Old Email Archive

digest 1997-10-25 #001


11:20 PM 10/24/97 -0700
From: "Society for Literature & Science" 

Daily SLS Email Digest
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Date: 23 Oct 1997 22:16:45 -0700
From: Wayne Miller 
Subject: Time for a little controversy?
Hi,
Maybe it's time to stir up the nest a little!
As many of you know, UCLA's College of Letters & Science has
instituted a
"course materials fee" for undergraduate courses that has been
used to
finance enhanced computer access and (most notably) "a web site for
every
class." This initiative has been pilloried as an effort to force
faculty to
create web sites. To be more accurate (I should know, I'm integrally
involved in doing the work), the initiative promised that an
interactive
web site would be created for every class but made no promises about
faculty participation. The instructor can make his or her own decision
about what to do with the Web site, although it is true that student
expectations may some day color the "voluntary" aspect of
this.
Faculty at I believe the University of New York included a clause in
their
contract that they cannot be forced to use multimedia technology in
instruction -- a reference to the UCLA initiative?
While I, too, have some reservations about the "top-down"
nature, the
tuition sleight-of-hand and the pedagogical assumptions of the
Instructional Enhancement Initiative (as it is called), I still believe
that the unique forms of interactivity provided by digital
communication
are too important to be "put off" as an unjustified burden
outside the
university's central mission.
I am still struck by the phrase offered up by the US Court of Appeals
in
overturning the Communications Decency Act: "The Internet is
therefore a
unique and wholly new medium of worldwide human communication."
That's
quite a mouthful, but it does summarize a challenge for the academic
community. Do we intend to help shape the communication channels of the
next century by creating content, users and vision? Or do we assume
that
the marketeers at the MSNBCs of the world have it under control, and
that's
not our bailiwick, after all?
Just two cents!
Wayne
/-------------------------------------------------------/
Wayne Miller                   
Manager, HCF Academic Services   /   Asst Adj Professor
Humanities Computing Facility      343 Kinsey Hall UCLA
Germanic Languages                2326 Murphy Hall UCLA
(310) 206-2004                      Fax: (310) 825-7428
/-------------------------------------------------------/
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Date: 24 Oct 1997 15:02:30 -0700
From: Stuart Peterfreund 
Subject: Re: Time for a little controversy?
speterfr@lynx.neu.edu
Wayne
I have written on the UCLA situation in particular (see my letter in
the
26 September issue of the _Chronicle_) and about the impact of
technology on teaching more generally (see my letter in the
"Colloquy"
section of _Academe Today_--forthcoming as a letter in the
_Chronicle_).
The issue is the top-down management style, and the increasing
resemblance between higher education administrators and corporate
management.  Many of us in higher education are there because we didn't
want to hold jobs in sales or manufacturing, and we resent being
managed
as though we were in such fields.  Moreover, anyone with a humanistic
perspective and a sense of history has an uncanny sense of deja-vu, the
Supreme court's decision notwithstanding, when it comes to words such
as
"revolutionary" or "new and improved."
A website is my choice or not as a pedagogical delivery option.  It
most
certainly is not something I am obliged to create, as though it were a
syllabus or some other fundamental piece of pedagogical information. 
To
force me to create a site is a fundamental denial of my academic
freedom.  Not that an administrator stiving to garner good pr would
care:  at my particular institution, the only thing that prevents the
administration from applying the leverage that UCLA did is lack of
financial resources and infrastructure.  That's a rather sad commentary
on a good deal above and beyond the particular issue that you raise.
Stuart Peterfreund
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Date: 24 Oct 1997 15:47:55 -0700
From: amato@charlie.cns.iit.edu (Joe Amato/Kass Fleisher)
Subject: Re: Time for a little controversy?
along the lines stuart raises, let me just add a couple of citations: 
(the
late) bill readings, _the university in ruins_, harvard up, 1996... and
james ridgeway (of all people), _the closed corporation:  american
universities in crisis_, random house, 1968... charting the distance
twixt
these two books gives some idea of how things have changed, and not
changed, and how much deeper the shit is these days...
best,
joe