a meaningful future is indentured and disciplined through the prevalence and amount of debt. Debt becomes a pedagogic tool, and recalibrates the structures, meanings and relationships of the University, as against the humanistic lesson that the university traditionally proclaimed. This is hardly resilient.

We are being taught a lesson that as the state transfers the social value of a university life to the individual via debt, higher education is no longer immune from the logic of the market, and is no longer able simple to call upon the mantra of the public good. Thus we enter a world where graduates face paying back double their student loans as debt charges rack up, and where Universities are disciplined by funding shortages into providing what their students as customers, disciplined by debt in a specific market, demand of them. There is no space for common deliberation about the purpose of an education in a world that faces massive socio-environmental disruption. There is only space for discussion of employment and debt repayment, pivoting around the entrepreneurial self. The logic of capitalist accumulation through debt, and the treadmill necessity of finding spaces for the re-capitalisation/investment of surplus value shackles higher education to the hegemony of consumption for capitalist growth.

THIRD. The legitimacy of caring about students.

As Paul Mason noted in 2011, about why it is kicking off everywhere, “At the heart of it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future”. In Athens, Oakland, Santiago, Quebec, University College London, Dhaka, Taveta and Wundanyi in Kenya, UC Berkeley, and in countless other places and spaces, students have led the protests against the legitimacy of austerity, and the limitations of a commodified educational experience. They have recalibrated their environments to cope with emotional issues and to perform cognitive tasks.

In this process of protest, students have used a range of deliberative techniques to uncover what is legitimate, and to reveal what they are collectively willing to bear in the name of freedom. To care about themselves and each other appears important. What they are willing to bear has to be negotiated communally, through a process that re-legitimises the politics of both the form and the content of the University. This demands trust and consent rather than coercion, a discussion that is more vital to the idea of the University in a world that faces not just economic austerity but socio-environmental crisis. For it may be that we risk enduring a semi-permanent state of exception if we do not find the courage to deliberate the reality of our world. EP Thompson recognised this courage emanating from a radicalised student collective, and saw in it a glimpse of redemption beyond economic growth:

We have been luckier than any of us had the right to deserve in the quality of our students. They took the initiative. They asked the right questions. They began to understand the answers. They stood firm against rhetoric, against threats, against the special pleading of those with large interests to lose. They have – by now in scores – put their academic careers at risk. It is they who have reasserted the idea of a university. They may well need help.

In response to the spread of the state of exception into the space of the University, student occupations have reminded us of the courage that we share in debating what is legitimate, who is marginalised, and why power is wielded. Students have asked who is to be cared about? They have also reminded us that the University is reproduced inside a broader, global set of relationships and political contexts, and this set both enables/disables the use of labels and interpretations about people and practices. This labelling comes in the wake of power, and affects who is scrutinised and which technologies are used to coerce and prevent, and for whom do we impose exceptional circumstances. Through critique we might work to push back against the University’s role in this reproduction of states of exception, and to re-politicise the forms of our University life, against meaningless, enclosed and universal narratives of justice and democracy. To take care of ourselves in society.

FOURTH. A care full University life.

The University develops meaning as it enables working and living in public. The work of the University must be public, knowable and fair, and it must be care full or full of care. How we demonstrate our care is a crucial question. As we answer it, we might consider how we enable our students’ dreams to outlive our fears, and how we collectively develop the courage to keep trying. We might usefully consider the realpolitik of University life. Inside capital and in the face of the rule of law and the market, what is the role of the University? How does the University help us to understand what we are willing to bear in the name of freedom?

We might try, therefore, to understand how the University can help us to be against force and enclosure, in order to become a space for deliberating rather than judging, and for developing an avowedly political response to the collective punishment meted out as austerity and marketisation. In taking this view, we demonstrate that the University cares very publically about a world that is socially-defined for collective ends rather than privatised of value extraction. This is important in overcoming what Christopher Newfield calls “subsidy capitalism”, which “means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.” Newfield goes on:

There is a profound cultural limitation at work here: American leaders see the agencies responsible for social benefits as categorically less insightful than the financially self-interested private sector, even though the latter are focused entirely on their own advantage. As it is now, the future emerges in erratic bursts from the secret development operations at companies like Google (e.g. this radio report on the sudden appearance over Silicon Valley of The Cloud). We are having an increasingly difficult time imagining a collective future that emerges from common activity.

In defining a collective future that is against the poverty of the thinking behind the student-as-entrepreneur, we might develop an idea of the kinds of enabling environments where s/he can be held whilst making sense of a world that faces significant socio-environmental and political disruption. As a result we might focus on three different sets of questions that attempt to enable the person who is cared about inside the University to cope with emotional issues and to perform mental or cognitive activities.

  1. What sorts of relationships between people are we encouraging? What are our negotiated roles/responsibilities in the curriculum and beyond?
  2. What sorts of knowledge/understanding do our students need to be effective agents in a society that faces stresses of climate change, peak oil and liquid energy availability, and austerity?
  3. Can the University work equally well for a mixed demographic, with some networked and mobile learners, operating in information-rich environments and preparing for highly-polarised workplaces? If not how do we respond? Is a resilient education part of this mix?

Ten points on the 2012 UCISA Survey on Technology-Enhanced Learning


Posted by hallymk1

Economic forecast soothe our dereliction

Words of euthanasia, apathy of sick routine

Carried away with useless advertising dreams

Blinding children, life as autonotomes

Manic Street Preachers. 1992. Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds.

The 2012 UCISA survey on TEL leaves me with some matters arising from its sector-wide description of the implementation of technology in higher education.

NOTE: I am grateful for the work of UCISA and especially Richard Walker, Julie Voce and Jebar Ahmed in pulling these data together. We need these kinds of surveys, in order to help us to shape a politics of educational technology.

ONE. The Background to the survey states:

UCISA is aware that a number of issues relating to VLEs are having a significant impact on Computing/Information Services. They also represent cultural challenges for both academic staff and students in how they engage with their learning and teaching. Issues relate to choosing a VLE, its implementation, technical support and a whole range of support, training and pedagogic issues relating to its use.

This made me think about the poverty of our collective critique of machinery, technology or techniques in higher education; the one space where such a critique should develop. In Capital, Volume 1, as he developed his argument about how machines recalibrate both work and the relationships between capital and labour, Marx wrote:

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.

TWO. The maturity of our understanding of technologies in the curriculum is increasing. Witness the reduction in staff confidence in the use of technologies as a barrier to change. So why does the sector insist, generally, on using the term TEL, which places technology before learning? Is this because it is easier to discuss technology or techniques that then connect to abstracted educational currencies like participation, retention, progression, which are in turn forms of separation, rather than to address the real subsumption of those technologies under a more humane, critical pedagogy? At present it feels like higher education is being calibrated as an educational space in which learning is formally subsumed under the need for technologically- or technique-driven value. The idea of separation is important here, in terms of: individual rather than collective or co-operative staff skills/literacies/strategies; supporting individual students and their engagement and participation on-line/in the classroom; individuated assessment and accreditation regimes supported by individuated analytics and surveillance, in the name of employability. In this the idea that individual students/academics might becomes in excess of themselves in a collective space is lost.

THREE. The Executive Summary flags the key institutional concern as finance with “the Browne review heralding the new economic climate and budgetary challenges”. It is possible that these are simply new economic norms, as neoliberalism recalibrates the university as a space for-profit. However, the Summary then argues for the following imperatives in the use of TEL, emerging from the HEFCE Online Learning Taskforce report:

student choice in the deregulated market place, with student expectations driving an improved level of service provision by higher education institutions, particularly through the use of technologies to support application and course selection procedures. The 2012 Survey sought to capture progress in these areas too, particularly the growth in online services offering more flexible opportunities for learning, such as through the development of mobile learning provision.

This is a deeply political statement, reflecting: the drive towards new public management in education linked to choice agendas; the fetishisation of student expectations and the hegemony of student-as-consumer (c.f. page 15 and reported student petitions/feedback that act as encouragement/pressure); the use of technology for work-based and distance learning; and the development of flexibility in educational provision as a means of replicating inside higher education those precarious working patterns that shape the landscape of capitalist labour. The report does not or cannot critique the extant political economy and structural constraints of the use of technology inside a neoliberal university sector. It can only reflect the perceived needs of the sector in responding to the rule of money, so that analysis/description pivots around money and efficiency. This is our collective loss refracted through the survey.

FOUR. The report states that “The key change since 2010 has been the emergence of corporate strategies.” This is interesting given the lifting of the fee cap to £9,000, and the ways in which discourses of competition and efficiency drive techno-determinism. Witness this Guardian article in which it is argued that “The use of innovative technology in higher education will ensure the UK remains a leader in world-class teaching, education and research”, and this Educause article that links the consumerization of technology, education and work. However, also witness this legal briefing on the relationship between universities and students-as-consumers, in which it states “Education institutions which are utilising e-learning, e-commerce and information technology to provide innovative ways for students to participate will have to be aware of the methods they employ in the provision of education products online and digitally in order that they can comply with the new [EU Consumer Protection] law.” Corporate strategies as a driver for TEL is correlated to the rush from universities to align themselves with MOOCs like Coursera and their engagement with overseas markets, and the business needs of those universities to maintain an increase in the rate of profit. In this, technology as a lever for competition and efficiency is central, so corporate engagement becomes normalised.

FIVE. In spite of this corporate agenda, and the threat/opportunity of MOOCs, the Executive Summary argues that “fully online courses have decreased as a proportion of TEL activity over the years and remain a niche area of activity.” Are (some) universities being redesigned around, firstly an external space that is defined by partnerships or collaborations or governing networks that are themselves geared towards extracting rents from global markets, and secondly, niche activities that are delivered in hybrid form inside the university? The first factor responds to governmental agendas for export-driven demand. The second is articulated in the focus on NSS scores and the survey return (page 13) that states “Another key development from the 2010 Survey is the rise up the rankings of creating/improving competitive advantage as a driver… with Russell Group universities returning the highest mean score of the mission groups for this factor.” This is underwritten by the idea of the student-as-consumer and business efficiency, with technology as a lever for competitive change.

SIX. Hosting/outsourcing: the Executive Summary argues that “The establishment of outsourced support for TEL services remains quite limited though across the sector.” I wrote about this here. It is part of a structural readjustment policy that disciplines (non-academic) labour and diverts income in the form of rents to corporations. As for the uncritical idea that it is green, read this or this or this.

SEVEN. “Mobile technologies top the list of challenges which institutions face, followed by staff development, legal/policy issues and e-assessment. Staff development, strategies/policies and support staff are seen as the primary remedies – echoing similar responses to the 2010 Survey.” Which reminds me that it is easier to distance the self from the reality of austerity and to engage with technological innovation inside neoliberal higher education for the student-as-consumer, than it is to imagine new forms of sociability or socially-defined value that might be against/beyond the university as it is geared for value-extraction and the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Which leads me to…

EIGHT. A/the critical statement in the while report emerges on page 6. At issue is “how the sector can maximise the value of its strategic investment in learning technologies.” Hence the scope of the survey appears to be fiscally-driven or focused on value as it relates to “new trends in TEL service delivery and provision” that are budgetary, about outsourcing, about institutional collaboration in delivering TEL services, about mobile services, about reviews of institutional VLE provision, and finally about the impact of TEL tools on the student learning experience and pedagogic practice. As Ruth Rikowski argues, this is important because:

‘value’ is the essential ingredient upon which all forms of capitalism rest, and furthermore, that today value is being extracted from knowledge, particularly in the industrialised world. Once the human race becomes more conscious of this, it can then endeavour to create a better, kinder, fairer social and economic system that does not depend on the extraction of value from and exploitation of human labour.

NINE. The survey notes that “Pearson’s eCollege was not returned in the results” in the questions on commercial platform uptake. The role of for-profits like Pearson, interrogated in the USA by Diane Ravitch, in the UK by Andrew McGettigan and me, now takes us beyond arguments about which VLE vendor a university “partners” with. It now becomes a question of whether universities can withstand the structural readjustment imposed by the levelling of the fiscal terrain through secondary legislation related to shared services and VAT exemption or research and innovation funds, alongside the demands for efficiencies in service-provision allegedly provided by for-profits, and the ability of corporates with massive stock market capitalisation to open-up the sector further. This is where the feedback in the survey about competition, especially from the Russell Sector, is the warning cry. Technology here represents the canary in the mine. The next survey will need to be less about Pearson’s specific eCollege and more about the impact of marketisation on the fabric of higher education and the idea of the University. The detail of how corporations like Pearson are able to lever profit and rent from universities, or to subsume those very universities inside their governance structures will be at issue. At this point the question might turn to how technology might be used to push back, by fighting against outsourcing or for locally-hosted open source, or how it supports an exodus away from what the university has become.

TEN. Impact is raised as a question 3.21. In April I argued that attempts to reclaim impact are important because

research [and pedagogic] impact is [are] a crucial site of struggle in the commodification of the University and its subsumption under the logic of capitalist expansion. The ways in which academics might go into occupation of terms like impact, in order to redefine its use against that prescribed by the regulatory logic of the State or transnational advocacy networks, is important in moving beyond the use of the term simply as the impression of academic activity. Impact as impression objectifies activity and relationships and people’s subject positions through behavioural demands. What can be measured is part of a neoliberal discourse related to efficiency and consumption.

This final point is crystallised because the UCISA report argues that “the evaluation of pedagogic practices is less well established across the sector than impact evaluation on the student experience”. The question then is how do we move beyond the ideological restrictions of technology shackled inside the claims made for the student experience, to re-frame that experience collectively and for new forms of impact that serve as a critique of the profit motive? Politicising the claims we make and the surveys we undertake might be one point of departure.


escaping the caduceus of technology-fuelled privatisation and student debt


Posted by hallymk1

When the culture’s drowning in a bad dream/Save myself, save myself and

When the old religion is the new greed/Save myself, save myself and

They sabotaged the levee, killed gris gris/Save myself, save myself and

When the vultures copyright the word free/Save myself, I got to save myself

Willy Mason. 2007. Save Myself.

I: assertion and the rate of profit

In a recent Blackboard Inc newsletter we were informed that:

Education is changing and universities face multiple challenges to remain competitive. Attracting students is only part of the challenge, retaining them requires engagement. With growing attention on course quality and higher student expectations, making sure that students are getting the most out of their education experience has become increasingly important.

It’s not enough to simply deliver great courses, they demand more. Students live in a world of social media, instant access to information and on-demand service. They expect faster responses to assignments, interactive course materials, grade tracking, and integrated learning resources.

This narrative has emerged from a relatively narrow set of evaluative spaces, that are not framed through significance testing or modelling, but rather on the structural need for capital to seek out rents or profits from new educational spaces, based on either the reduction in the circulation time of commodities or the creation of new services, applications or information flows.

This also underpins the cultural re-framing of education as a space from inside which efficiencies are required, and from where impact becomes a pivotal, abstract currency. Thus the JISC re-frames its newsletters around efficiency, effectiveness and impact. Cost reduction through a range of services and benefits realisation form the background noise of this new normal. Witness the supporting your institution pages at jisc.ac.uk. Witness this month’s jisc-announce message about e-infrastructure

The point here is not that evidence for investment should be divorced from an analysis of cost, but that it forms the dominating background noise, against which it becomes almost impossible to define a new form of value or to judge social worth. So we hear noise from Blackboard Inc. or Pearson Inc. about efficiencies/impact/value and our analysis is reduced to money, and then we forget to question why and how those corporations are lobbying in the USA over access to public schools. Witness this report from the Portland Press Herald that “Documents expose the flow of money and influence from corporations that stand to profit from state leaders’ efforts to expand and deregulate digital education.”

The terrain for corporate profits is further reinforced through state-subsidised infrastructural investments. Thus, in terms of our e-infrastructure, we are reassured that

The investment will build Janet6 the next generation of the UK’s national research and education network, adding value across the sector from high-end research to universities, colleges and schools. It will also enable research to stay competitive on both a national and international level, and support the £60bn contribution that higher education brings to the UK economy.

Value, competition, the UK economy: this is the background noise that drowns out everything else inside the need to crack new markets for new services to overcome the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall. And this is important because we are told in this article on Pearson ‘Education’ – who are these people? that

The U.S. spends more than $500 billion a year to educate kids from ages five through 18. The entire education sector, including college and mid-career training, represents nearly 9 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, more than the energy or technology sectors.

Critical here is an understanding of who, exactly is trying to develop and sell services into this space, based on the rate of profit. The answer given is that public education is having policy developed and implemented based on evidence and a series of mythologies that form the background narrative of people less focused on education:

In other words, Pearson’s chief operating officers, who are also heavily invested in the company, are busy trading stocks and racking up dollars and pounds while the corporation’s financial situation is shaky. And their solution is to sell, sell, sell their products in the United States.

The current vogue for the private sector to use evidence to drive an allegedly neutral cultural and political space for policy, is amplified through analytics and big data. These tend to frame the expectations of the voiceless student as a cipher for an untheorised view of impact, efficiencies, personalisation, scaling, and service-led innovation. There is no space to discuss structural inequalities that amplify issues of autonomy or agency, or the ways in which consent is addressed. In this process, openness or transparency or accountability is no substitute for political engagement. Thus, this article on Lies, Damned Lies and Open Data argues that

Now we must renew the much larger battle over the role of evidence in public policy. On the surface, the open data movement was about who could access and use government data. It rested on the idea that data was as much a public asset as a highway, bridge, or park and so should be made available to those who paid for its creation and curation: taxpayers. But contrary to the hopes of some advocates, improving public access to data—that is, access to the evidence upon which public policy is going to be constructed—does not magically cause governments’, and politicians’, desire for control to evaporate. Quite the opposite. Open data will not depoliticize debate. It will force citizens, and governments, to realize how politicized data is, and always has been.

II: the fallacy of problem-solving

Thus, the issue becomes one of what, structurally, is that evidence/data to be used for? Is it to be used for problem-solving, or to tweak the ways in which, for example, higher education is to be structured, funded and governed, in the name of impact, efficiencies and extant value-forms? Is technology inside the academy to be used to drive privatisation agendas that are in the name of competition and profiteering, because privatisation and the free market is the only available lever for driving efficiencies inside a higher education that is recalibrated around money?

Or is it to be collected and used to question whether the free market, and technology-firms that sell solutions inside that market and for whom the bottom line is the bottom line, are the only possible ways of reconstructing higher education as a public good. Is it to be collected and used to question the funding, regulation and governance of public higher education, and to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of the market and the corporation? In fact, are the power relationships and political positions that frame the space in which big data, learning analytics and evidence are collected and used for policy, our first reference point for a more meaningful definition of the use of technology inside higher education? This demands a critical approach to unravelling the neoliberal, transnational advocacy networks that make up so many of the private corporations now enmeshed inside our education systems.

In this we might ask whether it is possible to move beyond problem-solving analysis to a critique of the structural foundations upon which our evidence base emerges. This demands that we re-engage with the ways in which technology is used by corporations, non-governmental advocacy organisations, and governments, in order to re-frame cultural and educational positions, in the name of consumption and the rate of profit. In this, we are left with questions around: who consents to the adoption of technological solutions inside universities and why? On what basis are those assumptions taken as read? To what extent does money, in the form of value, efficiencies or impact, shape or coerce education and pedagogic practice, so that other social or co-operative forms of value are marginalised? How are technologies and allied services co-opted as allegedly neutral ciphers in this process?

III: the evidence and practice of student debt

The risk is that the background noise of the rule of money, which drives the recalibration of educational contexts, is amplified by the reality of student debt. Witness this recent New York Times piece on debt collectors cashing in on student debt, which is regarded as a new oil well:

With an outstanding balance of more than $1 trillion, student loans have become a silver lining for the debt collection industry at a time when its once-thriving business of credit card collection has diminished and the unemployment rate has made collection a challenge.

One student in the article highlights that “I will never have my head above water”, and recounts that she faced

a crushing reality: she still owes too much money and makes too little to pay it off. A marketing coordinator for a law firm, she filed for bankruptcy last year because she could not afford her mortgage, car payment and student loans. She lost the house, but still owes $115,000 in student loans, both private and federal. Under income-based repayment, she pays $325 a month on her federal loans; she also pays $250 a month on her private loans.

This individuated, anti-social fear of debt, or of the disciplining of sections of our society through what is becoming known as “delinquent debt” is also witnessed in this article on the United States of student debt where “Just like mortgages and the housing industry, student debt has become an important condition for sales of the commodity higher education.” In part, this is less about intergenerational justice and the legacy of the baby boom, and more about class and the loading of an indentured future onto segments of the working population for whom access to services funded by the public purse is now closed. As Zerohedge recently argued

[there are huge numbers of] impressionable wannabe college grads for whom college is the only hope out there, no matter the cost. Sadly, the cost is rising exponentially, and as we showed recently, total Federally-funded student loan debt outstanding is now at all time highs. Luckily, the cost of the debt is at record lows. Sadly, the principal will still need repayment, as cohort after cohort of unemployed students will soon find out, and also find out that there is no discharge of student debt in bankruptcy: it is, indeed, the proverbial gift that keeps on taking.

Worse still, as this post from Zerohedge reminds us, it is private (rather than public) debt, and excessive leveraging of debt that tends to push capital into structural crises. The leveraging of private debt through excessive student loans, whilst giving a short-term financial fix for some leaves a deeper structural legacy related to crises of demand. So we end up with an inflated set of financial assets that bear no resemblance to the value of real assets in the real economy, and in the process of deleveraging the ponzi scheme leaves those individuals with high levels of debt at most risk. We are therefore reminded of the need for debt jubilees because

[We’re going into] a never-ending depression unless we repudiate the debt, which never should have been extended in the first place.

IV: escaping the caduceus of technology-fuelled privatisation and student debt

*caduceus (Ka-doo’-seus): originates from the Greek “karykeion”, itself derived from “karyx” meaning a herald’s badge or staff. The caduceus was worn or displayed by Roman surgeons, official messengers, and by military emissaries to signify a cessation of hostilities on the battlefield. It symbolized the herald of the gods, as well, Mercury in Rome and Hermes in Greece, who carried a winged wand on which were coiled two serpents, symbolizing male and female. Legend was that Hermes came upon two serpents at war and, in his beguiling manner placed a staff, which Aesculapius had given him (also a symbol used in Medicine), between them wereupon entwining with it, they ceased warring and began loving one another thus expressing unity, fertility, and peace. The caduceus is also a recognized symbol of commerce and negotiation, in which balanced exchange and reciprocity are recognized as ideals.

This is the world that we now enter. Where bailouts meet austerity, where the realities of a quadrillion dollars of debt underpin politics in the United States, where student debt and therefore student education forms part of a coming sub-prime crisis, and where in spite of the rhetoric about higher education and employability, the realities are youth unemployment and long-term falls in real wages, or precarious employment.

And I haven’t even mentioned a future framed by oil, rising oil prices, or carbon. Yet, these matter because as Roger Pielke Jr argues:

We can simplify these four factors even further. Population and income together are simply GDP, or aggregate economic activity, and the production and consumption of energy reflect the technologies of energy supply and demand. The resulting Kaya Identity — as his equation has come to be called — simply says:

Emissions = GDP x Technology

With this simple equation before us, we can see the fundamental challenge to reducing emissions: A rising GDP, all else equal, leads to more emissions. But if there is one ideological commitment that unites nations and people around the world in the early 21st century, it is that GDP growth is non-negotiable. Right now, leaders on six different continents are focused on efforts to grow GDP, and with it jobs and wealth. They’re not as worried about emissions.

The concern then is that these factors become reinforcing. That the drive for GDP and growth recalibrates the University around the rule of money. That inside this space an agenda of privatisation based on evidential assertion or problem-solving theory is presented as de-politicised and normative, and enables technology firms, working with private equity, transnational finance, think tanks and politicians to lever open public education for profit. That student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education and the use of technologies inside that sector. That agency and autonomy are framed through consumption, revealed in-part through technology and technique. That these factors amplify the neoliberal feedback loops that target public education as a source of profit. That in our refusal to critique these loops, or question the background noise that forms our new normal, we consent to our own coercion inside techniques for further value extraction.

A starting point for pushing back or for dampening this background noise is the need to analyse the structural nature of the evidence that is presented to us, in order to question power and the political positions that technologically reinforce a student experience that is drive by debt. Debt and technology, entwining and beguiling education, like a caduceus.

So taking that Blackboard Inc. newsletter with which I started, we might ask the following questions, and begin the hard-work of defining more co-operative alternative solutions.

  • Why education is changing, and whether competition and the free market are really the best mechanisms for addressing the challenges that are faced by universities?
  • How attracting, retaining and engaging students might be geared to solving societal problems related to abundance and scarcity of resources as outlined by Pielke Jr., rather than preparing them as consumers for a debt-driven existence?
  • In the face of global, structural crises, and the prevalence of student debt as a mechanism for the accumulation of surplus value, how might we challenge the neoliberal ideas that underpin “course quality and higher student expectations”?
  • Do we really understand what students demand beyond their role as consumers of social media, instant access to information and on-demand services? How might we engage students in a world beyond faster responses to assignments, interactive course materials, grade tracking, and integrated learning resources geared solely for employability and servicing debt?
  • Is it possible to imagine a world that uses technology to be against-and-beyond the increasing velocity in which our educational experiences are circulated as commodities?